·event MAJOR
Battle of HED-GP
Image: EVENews24 / CCP Games · © CCP Games (fan-content policy, hosted by EVENews24 with CCP permission)
On 18 January 2014 Pandemic Legion field-tested the Wrecking Ball at HED-GP in Catch - a thin spherical shell of 670 carriers protecting 70 paired Titans - and broke a 700-dreadnought CFC/RUS Omegafleet. Roughly 350 enemy dreadnoughts died to about ten N3/PL capitals. Nine days later the same political setup spilled into B-R5RB.
Battle of HED-GP
Background
By January 2014 the Halloween War had become a grinding nullsec campaign between the CFC (Goonswarm + ClusterFuck Coalition) and RUS (Against ALL Authorities and friends) on one side, and the N3/PL coalition (Pandemic Legion + Northern Coalition. + Nulli Secunda) on the other. Earlier in the month the CFC had pulled an unexpectedly large fleet into Against ALL Authorities' home system to defend it from harassment; N3/PL declined to engage. Pandemic Legion's southern commander Manfred Sideous decided he could engineer a similar trap, only this time he would be ready to spring it.
The trap
Sideous picked HED-GP in the region of Catch. The system has only six moons where players can anchor structures, which made it possible to deny the defenders a cynosural field jammer - without one, capital ships can be teleported into the system. Pandemic Legion quietly took control of every moon while leaving HED-GP's headline ownership unchanged, then attacked the infrastructure hub and put it into its reinforced timer. When Against ALL Authorities arrived to plant a jammer, they discovered there was nowhere to anchor it. HED-GP was about to become a capital-ship engagement, and there was no way to stop it.
The Wrecking Ball
This was Sideous's chance to debut a fleet doctrine The Mittani had publicly feared all winter. Pandemic Legion called it the Wrecking Ball: a thin spherical shell of carriers - roughly 500 Archon-class carriers and 170 supercarriers - orbiting in formation around about 70 Titans paired up to one-shot enemy dreadnoughts. The carrier shell solved an old problem: when too many Titans warped to a single point, the engine's collision detection would fling some out into space, where they died alone. The Wrecking Ball's carrier wall caught any ejected Titan and bounced it safely back inside the formation.
The CFC's answer was simpler. Fleet commander Lazarus Telraven brought roughly 700 Naglfar-class dreadnoughts, fitted to survive Doomsday hits and to deal damage at close range. Their plan was to teleport the entire dreadnought fleet directly inside the Wrecking Ball and overwhelm it before the carriers and Titans could respond.
The fight opened at 16:45 GMT on 18 January 2014. The CFC dreadnoughts arrived inside the carrier shell as planned - but with thousands of subcapital ships already in the system, the server collapsed under the load. Module activations took twenty-five minutes to register. The CFC could not coordinate target calls, while the N3/PL Titans - whose Doomsday weapons run on long cooldowns largely unaffected by short module-lag - paired off and methodically destroyed dreadnoughts one at a time.
By the end of the engagement roughly 350 CFC and RUS dreadnoughts were destroyed across HED-GP and the systems they panic-jumped to. N3/PL lost about ten capital ships in return. Black Legion's promised 200-dreadnought reinforcement, which the CFC had paid for, declined to commit at all - a grievance that would poison CFC/RUS relations for months.
Seven days to B-R5RB
The Wrecking Ball had worked. Throughout the war Pandemic Legion had been staging out of a Nulli Secunda system called B-R5RB in the region of Immensea. Sideous needed to control B-R5RB's cyno jammer himself rather than ask a Nulli director for permission every time he wanted to move a fleet. Rather than transfer sovereignty (which would have left the system defenceless for a month), he set up a one-person dummy corporation called HAVOC, joined it to Nulli's alliance, and gave HAVOC structure-control rights inside B-R5RB.
What happened next is disputed. Sideous says he funded HAVOC's wallet with months of sovereignty bills and turned on autopay. The server disagreed. On 27 January 2014 - nine days after HED-GP - the sovereignty bill on N3/PL's forward staging base went past due, every defence in B-R5RB switched off, and the largest battle in the history of EVE Online began.
