·event MAJOR
Battle of Asakai
Image: CCP Games · © CCP Games (fan-content policy)
The "misclick battle." A Friday-night roam in Black Rise lowsec ended with a Goonswarm fleet commander accidentally jumping his Titan alone into an enemy fleet, triggering a 14-hour cascade that drew 2,754 pilots from across New Eden and birthed the HoneyBadger Coalition.
Battle of Asakai
Background
By early 2013 nullsec was carved between two superpowers - the ClusterFuck Coalition (CFC, the Goonswarm-led northern bloc) and a looser anti-CFC constellation around Pandemic Legion, TEST Alliance, the N3 Coalition, and the mercenary alliance Black Legion. The technetium moon trade was making everyone too much money to fight. The biggest battle of the year was supposed to come from that economic pressure cracking. Instead it came from a misclick.
Two minor lowsec alliances - Drunk N Disorderly and Lost Obsession - had spent the previous evening harassing a CFC subcapital fleet led by Goonswarm fleet commander DaBigRedBoat. He took it personally, hunted the gang for two days, and arranged with a small ally called Liandri Covenant to spy on their movements. Drunk N Disorderly worked out the trap, built a counter-trap, and put Pandemic Legion on standby with their supercapital fleet. The leak ran in the other direction too: word reached DaBigRedBoat that Pandemic Legion was waiting, so he arranged his own supercapital reserve.
The misclick
The flashpoint was a worthless faction-warfare starbase in Asakai, a lowsec system in the Black Rise region, due to come out of its reinforcement timer around 1am GMT on 27 January 2013. Drunk N Disorderly siege-fleeted on schedule; Liandri's defenders broke contact; DaBigRedBoat, several systems away, decided the moment had come to bridge his carriers in.
He was flying two characters at once on two monitors - one in the carrier fleet, one piloting the bridging Titan. When he hit the jump command, he clicked on the wrong screen. His Titan warped instead - alone, with no escort, dropping onto grid in Asakai by itself. Within seconds a Drunk N Disorderly Heavy Interdictor activated its warp scrambler and pinned the Leviathan in place. The on-call Pandemic Legion fleet commander committed forty supercapitals to the kill.
The escalation
DaBigRedBoat's all-caps panic ping ordered every CFC capital pilot online to cyno into Asakai. The system sits on the CFC's doorstep, so the carrier fleet arrived first - Pandemic Legion's supercapitals followed close behind. Once the scale became visible, Pandemic Legion reached out to N3 and TEST. Both committed. Black Legion diverted a sixty-strong dreadnought fleet that happened to be exercising nearby. The CFC kept escalating in turn, bringing its own Titans onto the field.
Time Dilation slowed the system to its 10% floor. Word raced across New Eden; pilots logged in and burned to Asakai just to watch, because the rest of the cluster was still running at normal speed. At its peak, 2,754 players from more than 270 alliances were on grid - at the time the largest lowsec engagement CCP had ever recorded.
When the CFC finally began extracting its trapped capitals one at a time, the losses were severe. Three Titans went down, including DaBigRedBoat's Leviathan, alongside seven supercarriers, thirty-six carriers, fifty-three dreadnoughts, and roughly eight hundred and forty-five subcapitals. Total hull value destroyed came to 717 billion ISK across 945 ships. Pandemic Legion's fleet commander noted afterward that in nullsec - where Heavy Interdictors deploy warp-disrupting bubbles instead of single-target scrams - the CFC would have lost roughly 60% more.
Aftermath
The CFC lost less than a week's technetium income, but the bruise was public. DaBigRedBoat was temporarily banned from piloting Titans by his own coalition and ridiculed for months. PC Gamer, Gizmodo, Kotaku, and others wrote the battle up in real time. It was the first EVE story mainstream gaming press could explain in a single sentence: some guy clicked on the wrong monitor and a thousand-ship battle broke out.
