EVE Online: Battle Reports

Incredibly, our fleet commander remained calm, and was able to save the carrier by giving it another point in space to warp to. The relief as the carrier pilot confirmed he was safe was palpable.

After this uncomfortable moment, we decided to give sniping a break, and move into smaller ships. There was another tactic we could try against the enemy - that fighter assignment via the carriers. We had half a dozen carriers out in space, and they were able assign their fighters to the smaller, faster ships. This tactic is called "fighter-bombing". Small ships go in with fighters in tow, and use them to massively increase their damage against the enemy ships. After several laggy, chaotic forays with this tactic, we'd lost a whole bunch of ships and done very little to fight off our enemy. They were, however, moving out.

Rather than give up, we elected to swap out into our fast ships and harass them. What followed was a two-hour running battle in which we killed dozens of ships that split away from the main fleet, without ever being able to take them on toe-to-toe. By the time the evening crawled to a close we had killed and looted dozens of ships. But it was all irrelevant to the bigger picture: by dint of sheer force of numbers our enemy had achieved their aim and destroyed a friendly POS. We just hadn't mustered the muscle to challenge our foe. We definitely weren't in a winning position, despite our mad efforts to get kills. They had the upper hand.

A week or so later, however, and the situation had changed entirely. War fatigue was taking its toll on the enemy fleets, and they hadn't been able to raise quite as many pilots for their next big move: putting up a POS in our home system. Still outnumbered, although less so, we were busy patching up another installation that had been attacked by their fleets, and we watched passively as the tower was placed and our gate blockaded. Soon, however, it was to become clear that this would be a decisive moment in the war. The structure would take some time to anchor in space, and the Thorn and Red Skull commanders had placed capital ships near it to protect that process. Our fleet, cut off doing its repair job in a side system, had one option: to madly Leeroy through the blockade, into the enemy capital ships, and hope for the best.

While normal day-to-day ships use jumpgates to travel between systems, capital ships use a system of beacons. These beacons, which are attached to ships, allow the capital ships to jump from one system to the next in spectacular fashion - avoiding blockaded jumpgates entirely. Our plan was to land a ship carrying this beacon next to our enemies, and then hurl the fleet into them: capital ships via the beacon, the rest of the fleet the old-fashioned way via a jumpgate. We expected losses, but a grand fight nonetheless.

The beacon went up and the charge began. Clearly not expecting this turn of events the enemies decided to try and flee, leaving a couple of capital ships behind. These huge ships rapidly began to die, but the enemy fleet nevertheless tried to return to save them. Awkwardly for them, they came streaming back in their ones and twos, to be utterly destroyed by our rampaging gang. It was a glorious slaughter, with not even a single friendly ship placed in jeopardy. When the massacre was over we turned out attention on the tower that our enemies were anchoring, and destroyed that too. Smug with our overwhelming victory, I warped back to the main space station in the system... and into the remains of the enemy gang.

I was the only person in our fleet to die.

She's a cruel mistress, EVE Online, but sometimes I think she has a sense of humour.