Returning player note
If you played in 2013-2014, HED-GP is the missing piece of the B-R5RB story. The Wrecking Ball that PL fielded at the Bloodbath was tested here first, and the political setup here is what triggered B-R5RB nine days later.
The fight is also part of why HED-GP became one of the most-cited system names in EVE memory - it had already been a famous nullsec-to-highsec chokepoint, and January 2014 cemented it.
Battle stats
Pandemic Legion + N3 held the field- System
- HED-GP · Catch
- Sides
-
Pandemic Legion
Anchor
On side: Pandemic Legion + N3 (Nulli Secunda + Northern Coalition. + allies)
Northern Coalition.
Partner
On side: Pandemic Legion + N3 (Nulli Secunda + Northern Coalition. + allies)
Nulli Secunda
Partner
On side: Pandemic Legion + N3 (Nulli Secunda + Northern Coalition. + allies)
Goonswarm Federation
Anchor
On side: ClusterFuck Coalition (CFC - Goonswarm + allies) + Russian Coalition (RUS - Against ALL Authorities + allies)
Against ALL Authorities
Anchor
On side: ClusterFuck Coalition (CFC - Goonswarm + allies) + Russian Coalition (RUS - Against ALL Authorities + allies)
- Decisive doctrine
- PL/N3 "Wrecking Ball" - 500 Archon-class Slowcat carriers + 170 supercarriers forming a thin spherical shell around 70 paired Titans, each pair coordinated to one-shot CFC/RUS dreadnoughts via Doomsday volleys. CFC/RUS "Omegafleet": ~700 Naglfar-class dreadnoughts close-fit + Doomsday-tanked, cynoed inside the Wrecking Ball bubble - caught by warp disruption and module lag.
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
HED-GP on 18 January 2014 at 16:45 GMT was the direct precursor to B-R5RB nine days later. The Wrecking Ball doctrine that PL/N3 deployed here was the same doctrine that anchored B-R5RB at scale; the political fallout from the system's contested sov bill ultimately triggered the Bloodbath. Empires of EVE chapter 065 cites Elise Randolph's retrospective: roughly 3,000 players on grid, 1,800 of them CFC and RUS; a 25-minute module-lag spell rendered RUS dreadnought fire ineffective; "350 RUS/CFC Dreads died between HED-GP and various other systems they panic-jumped to. In return... a mere ~10 N3/PL capital ship losses." Black Legion's 200 dreadnoughts under Elo Knight failed to commit, which became a CFC grievance for years.
The pilot, ship, and ISK figures here are left empty: CCP did not compile a by-the-numbers devblog for HED-GP. Kotaku's coverage cites Elise's 350-dreads figure but no comprehensive pilot, ship, or ISK totals were ever published. The Wrecking Ball composition figures (500 Archons, 170 supercarriers, 70 Titans, 700 dreadnoughts) are fleet sizes, not destruction. PL and N3 held the field decisively on the day.
CCP's "What a HED-ache" devblog is a server-performance retrospective explaining the module-lag root cause, not a numbers piece. Reconstructing ISK destroyed by multiplying per-ship-class losses against era-Jita prices would land somewhere near ~1 T but constitutes original research, not a published figure. TAGN's HED-GP tag (three contemporaneous posts) carries no 2014-battle ISK references either.
Context at this date
- 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 - "HED-GP Technical Retrospective: What a HED-ache" (CCP Veritas, 24 Jan 2014)
- EVENews24 - "HED-GP More Like HED-GG" (Elise Randolph after-action, 19 Jan 2014)
- Empires of EVE Volume I, chapter 065 (Andrew Groen, ISBN 978-0998812601)
- Kotaku - "EVE Online's Two Biggest Factions Had An Enormous Battle" (Owen Good, 19 Jan 2014)
- Den of Geek - "EVE Online Best Battles" (HED-GP section, retrospective)
- Reddit r/Eve - "ELI5: The massive HED fight?" (contemporaneous community explainer, 27 Jan 2014 Wayback snapshot)