Solo Player vs. Trollers (2)
Unlike a normal facility upgrade, though, this was an upgrade of the base itself — and it showed.
Wiiiiirrr—
Rrrrrumble—
THUD! BOOM!
Screeeeeech!
Wherever I go… I can hear your sound.
No matter where I walked inside the base, the racket of a full-blown construction site followed me. The entire structure was reshaping itself in real time, swelling and twisting into something larger right before my eyes.
And as a bonus, while I wandered around I got to gawk at construction gear I'd never even seen from the inside before — tower cranes and the like, all over the place.
The problem was that remodeling the entire exterior of a base this massive apparently took… well, remodeling.
> Base upgrade in progress…
> Time remaining until upgrade complete: 25 : 31 : 02
I'd hit the upgrade button the second I claimed the reward, and it was still grinding away.
Honestly, I would have preferred the usual game treatment — press the button, flash-flash, sparkle-sparkle, done in an instant. Why this game insisted on devouring time for every single thing I tried to do was beyond me.
Sure, games like this almost always had speed-up items. But for a base-level upgrade, the use of speed-up items was locked out entirely.
So just like that, I was stuck living through three days of construction noise already behind me, plus another day and an hour still to go.
Fortunately, there were exactly two places where the noise didn't reach. One was the Commander's Private Quarters — thorough soundproofing so players could actually get some rest. The other was the Command Center, which by all structural logic should have been impossible to soundproof, and yet somehow was, thanks to whatever "immersion" logic the game was running on.
Which meant that aside from the first day, when I hadn't figured any of this out, I'd been shuttling almost exclusively between my quarters and the Command Center, issuing orders from there.
Anyway. While I was thinking all that and puttering around, the mood on the community boards was turning decisively against the troll pack known as the Villain Alliance.
Which was only natural. From the average player's point of view, a pack of dopamine-addicted maniacs running around doing whatever they felt like — the Villain Alliance — was always going to look worse than the Veteran Alliance, the people who actually helped you, or at least could help you.
But as with everything in life, copycats of the Veteran Alliance started crawling out of the woodwork.
And the problem was…
(Image attached)
So they said they'd help, right? I asked for help. Then they show up with a ten-ship fleet including a cruiser — to deal with pirates who had one destroyer and two corvettes — and demand a deployment fee??
A thousand minerals per sortie. How the hell is a newbie supposed to pay that;;
I figured at least a tip was fair, so I scraped together everything I had and gave them 700 minerals.
They said it wasn't enough and wrecked 300 minerals' worth of my fleet on the way out. What kind of operation is this?
(Images attached)
Copycats of the Veteran Alliance — the ones who used to help for free — are popping up like weeds.
The ones I screenshotted here? Even if they offer help, do NOT take it.
They send a fleet so big a newbie can't possibly fight back, then scream at you to pay an outrageously expensive deployment support fee.
And if you don't pay? They attack you on the spot and loot everything.
The opposite of the trolls — these guys are straight-up loan sharks.
I'm actually losing my mind.
True to form for a community of copycat addicts, imitators were already showing up. Except the ones doing the imitating had zero interest in copying the original's actual intent — they just zeroed in on the rewards, like they'd decided to become pirates themselves.
Watching that garbage, I found myself shaking my head without even meaning to.
Separately from all that, seeing that players were already fielding cruiser-class ships sent me digging through the base upgrade list, hunting for the tier that unlocked cruiser production.
Fortunately, that upgrade was the very next step after the one currently running.
Reading that description, I thought back to the "assorted resources and goods" from the event rewards — and the measly 300 rare resources that had come with them. Those, I decided, were going to have to be hoarded carefully.
On a separate note, I called over Jessica, who happened to be standing nearby.
"Jessica, roughly how many minerals do we have left?"
"We're not repairing any ships at the moment, so remaining minerals should be around five thousand."
"Hmm."
"More precisely, the high four-thousands. And since the Commander is currently running five resource zones, we're bringing in eight hundred seventy-five a day."
"Hmmm."
Hearing that, I pulled up the list of facilities that would become buildable the moment the current base upgrade finished.
> Additional Shipyard Production Line — Minerals: 500
> Advanced Research Lab — Minerals: 700
> Resource Synthesis Production Facility — Minerals: 1,000
> Advanced Tech Management Office — Minerals: 1,200
Looking at that, I could more or less feel out what needed to happen next.
The plan I'd settled on wasn't complicated.
"Jessica. The moment the base upgrade finishes, there's something I want built first."
"What would that be, Commander?"
Jessica's rabbit ears twitched with curiosity. I pointed at the status window I'd left open.
"From this list — the Resource Synthesis Production Facility. Build only that, then we go straight into the next base upgrade."
"Pardon?"
Hearing that I had no intention of working through the stages carefully, Jessica's eyes went round with surprise.
"Commander, that would push back the unlocks for the shipyard, the research lab, and the tech office even further."