Complicated Problems Sometimes Have Solutions Right Next Door
Weren't captured Supers' affinity scores just supposed to reset?
Why the hell are they starting at -200 from the jump?
And the fact that this kept happening pointed, with high probability, straight at an update.
Sure enough, it wasn't long before the board got carpet-bombed with whining posts from users who looked like Central Zone veterans — myself included. Eventually, one player dropped a tip thread on the whole mess.
[Image of a mocking toad]
Unlike back when you lot were still playing, an update changed how affinity works on captured Supers.
Snatching them used to normalize way too easily, so now the affinity they had for their original commander gets slammed onto you as a negative score. Yeah.
Which means you can't just throw stolen Supers into the field right away — you've gotta pet them to death inside the base first.
Do what you used to and dump them outside immediately, and they'll straight-up desert. Yeah.
Or you can toss them in a forced labor camp and shatter their will to resist. That works too.
Either way, you need at least one Super of equal or higher grade stationed with them at all times. Yeah.
Skip that and there's a high chance they successfully escape.
And once I'd finished reading that post, the reality settled in: if I wanted to actually use those captives, I'd have to glue Ignis and Partia to them and keep them there.
The problem — whether I went the forced-labor-camp route or the base-confinement route — was the same. Until that damned -200 affinity climbed to at least +1, a minimum of two of our own Supers would be locked into babysitting duty, unable to do anything else.
Whoa, hang on. This is way more inefficient than I thought.
Affinity gain rates varied by character, so hard numbers were tough to pin down. But with combat leveling and trust-building through work completely off the table, the only path forward was pure, relentless petting.
And "+1" was a joke, really — that just meant the debuff disappeared. Affinity naturally drifted up and down during ordinary work, so for stable, reliable use you'd need to push it to at least +50 on top of that.
Reaching that level? No exaggeration — you'd be grinding that way for a year at minimum.
The moment that fact clicked, pure irritation came boiling up from somewhere deep in my chest.
While I was buried in all that fretting, our bunny-bunny Jessica ducked out somewhere for a bit, then came back wearing her usual expression to brief me on the base's resource situation.
"Commander, recent fleet repairs and defensive-structure reconstruction have left our resource reserves in very poor shape."
"I'd imagine so."
I didn't need a report to know that much. Of the capital ships, the only survivors besides the Kraken and the Overseer were two standard heavy cruisers. The light ships had been almost entirely wiped out. Worst of all, the alpha and omega of any fleet's foundation — the resource mining vessels — had been chewed through in catastrophic numbers.
"Regarding our current daily resource intake: even counting the newly produced ones, the resource fleet is only six ships strong. Intake rates are quite low."
"…Hmm."
"Base production efficiency has improved recently, so we're up to 4,500 minerals and 900 rare resources per day, but…"
Jessica had been trying to loosen the tension by walking through the base numbers. Then she shook her head, driving the severity of the situation home all over again.
"The resource fleet that used to account for most of our intake is currently bringing in a mere 3,000 a day, Commander."
"Not ideal."
"Still, the forward base's mining facilities are finally coming online in earnest, so starting tomorrow we should be able to pull in an extra two thousand to twenty-five hundred minerals and maybe a hundred rare resources each day."
"Hmm."
A silver lining, at least — the forward base we'd set up earlier was spinning back up properly. Stack daily quests on top of that, and we could probably keep daily intake in the ten-thousand range somehow.
Of course, watching us scramble like this, someone might ask where the hell the 500,000 minerals in war reparations from beating the Unity Clan had gone. But as I'd already mentioned, we were currently running four standard shipyards and one capital shipyard at full tilt just to rebuild the fleet. On top of that, every defensive installation smashed during the fighting inside and outside the base needed reconstruction. Base expansion that could no longer be postponed was underway. And the Space Kaiju quest we'd shelved because of the sudden war — construction of the Kaiju Fleet Production Facility — was finally being finished off as well.
Basically, the second a lump sum hit our accounts, we'd decided to spin up every single project we could run at once.
"So what's left?"
"Mm… counting everything currently in transit, about 60,000 minerals and 9,000 rare resources."
We'd hauled in 500,000 minerals and 50,000 rare resources, and our wallet still looked this pathetic. Which was exactly why, in a situation like this, the whole captured-Super problem was grinding my gears.
Or rather — less about their treatment, more about being forced to nail my precious Supers to base-guard duty. Put bluntly, the fact that I basically had to write the captives off for now was just plain infuriating.
Not that there was anything we could do about it at the moment. And if I genuinely abandoned them, what was the point of the rewards my Supers and I had fought so hard to earn?
God, this is ridiculously annoying.
I did briefly consider fishing for answers on the gallery…
[Proof shot of a Super at -50 affinity (burly male character).jpg]
The angry face is kinda hot, not gonna lie, but they say he'll desert the base if I leave it like this.
I've been trying to fill the affinity bar somehow, but every time I catch him trying to run, whatever little progress I made gets wiped. Help!
The problem had dropped on me out of nowhere, and I spent a long time turning it over in my head.
Somewhere in the middle of those brooding days — while the Kraken was undergoing a semi-forced diet — I finally got the resource mining fleet up to twenty ships and immediately queued four corvettes at once to serve as evasion tanks and bait, venting my accumulated stress in the most mediocre way possible.
"Yaaaah—! Quad corvette build, babyyy!"
That was roughly when Jessica spoke up.
"Commander? Oxianor and Griyanaar are requesting an audience."
"Those two?"
Oxianor I could understand — the Space Kaiju envoy had, somehow or other, ended up half-absorbed into our base's Super roster. But Griyanaar? What did she want?
A flicker of curiosity crossed my mind, but then again…
…There's probably a reason. And while I'm at it, maybe I should ask if either of them has any ideas about those captives.
Those two wouldn't show up for nothing. Whatever it was, I decided to take the meeting.