More than 4,000 ships fought in a huge battle in EVE Online, a massive multiplayer space game.

Since EVE Online users play in a persistant universe, as opposed to the game being divided into multiple worlds, like in World of Warcraft, it routinely breaks records for most populous in-game events.

According to Erlendur S. Þorsteinsson, the Sofware Director at Iceland-based CCP (the company that develops EVE Online), 4070 ships participated in this battle, making it the largest-ever in EVE online and squashing the previous record by some 400 ships.

The fleet fight in 6VDT-H tonight is the largest ever in EVE, topping at 4070 pilots (so far). Previous was P-2TTL at 3615. #tweetfleet — Erlendur (@erlendur) July 28, 2013

So, how did this battle start? Two huge player alliances, CFC and TEST Alliance Please Ignore, were fighting over one region of the game called Fountain, where the game's developer recently placed some valuable moons.

In the end, CFC was victorious, with members of TEST retreating to a region called Delve. According to a post on TEST's forums, the fight was never seriously meant to be won — TEST just wanted to go out with a bang.

And that they did. In the screenshot above, you can see thousands of ships fighting in one region, which slowed down the game to about 10% of its normal speed.

Just to give you a sense of scale, most ships you can actually see in the screenshot are enormous battleships, and the structure in the middle is a space station, hundreds of kilometers in size.

While EVE Online is far from an easy game to master, its unique persistent game world that's constantly evolving, as well as CCP's ability to keep the game operating even with thousands of players interacting constantly produces marvels such as this galactic battle.

Images: Imgur/Unkdoom, Bryan Murph