Things Don't Always Go Your Way
Of course, if that kind of bait had simply been left sitting out in the open, a mass invasion of jealous friends — blind with envy, yet utterly devoid of luck, skill, or minerals — would have come barreling straight toward Icarus.
Fortunately for Icarus himself, a veteran who had offhandedly mentioned in a comment on some newbie's whining post that he was "working on an analysis write-up" actually followed through and posted the thing.
Writing this because the whining newbies just will not shut up. Veterans can figure it out on their own.
First off — if someone has an actual carrier at this point in the game, and not just a light carrier, it is one of three things:
They speedran a Level 7 base, slapped down nothing but an Aviation Command, cranked out a carrier, and just finished building it;
They raided an NPC faction fleet that included a carrier and stole it through a boarding action;
Or they lucked into one the way that one popular gallery regular did.
In the first case, the carrier's level is so low it barely matters. Bluntly, it is just a standard carrier — a machine that spits out fighters and that is about it. Put up an anti-air formation and the rest of their fleet is going to be garbage anyway because of the time investment, so it is not a big deal.
But.
The other two cases — meaning they stole one from an NPC fleet, or they lucked into something and are raising not a standard carrier but something weird?
Conveniently, we just got a perfect example, so let me spell it out.
Take something like that Murim-Builder guy's Anomalocaris-class: a quasi-supercarrier that can put seven to eight thousand fighters in the air at once, and with hangar expansions can push ten thousand. Go up against one of those and you are cooked. Their armor is absurdly thick — ordinary torpedoes and naval guns barely scratch them. You either need to dump dozens of armor-piercing heavy torpedoes (the ones that crawl so slow they get intercepted constantly) from heavy torpedo cruisers, or you need the kind of firepower you get from bombardment-type heavy cruisers like the Overseer — minimum battleship-grade output — just to answer them.
And then there is what Icarus is running, which is the exact opposite of the Murim-Builder type: an assault carrier.
That Kraken-class has weak hull and armor. A few ordinary heavy torpedoes will tear it apart just fine.
The problem is its special ability lets it teleport fighters and missiles, so it can shred your capital ships with fighter strikes from outside your fleet's engagement range. Anti-air formation or not — the people getting farmed right now have been feeding that thing so much XP it has probably grown properly by now, and it has almost certainly climbed out of the "gimped fighters" state people were talking about last week.
So if newbies rush in thinking they can take it down, exactly what I said happens: their battlecruisers get annihilated from the opening volley, and whatever is left gets finished off by follow-up airstrikes and other fleets.
Oh, and while I am at it — it is not just carriers. People with weird ship classes have been popping up here and there, right?
Those are, respectively: a siege battleship that can one-shot not just battleships but even a Level 7 base barrier; an arsenal ship that dumps close to ten thousand anti-ship missiles in a single salvo; and a specialized tanking vessel that throws a base-grade barrier over an entire fleet.
Please, newbies. If you see something like that, do not charge in because you want the shiny toy.
You will legitimately die.
It probably was not intentional.
But the pure analysis post from that veteran had the effect of scattering the aggro that had been concentrating solely on Icarus, dispersing it across other users instead — and in doing so, spared our Icarus from a jealousy-fueled invasion swarming his way.
Besides, the players near Icarus were either roughly his own level, or people who had enough of an edge to survive this hellscape yet simply did not participate in the community. Even if the aggro had landed properly, anything resembling a direct threat to Icarus was still a long, long way off.
And as for the state of the gallery itself — I, who had opened it intending to finally do some moderator work and happened to stumble onto all of this, was left with a truly indescribable feeling.
Things Don't Always Go Your Way (1)
What on earth is everyone making such a fuss about.
A post that called itself analysis but read more like pure hype was one thing. The way people piled on and started writing praise posts out of nowhere was another. The whole situation was so sudden I could feel nothing but bewilderment.
While I was dealing with the gallery's particular brand of nonsense and various other odds and ends—
"Oppa, I came because I have something I need to tell you."
"What is it, Marianne?"
Marianne, who had lately been talking with Belial more than usual, showed up — and unlike her normal visits, she had brought another female pirate with her and clearly wanted a proper conversation. Curious about what this was about, I closed the gallery window I had been reading and settled in to listen.
A short while later:
"…So you're saying a large-scale fleet from the Earth Federation is heading toward Pirate Coalition territory?"
"Yes. According to our internal sources, it is ostensibly a 'clan' led by an Earth Federation commander moving to attack a 'clan' under one of our commanders, but…"
According to the female pirate who had come with Marianne, a war was about to break out somewhere farther from here — a place where only pirate and Earth forces met, with no other factions involved. I nodded, but I could not quite hide the puzzled look on my face.
"But what is the actual problem? At best it is just a fight between clans, isn't it?"
Given that most players' base levels topped out around Level 7 at this stage of the game, even if both sides spammed nothing but one-point corvettes, a clan-scale battle would field maybe two to three hundred thousand ships on each side at most. In practice, nobody built only corvettes, so the fleets would be packed with battlecruisers, light carriers, and cruisers — meaning the real combined total would not even hit a hundred thousand.
And for factions like the Pirate Coalition, which had once fielded fleets in the hundreds of millions during an event and still maintained tens of millions of ships; the Earth Federation, which had thrown hundreds of thousands of dreadnoughts and heavy battleships into the Space Kaiju invasion; or the Space Kaiju themselves, who had overwhelmed that same Earth Federation with over a million monsters through sheer numbers — a scrap on that scale was nothing more than a neighborhood brawl between the toughest kids on the block.
Why Marianne and a pirate executive were this worked up about it was, from my perspective, genuinely hard to understand.
When I voiced that doubt, the female pirate who seemed to have come as Marianne's adjutant answered cleanly.
"The problem is that the Earth Federation's main force appears to have inserted itself into what should have been a clan-versus-clan fight."
"Ah…"
"Furthermore, according to internal intelligence, hardliners within the Earth Federation intend to use this clan war as a proxy conflict."
"Ah."
She went on with various details after that, but the summary was this: what should have ended as a clean fight between two mid-tier clans had ballooned the moment the Humanity Clan — the Earth Federation's flagship player organization — stepped in to expand its sphere of influence, which in turn dragged in the Loki Clan, the top dog on the Pirate Coalition side, and the whole thing had rapidly spiraled out of control.
"This is not going to be easy, Commander."
"No kidding. Of all the clans to get involved, it had to be the two biggest ones at the same time."
Which meant I had to revise everything I had just said about "clan-scale battle sizes." Both sides had over ten thousand member players, and neither was carrying anyone with a base below Level 5. If they truly committed to building ships, they could easily field fleets in the million-ship range — no joke. And on top of that, as the female pirate had said, the Earth Federation's main force was getting involved?
With the risk of losing territorial control on the table, the fact that Marianne's Pirate Coalition was taking this seriously was, in hindsight, only natural.
Once I had sorted that out, I finally understood why Marianne had come.
"So you need to head to the Coalition right away and take proper command."
"Yes…"
Seeing Marianne look so dejected, I figured there was nothing to be done about it. I gave her the usual shoulder pat and was about to send her off — but only for a moment.
No, there is no way she would show up this formally just to say that.
The instant that suspicion hit me, Marianne apologized again and finally brought out the real reason she was here.
"So, Oppa… I am really sorry, but to respond to them this time, I need the fleet I stationed here to protect you — Leonard's fleet!"
"Leonard? Ah."