Mission Complete, Time for the Reward (4)
Se… sexy…!
The design alone had already struck me as bizarrely cool. Now the performance description was calling it a genuine all-rounder, and I was one heartbeat away from what they call a dry orgasm.
But right at that peak, a thought cut through the haze: in this game, no ship ever maxed every single stat. I forced myself to re-read the description of that big, beautiful Kraken-class one more time.
Hey, you bastard, why aren't you listing any drawbacks?
It had the unmistakable flavor of pure propaganda. So before I could fully tip over into bliss, I grabbed hold of my sanity, calmed the racing excitement the way someone might try to compose themselves after staring at Monalisa, and started digging through the wiki tabs.
Once the high cooled, every kind of suspicion and doubt flooded in to take its place.
What if the one I got is just a trash ship with a fancy write-up?
I already nearly got screwed over by the Bahamut-class once, didn't I?
Even three years ago when I was still playing, there were plenty of ships that looked badass on paper and performed like absolute garbage!
Oh, Jesus.
The doubts crowding my chest started working my mental state over, and my composure wobbled all over again. Sweat slicked my palms and the soles of my feet; a fine tremor ran through my hands.
That feeling hit its absolute peak the moment I found an evaluation post on the Kraken-class and hovered over it, finger ready to click.
"Commander? Are you feeling unwell somewhere…?"
Jessica, standing beside me, was looking at me with genuine concern. I drew a long, heavy breath, forced my locked-up body to loosen, squeezed my eyes shut, and jammed the post open.
The instant I felt the page flash up, I opened my eyes and read.
1. Almost nobody has owned one since the update, so most people have no idea how to fight it.
2. Because of that, it has never once been hit with a balance-nerf patch.
3. In other words, it is an insanely strong all-rounder.
No fluff needed. If one drops for you?
Unless the admins deliberately messed with it after the possession event, I am not joking — at the same weight class, the ships that can actually trade with this thing can be counted on one hand. For real.
"Jeeesuuuuuuus!!!"
The instant I realized my Kraken-class was absolutely not a piece of junk, I shot up out of my seat and let out a full-throated roar of pure joy.
Mission Complete, Time for the Reward (4)
Of course, as I had already said, nothing in this world is truly all-purpose.
Another wiki post turned out to hold an actual user's review of my one-in-a-million Kraken-class's real performance…
Yeah, this is a screenshot from back when this place was still a game, just so we're clear.
Honestly, it is an all-rounder, but once you actually use it there are going to be some disappointing parts. No way around it.
Because at the end of the day this is an assault combat carrier — one of the extremely rare long-range ships among the Space Monster faction.
And it doesn't even stack raw monster-style firepower. It's a sub-DPS ship that pokes with massed strike craft and missiles.
But you saw the description, right? Dozens of close-combat tentacles hanging off it?
I am dead serious — once you fly it, you're going to want to yank off all but maybe ten of those tentacles like a balding guy's last hairs and cram hangars or bio-silos into the empty sockets instead.
In small-scale fleet battles it is legitimately broken. It beats the hell out of everything at both long and short range.
Large-scale fleet battle, though? At distance, its firepower and strike-craft count both fall short of a proper long-range bombardment ship or a real carrier.
No joke — its intrinsic firepower, excluding the craft and missiles, is roughly on par with a bombardment-type heavy cruiser three full ship grades below it, like the Overseer.
So you decide to lean into those tentacles — still thicker than some balding dude's remaining hair — and go for a brawl?
Then either players or NPCs show up draped in heavy torpedoes and spear you to death, or the big fleets up front go "oh hell yeah" and immediately pull aggro, dumping every scrap of DPS onto you.
And every Space Monster fleet user already knows this one:
Oversized monster ships that stick out like this cannot be repaired by the player at will.
Especially if it gets hammered past moderate damage?
You just leave it alone until it self-heals.
Sure, if you toss it resources and biomass as feed, recovery speeds up a little — but if the mouth it eats with gets wrecked, you're stuck parking it at your base and praying for natural recovery, lol.
Or you can ship it back to the monster home base with a mountain of resources and they'll eventually patch it up somehow… but the cost is no joke. You're looking at roughly the price of building a whole new battleship from scratch. Once you're actually flying one, that decision is going to hurt.
But even so — I love this deranged hexagonal ship…!
Whoa.
Reading a review that actually felt lived-in, I looked back out of the command center at the Kraken's majestic silhouette and finally understood why ship-fetishists occasionally crawled out of the woodwork.
But if I left it sitting out there just to gawk at it, it wouldn't even be under the base shield's protection. That opened it up to a favorite troll tactic — swarming oversized ships that had drifted outside the base with small high-speed craft loaded with heavy torpedoes.
So I decided to take possession of that big, precious Kraken-class and move it into the docking facilities.
Then again, the fact that we weren't even talking about other pirates anymore said plenty. The hundreds of thousands of pirate ships Marianne had scattered across the sector had all gone home, and the space around our base was, for all practical purposes, an empty house.
"Commander! A Zenobia Empire detachment has appeared in the resource zone!"
"Scale?"
"Three light cruisers, ten destroyers, five frigates!"
"Hmm. The timing is almost considerate."
Marianne's fleets had fully withdrawn, and our own forces were still deep in the middle of a major reorganization — and now word arrived that a Zenobia Empire detachment… or rather, space-elf privateers disguised as one, had shown up. Classic resource-raid pirates, the kind I hadn't seen in quite a while.
"Heh. They waltz in the second we leave a gap… awfully brazen of them."
"They really are."
"Oppa, I'll call a few of my underlings back right now and have them put down."
Naturally, the moment Marianne laid eyes on those privateers, she offered to U-turn some of her returning subordinates and handle it. But—
"Oh…? Coming closer, are they? Walking straight up to this Kraken without running?"
"What on earth are you talking about, Commander?"
"Marianne, leave it. No need to call your fleets back."
"Oppa, what are you planning?"