Always Watch Your Back (3)
What I was worried about was something else entirely.
Even this Avalon Fortress — a Level 5 base two full tiers below the place those guys were about to invade — had fielded combat fleets of absolutely terrifying scale. A single fleet packed ten battleships, fifty heavy cruisers, and five hundred destroyers. And there were fifty of those fleets. Total force: five hundred battleships alone, with heavy cruisers running into four digits.
But Level 7?
The Tannhauser Gate Fortress I'd once planned to assault and then abandoned sat somewhere around Level 7 to 8. If my memory was right, at Level 7 the "patrol fleets" — the ones that only handled the opening skirmish — would already be rolling out with about five battleships each. And when the real combat fleets showed up, a single one would drag more than thirty battleships into the fight. At Level 5, the only capital ships under the battleships had been heavy cruisers. From Level 7 onward, battlecruisers joined the mix. The number of combat fleets went up, too.
Unlike me, the Rotten Water Clan was charging in as an actual clan — and even so, I couldn't see how they were supposed to handle that kind of raw tonnage.
Apparently I wasn't the only one thinking it. The gallery was filling up with worried posts about Rotten Water's Level 7 base assault.
[Chat log of Rotten Water Clan declaring a Level 7 base assault.jpg]
Not saying I doubt those clan members' skills.
Nobody in that roster is outside the top 1000, yeah.
But the numbers are just too thin.
Rotten Water is an elite-few clan — total membership is only like a hundred, right?
They're barely hitting Level 8 right now. Factor in Fleet Points and they can barely handle a patrol fleet, no?
It wasn't just vague worry, either. Some people were straight-up dissecting city force compositions and diagramming exactly why the whole thing was impossible.
[GIF of 50,000 ships firing a simultaneous volley at a fortress.gif]
Saying this for the people who still don't get what the actual problem is.
It's not the player count. It's the ship count.
Even if all 100 Rotten Water members dump every Fleet Point they've got, their bases are only around Level 7–8.
Level 7 is 650 Fleet Points. Level 8 is 800 or 900. Add it all up and their combined Fleet Points max out under 80,000.
Even if they cram every last point into battleships, battlecruisers, and carriers — how many are they actually bringing?
A Level 8 player can maybe field 20–25 battleships and battlecruisers max, so they can probably handle the patrol fleets somehow.
But the combat fleets?
Minimum 30 battleships and 10 battlecruisers per fleet. And from Level 7 on, carriers start showing up in the fleets too.
Looking at just the capital ships, you might think it's doable.
But fortress cities have a stupid number of light ships as support.
You all saw it when the 3rd-ranked guy did his solo siege — a Level 5 city's patrol fleet alone had over 30,000 light ships.
You think a Level 7 base won't have those?
Players dump every point into capital ships to build a siege force, and then a minimum of 100,000 light ships — free of any Fleet Point cost on the city's side — shred the player fleets that have zero support screen.
There's a reason the mega-clans always bring hundreds of players running pure light-ship fleets on top of their capital-ship players when they hit a base. Otherwise their precious capital ships get swarmed at point-blank range and just get mulched.
That's why Icarus brought in a mountain of light ships through mercenary companies when he hit the Level 5 base.
And Rotten Water?
If at least half of those 100 members don't dump every Fleet Point into capital ships, they can't even field the bare minimum for a city siege — and they have zero tools to screen the light ships that are about to pour out of the gates.
Personally, I think this is going to be a total disaster.
[Image pulled from the wiki tab.jpg]
Just the light ships coming out of the patrol fleets: 50,000.
That's more than the total force Icarus committed to his fortress assault.
And the combat fleets bring out even more than that.
Now you get why mega-clans like Humanity, Loki, and Justice throw every single clan member at a Level 7 base?
Anyone who'd actually played the garbage game that was Astral Lagrange already knew this was realistically absurd. Unlike me — who'd been able to throw 512 mercenary companies at an NPC base and force a pure numbers fight — the gallery consensus was that Raksha's Rotten Water Clan simply couldn't pull that off in practice.
And in response to all that gallery noise, Raksha of Rotten Water — who'd been silent until now — finally dropped what amounted to an official statement.
[Image of a toad in sunglasses yelling]
The sound of black holes and the eerie hiss of meteor showers hammer the base armor plating.
The. Night. Before. The. Storm.
Whether we rise or fall — the results will speak for themselves.
Prepare the booze, the women, the gacha, and the betting slips!
This is the hour of the heroes who will take a Level 7 base and come home!!!!!!!!
That swaggering statement split the gallery into three equal camps: one-third mourning the death flags, one-third impressed, and one-third outright skeptical. The classic three-way split of the realm.