The Art of War Alliance

As of last night, I created the Art of War Alliance (AWA).

This is an exciting new step in the travels of Black Claw, as well as an evolution of what Black Claw is all about.

I first started converting Sun Tzu's Art of War for Eve Online back in 2006, when I was a member of a corporation called Purify. They were anti-pirates, and I got excited about helping them with the art of war, so I created a document called Black Claw's Art of War for Eve Online.

Unfortunately, Purify and I split up and I followed a different path. I didn't revisit the Art of War until 2008, when I first started publishing it on my blog: The Art of War - Laying Plans.

I gained a small amount of 'fame' when Massively featured me later in 2008: Eve and Sun Tzu's Art of War. I also started submitting the series to eve-mag.com but got caught up in too many other things, so the series was forgotten about. I've always been meaning to revisit and continue it, but just never got around to it.

For the past week I was trying to work out a name for the alliance I was about to start, but nothing was inspiring me. I put it up on the corp forums for everyone to add their suggestions, but still nothing grabbed me by the balls and said "THIS IS IT!"

So there I was, sitting in front of my computer after Empire Control V finished, and still no closer to thinking up a name. It was time though, so I decided to sit there until a name came to me.

I thought about Black Claw's past, about OUCH and my goals, and where I wanted to go as Black Claw and as a corp and an alliance. Then I remembered Black Claw's Art of War... That's when I immediately got the feeling, "THIS IS IT!"

OUCH is all about nullsec survival training. A lot of that has been about lowsec and nullsec PVP training, with the focus on surviving. The purpose of an alliance was to bring together a bunch of corporations that supported OUCH and its goals with industrial support, combat support, or just wanting to be part of it all.

We've been at war with Dark Grendal for about 6 weeks now . It's been quite an interesting ride, and we've had to adapt our training and operations to deal with the war. This has included moving most of our operations into lowsec and nullsec, and including war as part of our ongoing operational background.

There have been some mistakes along the way, but we've learnt and grown from them. When people make mistakes, it just points out where we focus our training, so that we can minimise those mistakes in future. We've been building an excellent group of core personnel, and they've become quite a solid team.

I'd been in the process over the past week of working out how to restructure training to take into account how we're evolving and our unique challenges. Once I remembered the Art of War and created the new alliance around it, I also started re-thinking how the training and structure of OUCH is going to change accordingly.

There'll be more on training and alliance memberships in upcoming posts.

Eve just gets more and more exciting every year. :D