The strategic consequence was the formal birth of the HoneyBadger Coalition. The cooperation between Pandemic Legion, N3, TEST, Black Legion, and the original Drunk N Disorderly trigger had been spontaneous, but it worked. In the weeks that followed, the same constellation of alliances stood up as a permanent anti-CFC bloc. HoneyBadger held together through the spring; Fanfest 2013 broke it apart again in a single night at a Reykjavik bar; and the surviving fragments redrew the map of nullsec into the alignment that met at B-R5RB the following January.
Returning player note
If you remember 2013 only as "the year before B-R5RB," Asakai is the piece that explains why B-R5RB was possible. The 2,754-pilot peak set the participation expectation, Time Dilation got its first real stress-test, and the HoneyBadger Coalition that formed out of Asakai's spontaneous cross-bloc cooperation was the political structure that twelve months later put nine hundred Titans into a single system.
The worthless starbase that started the fight, by the way, survived - a third-party pirate fleet finished it off the next morning while nobody was paying attention.
Battle stats
HoneyBadger Coalition held the field- System
- Asakai · Black Rise
- Sides
-
Pandemic Legion
Anchor
On side: HoneyBadger Coalition (Pandemic Legion + N3 + TEST + Black Legion + Drunk N Disorderly + Lost Obsession)
Test Alliance Please Ignore
Partner
On side: HoneyBadger Coalition (Pandemic Legion + N3 + TEST + Black Legion + Drunk N Disorderly + Lost Obsession)
Black Legion.
Guest
On side: HoneyBadger Coalition (Pandemic Legion + N3 + TEST + Black Legion + Drunk N Disorderly + Lost Obsession)
Goonswarm Federation
Anchor
On side: ClusterFuck Coalition (CFC - Goonswarm + Fatal Ascension + others)
- ISK destroyed
- 717 B
- Decisive doctrine
- Pandemic Legion supercapital escalation triggered by DaBigRedBoat's misclick (Titan jumped solo); Drunk N Disorderly Heavy Interdictor tackle; PL Wrecking Ball precursor
What does “held the field” mean?
The badge marks the side that held the field at the end of this engagement — who was still on grid, who walked away with the objective on the day. It is not a verdict on the wider war or campaign, which often turned on logistics, attrition, or political fallout in the weeks after. The full strategic arc lives in the deep-dive above.
Caveats & contested numbers
Capital-ship losses are contested across CCP, Wikipedia, and Empires of EVE. CCP's by-the-numbers devblog gives 3 Titans, 7 supercarriers, 36 carriers, 53 dreadnoughts and 845 sub-caps; Wikipedia gives 3 Titans, 5 supers, 29 carriers, 44 dreads plus ~700 sub-cap on the CFC side and 1 super, 11 carriers, 6 dreads on the HBC side; Empires of EVE chapter 053 prose says 3 Titans, 6 supers, 29 carriers, 44 dreads, 450+ sub-cap. The figures shown here use the CCP devblog combined totals: 2,754 pilots (all sources agree), 945 ships destroyed (Wikipedia combined; CCP's ~941 matches within counting tolerance), and 717,033,768,274 ISK destroyed (the exact CCP by-the-numbers figure). Per-side detail is not split out because variance across sources exceeds 25%.
Asakai is a Faction Warfare lowsec system in Black Rise, not nullsec; Empires of EVE calls it "EVE's Faction Warfare territory" and DOTLAN confirms the security band. HBC held the field on the day and obliterated DaBigRedBoat's Titan plus two more CFC Titans.
Context at this date
vs M2-XFE's all-time peak (29.11 T)
- Killmails
- - total ships destroyed game-wide that month, from CCP's killmail feed (aggregated by EVE Ref).
- PLEX
- - Jita market price of one PLEX (30 days of game time), in ISK.
- Maps
- - quarterly sovereignty / coalition / faction-warfare snapshots from verite.space (Verite Rendition).
Gallery
Sources
- EVE Online - The Battle of Asakai by the numbers (CCP Quant)
- Empires of EVE Volume I, chapter 053 (Andrew Groen, ISBN 978-0998812601)
- Wikipedia - Battle of Asakai
- PC Gamer - EVE Online's Battle of Asakai
- Gizmodo - How the Battle of Asakai Became One of the Largest Space Battles in Video Game History