Princess Luka's Resource Request
Looking at the quest that had brazenly popped up — essentially a demand to hand over resources — my already complicated mood hit a new personal record.
Status check after a long while! (3)
After a moment of thought, I figured we still had some breathing room. We hadn't hired that many mercenary companies, and once the third forward base went up and we expanded the resource harvesters, our intake would climb further. So I decided to ask Jessica how much slack we actually had.
"Jessica, roughly how many resources do we have left right now?"
"Factoring in what you spent building the forward base last time, about five hundred fifty thousand minerals and ninety thousand rare resources."
"That so. Daily intake?"
"After mercenary fees, fleet upkeep, and repair costs… roughly fifteen thousand minerals and seven thousand rare resources a day."
"…That's all?"
The numbers were a touch lower than I'd expected, and I couldn't hide a flicker of dismay. Jessica saw the look on my face and shrugged as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
"Well, a forward base needs at least a few more days before it can actually start producing resources and spinning up operations."
"Ah. Right. Of course."
"Plus you just received two capital ships — a large carrier and a battleship. Those things burn through upkeep like crazy."
"…Mmm."
I nodded along. Honestly, aside from base construction and additional forward bases, there wasn't much else draining our resources these days. It would be a little tight, but I decided to accept Princess Luka's quest as-is.
And so I settled on shipping her a daily package of 1,001 minerals and 101 rare resources. After that, I figured I ought to check just how large the beast fleet at our base had grown.
When I actually looked, it was still very much at the level of a "hobby" — which was almost a relief.
The beasts' bizarre dual classification system made the list look twice as long as it really was. All told, though, it was only twenty-one vessels — and of those, only three would clearly count as "capital ships" by player standards.
At this scale… yeah, they're not going to burn through resources in any serious way.
I wasn't covering their entire budget, either. They were scavenging and cobbling things together on their own. If they could maintain and manage that much combat power on roughly one-sixth of what a mercenary company cost in upkeep…
Whether we ended up in PvP with someone else or diving into PvE, as long as the game didn't deliberately screw us over, this was a perfectly serviceable secondary damage fleet. The thought left me genuinely satisfied.
Next on the checklist was, of course, the Gold I'd received as compensation from both the Humanity Clan and the Loki Clan after the last incident — specifically, how much I'd actually accumulated.
I hadn't opened the auction house even once since the event ended, so I'd completely lost track of the total.
> This system requires the exclusive currency Gold.
> It is distinct from the rare mineral "gold ore," and can only be used here.
Mmm. A very juicy sum.
Between the two clans, a combined thirty-five thousand Gold had poured in. My auction account, which had been scraping by on the occasional few dozen Gold here and there, was suddenly sitting on over forty thousand. Looking at that number, I decided to set aside five thousand for future growth and put the remaining thirty-six thousand to work buying something sweet from the auction house.
The problem was that I was hardly the only person with that idea…
And when I actually opened the auction house, both the auction listings and the trade market for ships and superhumans were, for some reason, completely barren.
What the hell is this.
Staring at a market that had been picked clean down to the last scrap, I felt pure disbelief. I immediately searched the gallery for an explanation of what had happened to the auction house. The results:
[The Drought Has Come to the Auction House.jpg]
[Trade market empty except for resource crates, or full of already-completed listings.jpg]
I saw how the event went down and figured I'd finally save up some Gold and drop a big purchase…
Why is there literally nothing?
Is it always like this?
[Battleship getting body-slammed into scrap by the Kraken.gif]
The wild part is that the actual super hard-carries of the All-Star match — the Kraken and the Anomalocaris — don't even drop from gacha.
The Kraken is a pure RNG ship that comes out of a space chrysalis the beast faction sometimes sends as support, at a one-in-a-million rate.
And the Anomalocaris isn't given to you at all — the only way to get one is by capturing it from a Xenobia Empire regular fleet lmaoooooooo
Through the last event, players had felt it in their bones — whether superhuman or ship, a well-raised gacha unit could crush ordinary-grade ships so thoroughly it wasn't even a contest. The half-formed consensus that had already been circulating among players — regular ships <<<<<(overwhelmingly)<<<<< gacha ships — had accelerated into full-blown orthodoxy.
The result: the vast majority of players, and every major clan on top of that, had dumped every last scrap of Gold they'd saved into cornering the auction market. Anything that listed got snapped up the instant it appeared. Auction house, trade market — both stripped bare.
Which left a virtuous, pure-hearted solo player like me with absolutely nothing to do.
Sob. How tragic.