·event MAJOR
Battle of 6VDT-H
Image: CCP Games · © CCP Games (fan-content policy)
On 28 July 2013, 4,070 pilots converged on a single nullsec system to fight over TEST Alliance Please Ignore's spiritual home in Fountain. The CFC formed seven 256-pilot Baltec Megathron fleets in a spherical orbit at 80 km of the contested station and broke the N3/PL/TEST defence over five hours. The largest battle in EVE - and at the time the largest in any online video game - and the engagement that broke TEST.
Battle of 6VDT-H
Background - the Fountain War and TEST's spiritual home
By the summer of 2013 the Odyssey expansion had reshuffled where nullsec's valuable moons sat on the map, and the CFC (the Goonswarm-led ClusterFuck Coalition) had concluded it could not stay solvent without taking the Fountain region from its long-time owners, TEST Alliance Please Ignore. The Mittani declared the invasion in a State of the Goonion speech on 6 June. The war that followed pulled in Pandemic Legion and the rest of the N3 coalition on TEST's side and ground on for two months across the Fountain-Cloud Ring border. By late July TEST had been pushed back to the system that had been its spiritual home since it took the region from IT Alliance in 2011 - a quiet outpost station deep in Fountain with no strategic value any more, but with two years of TEST memory attached to it. When the CFC reinforced the station and forced its timer, TEST cancelled every other operation for two days and called every pilot it had to defend it.
The set-piece - 4,070 pilots and a spherical wall of Megathrons
The CFC arrived almost two hours before the timer ran out. Vily, the coalition's lead fleet commander, carved the 2,300 pilots already in the staging system into seven Baltec Megathron fleets of 256 pilots each, two bomber wings under Kcolor and DaBigRedBoat, an electronic-warfare fleet under David Cedarbridge, an Armor-Heavy-Assault-Cruiser interdiction group at the exit gate under Imperian, and a carrier-and-dreadnought reserve waiting in an adjacent system. The seven Megathron fleets orbited the contested outpost at 80 km, spread as thinly as possible - a spherical wall of roughly 1,600 battleships around the target, photographed and re-photographed throughout the day as "ants swarming" or "bees around a new hive."
When the timer dropped and TEST's 1,500-pilot mega-fleet teleported in via seven cynosural spirals around the system, the in-system pilot count peaked at 4,070 - beating the four-year-old record of 3,615 set at P-2TTL in 2010, and at the time the largest concurrent battle in any online video game. CCP migrated the system to the dedicated server blade normally reserved for the trade hub Jita and held time dilation at one-tenth real-time for almost all of the five-and-a-half-hour engagement. Over 10,000 spectators watched the fight live on Twitch.
The fight - bombers, drone-assigned Prophecies, FC decapitation
The two fleets met in the standard way a 4,000-pilot engagement meets - slowly, with the user interface barely responding and ammunition swaps treated as commitments. DaBigRedBoat's bombing wing forced the arriving TEST formation off its natural warp-in and into the centre of the CFC sphere, where the Baltec Megathron fleets opened fire. TEST's drone-assigned Prophecy battlecruiser fleet tried to concentrate damage by handing every drone's targeting authority to a single fleet commander, but the CFC's opening salvos went straight at TEST's command ships, and once the fleet commanders died the drone wing went silent for nearly two hours.
By the end of the engagement 2,591 ships had been destroyed, including 621 escape capsules - but the bombing wings alone accounted for more than a quarter of all kills, sometimes 60 ships at a time. The CFC's own bombers caught roughly 15 friendly ships in each blast. Goonswarm Federation led the kill chart with 678 ships down; Fatal Ascension second with 244. As the TEST formation thinned and tried to retreat toward the exit gate, Imperian's interdiction fleet was waiting.
The Last Charge of TEST
TEST's Military Director Ingen Kerr could see, in time-dilated slow motion, that breaking past Imperian's interdiction was going to cost roughly a third of his remaining fleet over the next several hours. He stopped, told his fleet commanders to turn the fleet around, and ordered them to charge at full warp speed straight back into the CFC formation and lock the single most expensive dreadnought they could see. Several hundred TEST and allied ships, including pilots from Northern Coalition and Tribal Band, accelerated back across the battlefield and were methodically picked apart by the CFC Megathron fleets - but their concentrated fire managed to destroy one CFC Naglfar-class dreadnought before the last of them died.
