Fleet Delay Mid-Flight

This is a quick guide how to slow down your fleet before it hits someone's planet, really helpful for avoiding ninja's:

1.) Launch your fleet at the enemy as you normally would.

2.) Go to the Fleet > Fleet Movement tabs.

3.) Next to the avatar of your planet (where your fleet left from) is a small blue button with white triangles all over it (they are supposed to look like ships, but that's beyond me). Click this button.

4.) This will bring up a window called "Fleet Union". If you are only looking to slow down your flight, and not invite players to an ACS, you can simply just hit the OK button on the bottom right. Notice the string of digits/letters in the "Union Name" box, as this is the ID tag for your fleet.

5.) You've now created a fleet union (and a little message will pop up confirming this), that you can access, this fleet is now called your ACS fleet. But your not done! Now you need to use this new union.

6.) Go and hit the Fleet tab again as if you were launching another fleet. Select a probe (or I suppose any ship you want, depending on how much you want your fleet slowed) and hit "Continue" as you normally would.

7.) Now, on the Fleet Dispatch page instead of entering a target, you will use the drop-down box called "Combat Forces". Notice that the tag you created earlier is listed here, select it and hit continue. All of the planet information and whatnot should now be where your first fleet is headed.

This next part requires some math, practice and timing, so I'd strongly recommend trying it out on INACTIVES before you attempt to tackle a strong player or a war target. Play around with getting your fleet slowed down by exactly 15 seconds, or 20 seconds and getting a "safety probe" to land exactly when your fleet would have originally landed (explained better below):

8.) The trick is you want your fleet to be slowed down while the probe is catching up to your ACS fleet, since Ogame allows a fleet to "slow" by a little bit so that any straggling ships can catch up before the ACS hit. You may have to adjust the speed settings on the probe. Ogame will not however allow you to slow a fleet that is 30 seconds from landing by too much, so be careful about your timing.

Example- Say your attack is 1:30 out and you have a probe primed and ready to launch. You made sure beforehand that the probe's flight time to the planet was 1:50. When you launch, this means that the ACS fleet will slow down by 20 seconds to allow it's slowest ship (the probe) time to catch up before the ACS hit. Again, try this out before you do this on your raids. It can be a bit tricky to determine how much Ogame is willing to let you "slow" a fleet down, which depends on how close it is to it's target. It's a science!

The general window players aim for is to slow down their fleet by about 15-30 seconds and simultaneously launch a "safety probe" to land a few seconds after your fleet would have originally landed. In this way, you can see if the player or his buddies were attempting to ninja you (or if the player decided to be a pesk and speed-build a bunch of plasma turrets) and have time to recall if you have to.

You generally do NOT want to slow down by more than 20 seconds in a war raid/against a strong fleeter. Because remember that everything you just did, the player attempting to ninja you can do as well. If he gets a message saying you slowed down by a minute or two, he can adjust as well....

If you have any questions, you can message me. But it's been a while since I've done this, so I'm rusty . Play around with it first on some inactives!

AWESOME POST! Just tried this and it worked perfectly