Don't Fight Head-On—Hit and Run Fairly
"What the hell are you still doing up front? Fall back! Anti-air cover incoming!"
"Ooooh."
"Thank you… overwhelming thank you…!"
Having sized up the situation in an instant, the small-ship player RamuRamu swung his frigates—his dedicated AA screen—forward and threw up a fleet-wide anti-air net. The capital ships had taken a brutal beating, but they'd managed to tank their way through it. Now they peeled off toward the rear as fast as they could.
"Alright, get the repair ships cycling, now."
"Holy shit, that was almost it."
"While we've got cover, we patch everything we can or we're not surviving this."
They decided to use the repair ships already shadowing the fleet in real time to patch the near-wrecked hulls right there on the spot. The decision was made. The five repair ships attached to that fleet got to work—and about a minute into the repairs…
RamuRamu's small ships had all surged forward to intercept the fighter spam pouring in from the front, leaving a gap. That was the moment.
"Oh, fuck."
"What?"
"Fighters teleporting in from behind!!!"
"Oh, fuck."
Icarus's second strike wave, riding the Kraken's teleport, hit their rear at the most exquisite possible timing. The players who'd been about to breathe a sigh of relief scrambled to shove the battlecruisers that had been sitting safely in the back all the way forward, yanking them out of the rear line in a panic.
Of course, no matter how fast their micro was, the battlecruisers themselves simply couldn't react that quickly—that was the fundamental problem. And worse, the ships that had come to a dead stop so the repair ships could clamp on for emergency work were now actively sabotaging their own mobility.
So for all their frantic urgency, most of the fleet—battlecruisers included—was left half-turned and completely exposed, rear ends hanging out in the open, and took the second wave's massed airstrike full in the face.
There was one silver lining, though: on paper, the damage from the second strike wave looked surprisingly light. The fleet's toughest ships, the battlecruisers, had drawn every last scrap of fighter aggro from the rear, which meant the rest of the formation barely got touched. In pure numbers, they'd managed to preserve a decent chunk of their combat power.
But the damage the players felt was something else entirely.
The battlecruisers had gotten their rears hammered—textbook "capital ships are weak from behind"—and still refused to go down. The heavily damaged heavy cruisers sitting behind them (or was it in front of them now?), and the repair ships clamped onto those hulls, were a different story. Suddenly swarmed by a cloud of organic gnats with zero cover of any kind, they frantically aborted the repair process and made a desperate run for the anti-air bubble of the small ships that were supposed to protect them.
For all that desperate scrambling, it wasn't long before—
"Clean shot, whoooosh!"
"Ah."
Battlecruisers might be tough, but even they couldn't armor their rear engine nozzles. Beaten into smoking, immobilized hulks, they sat there dead in the water while the fighters still carrying ordnance simply flew past them and went looking for softer targets.
Moments later, the already-limping heavy cruisers—and the repair ships still stuck to them—went up together as the airstrike cooked off the heavy cruisers' magazines. That was the end of them.
Even watching Icarus's fighters burn the last of their munitions and peel away…
"Fuck, we're screwed!"
"Why?"
"All our repair ships just exploded!"
"Eh?"
"We've got no way to fix the battlecruisers, the heavy cruisers, or anything else."
"Yeah, we're cooked."
The price of failing to keep those five repair ships alive was steep. With engines and thrusters shredded, their battlecruisers were sitting ducks. Instead of pushing the advance, they reformed an anti-air formation around the wrecked battlecruisers and dug in.
"We've still got our support supers, right? Let's throw them at it and see what happens."
"Oh, genius."
They committed the support-type superhumans they'd originally brought along to speed up the repair ships. The plan was to lean on passive self-repair, however slow, and at least get some mobility back.
Of course, those supers had been brought specifically for the repair ships' "repair speed boost." And that speed boost didn't come from anything the supers actively did—it was just the passive buff aura they naturally leaked. So…
"We're so fucked."
"How the hell do we fix this…"
"At pure auto-repair rates, this is gonna take a month."
"This is a disaster."
