Can anyone explain this to me...?

Okay, here's a weird one.

There's a guy probing me - nothing too unusual there. However, two fleets are on the way:

- 4 probes and 1 light fighter
- 3 probes, 1 small cargo and 1 light fighter

Weirder still, the second fleet is running at about 30% of full speed.


Can anyone see a good reason to do this? I've been wracking my brains for a while now, and I can't think of a single benefit to this way of probing.

I don't understand the slipping probes in on the attack...maybe he's hoping to use it as fodder somehow? The second attack at 30% might be a fleetsave to your planet, though it's not wise to send a fleetsave at an active person.

Is it an attack or a spy mission ? Any way, I agree with Justiceforjestes, it's not very wise to send fighters along with spy probes on a spy mission. And if it's an attack, the sending of probes is mostly used to slow down the timer of the attack in the last couple of minutes. This will make it an acs attack of course.

How did it end ?

Sorry I should've mentioned they were spy missions, not attacks.

When they arrived, they got destroyed. In the mean time I attacked the player who was sending them to me a couple of times, just to make sure we understood each other...

Curiosity eventually got the better of me, so I sent the player a message to say hello, and see if I could extract any information about the bizarre probe missions. After a friendly exchange of messages it turns out that he's just new to OGame and still hasn't entirely got to grips with how everything works. Fair enough - we were all new to the game at some time or other!

We've exchanged a few messages now, I've answered any questions he had about the game to the best of my ability, and now I have one more ally on my buddy list!

Alls well that ends well!

Weird, 1 search with google and you have all your questions answered :
http://ogame.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page