The next morning, TEST executor BoodaBooda assembled what was left of the alliance on its voice-chat server and gave a speech that opened with "Today we fought in 6VDT. We didn't fight to save the station, we didn't fight to win an ISK war, and we didn't fight to turn the war around. We fought because TEST stands together in the face of certain, guaranteed death." TEST retreated to Delve within days. BoodaBooda resigned a fortnight later, returning six months on to lead "The Great Purgening" - a livestreamed mass-removal of TEST members who hadn't logged in since before the war.
Returning player note
If you played before 2014, 6VDT-H is the battle that set the size record EVE held for almost eight years, until FWST-8 broke it in early 2021. It also closed the Fountain War, broke TEST as a major coalition force, and is the canonical example of a player-led alliance choosing a glorious last stand over a clean retreat.
The Wrecking Ball doctrine debut at HED-GP and the supercapital-blob trap at B-R5RB are six months in the future; the spherical Baltec wall pattern at 6VDT-H is the doctrinal ancestor of both.
Battle stats
ClusterFuck Coalition held the field- System
- 6VDT-H · Fountain
- Sides
-
Goonswarm Federation
Anchor
On side: ClusterFuck Coalition (CFC - Goonswarm + Fatal Ascension + allies)
Fatal Ascension
Partner
On side: ClusterFuck Coalition (CFC - Goonswarm + Fatal Ascension + allies)
Ev0ke
Partner
On side: ClusterFuck Coalition (CFC - Goonswarm + Fatal Ascension + allies)
RAZOR Alliance
Partner
On side: ClusterFuck Coalition (CFC - Goonswarm + Fatal Ascension + allies)
Test Alliance Please Ignore
Anchor
On side: N3ST (TEST Alliance Please Ignore + N3 Coalition + Pandemic Legion)
Pandemic Legion
Partner
On side: N3ST (TEST Alliance Please Ignore + N3 Coalition + Pandemic Legion)
Northern Coalition.
Partner
On side: N3ST (TEST Alliance Please Ignore + N3 Coalition + Pandemic Legion)
Nulli Secunda
Partner
On side: N3ST (TEST Alliance Please Ignore + N3 Coalition + Pandemic Legion)
- ISK destroyed
- 1 T
- Decisive doctrine
- CFC: 7× 256-pilot Baltec Megathron fleets (~1600 hulls) in a spherical orbit at 80 km of the target station + 2 bomber wings (Kcolor / DaBigRedBoat) + ArmorHAC gate-camp + carrier/dread reserves. Bombers alone destroyed >25% of all kills.
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
The largest battle in EVE Online history at the time, surpassing the 3,615-player record set at P-2TTL in 2010. Peak in-system: 4,070 (CCP devblog). Empires of EVE chapter 061 says "more than 4000 players" and breaks down CFC 2,300 plus N3ST 1,500, with the rest as third-party and observers. 2,591 ships destroyed including 621 capsules, per CCP's "Battle for 6VDT-H summary and numbers" devblog.
The ISK aggregate shown (~1 T) is a community-cited estimate, not a CCP figure. CCP's summary devblog publishes ship counts (2,591 destroyed) but not an ISK total, and the same pattern holds across the five mainstream-press write-ups in the source list (Verge, BBC, Polygon, GamesRadar+, Den of Geek). Reddit and EVENews24 retrospectives cite a range of 700 B to 1.5 T; the figure here stores 1.0 T as a conservative midpiont of that range. The tilde prefix on the displayed figure marks it as approximate.
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
- CCP - "Battle for 6VDT-H - summary and numbers" (CCP Logibro, 30 Jul 2013)
- The Verge - "Largest space battle in history claims 2,900 ships" (T.C. Sottek live-blog, 28 Jul 2013)
- BBC News - "Eve players stage giant online space battle" (29 Jul 2013)
- Polygon - "Eve Online was the stage for the biggest space battle in history" (Emily Gera, 29 Jul 2013)
- GamesRadar+ - "EVE Online's Fountain War: The largest battle in gaming history" (Addie Burke, 3 Oct 2013)
- Empires of EVE Volume I, chapter 061 - "The Battle of 6VDT-H" (Andrew Groen, ISBN 978-0998812601)