They sent a join request to Marshmallow's fleet—the only one that still had repair ships left—and held position, rebuilding their AA formation, determined to weather Icarus's vicious fighter raids.
But the Unity Clan members, panicking and locking themselves into a formation optimized purely for anti-air…
"Uh, fleet incoming from the front."
"Holy shit, look at the size of that thing?!"
"That's massive. Like three times bigger than our battlecruisers."
…had completely forgotten they were here for a fleet battle, not just mindless fighter spam. The moment Icarus's main force—Kraken-class plus two battlecruisers—appeared alongside eight mercenary companies, a merciless rain of heavy fire poured down on them, and they took it utterly helplessly.
And there was one more problem that was pure candy for Icarus and pure nightmare for the Unity Clan…
"Aaaaaaagh!"
"Oh, fuck…"
"You idiots, the fleet is coming and our capital ships are still parked in the back!"
To deal with the fighters that had just been swarming them, RamuRamu's AA frigates—his small ships—had been holding the front line, while Goliath and the other three players' capital ships had pulled back to the rear to dodge the airstrikes. When Icarus suddenly brought his main force and the mercenary companies into a gunnery duel, RamuRamu's small ships found themselves well inside the enemy's engagement range with no way to fight back, and got slaughtered.
The real problem was this: while RamuRamu's fleet was being carved up by the superior range of the Kraken, the battlecruisers, and the heavy cruisers—including the Overseer—
"Ugh."
"Shit, engines are blown, I can't move…"
"This is so bad."
—the capital ships that had withdrawn to the rear were now out of range of Icarus's fleet entirely. And thanks to the second strike wave, every battlecruiser that formed the core of their firepower was a sitting duck. So even as RamuRamu's fleet was being massacred, all they could do was sit there and watch.
Fortunately, RamuRamu was a ranker somewhere inside the top five hundred. He somehow kept his head, and even while his fleet was getting torn to pieces, he carefully baited Icarus's formation, drawing them forward while he edged backward.
Unfortunately for our side, Icarus and his fleet—convinced they'd crippled the enemy capital ships' mobility and were free to run wild—pushed straight in without a second thought…
"Suuuurpriiiise—! Motherfuckers!"
"Oh, shit."
RamuRamu's rock-solid mental game and his feint tactics combined with a truly inspired Unity Clan maneuver: three intact heavy cruisers shoving the immobilized battlecruisers from behind, physically pushing them up to the firing line. The result was a full broadside engagement against a wall of seven battlecruisers plus the remaining heavy cruisers.
Seven pure battlecruisers on their side, and even after peeling off the ones doing the pushing, still roughly thirty heavy cruisers joining the gunnery duel. No matter that Icarus had the Kraken, two battlecruisers, and the Overseer—whose firepower alone rivaled a battleship—the absolute weight of guns was simply not on his side. Damage stacked up in seconds. He abandoned the frontal fight and fell back toward base.
Don't fight head-on like a coward. Fight fairly—with hit-and-run. (1)
Naturally, the Unity Clan saw Icarus's tactical reverse and immediately decided this was their chance for a grand comeback. They were ready to charge.
"I knew it—that bastard's a pure carrier one-trick. Close the range and we win!"
"Oh…"
But their dreams and hopes ran straight into reality and shattered into pieces.
> Battlecruiser propulsion destruction confirmed!
> Affected vessel speed and mobility reduced by -99%.
"Kraaaagh!"
"Please get up, Battlecruiser-chan!!"
"Did you just call a battlecruiser a battlecruiser…?"
"That is NOT the point right now, you absolute idiot!"
The battlecruisers that were supposed to chase down Icarus's retreating fleet and finish the job were all sitting ducks. And there was only so much three heavy cruisers apiece could do, heaving and shoving from behind with a "heave-ho, heave-ho."
"Let's just stop and hold here."
"There's no answer to this."
The Unity Clan's main fleet halted its advance and formed up right where they stood, digging in to survive long enough for auto-repair to do something—anything.
And the moment they settled into that posture, Icarus's fleet—which had been slipping away bit by bit—spun its bows around and vanished entirely. Someone suggested taking only the intact ships and giving chase, that they couldn't just let him go…