Anatomy of a Failed Assault
The fleets still inside came rocketing out through the teleport system, shooting into open space one after another.
The temporary clan's morale was already shredded from watching their fleets get carved apart. When the main combat fleets came pouring out through the teleports with nothing to stop them, the whole group recoiled as one — and the ending wrote itself. They abandoned the fight and ran.
Everyone had only one thought left in their heads.
For the record, I had no way of knowing at the time that they were all eyeing each other for a backstab. Those stories only came out after the siege was over, through the mutual exposé war that erupted among them — pure coincidence that I ever learned any of it.
But even setting that aside, watching from a step back with a cool head made it obvious that the temporary clan's Tannhäuser assault had problems stacked on problems.
The first one was structural. The temporary clan was temporary in the truest sense — it was supposed to dissolve the moment the siege ended. That meant the fleets of the players who'd signed on for the assault could never be reconfigured into a composition actually suited for base-cracking.
<User battleships getting absolutely shredded.jpg>
Everyone's going on about the internal split this and that,
but that's the secondary problem. The real issue was that their ship composition was pure PvP.
And in this game, player-vs-player basically means small-fleet decisive engagements.
A PvP composition means you build a small elite force centered on high-performance ships and capital vessels —
which is fine when you're fighting another player running the same small-elite setup. Against a base assault? It becomes a catastrophic problem.
There's a hard limit on how many ships one player can field, so nobody notices until it's too late.
When the enemy doesn't just outnumber you two or three to one but five times over, you just get steamrolled.
Around Level 7, the garrison fleets alone — the vanguard — come out to about 50,000 ships total.
The main combat fleets, battleships down through destroyers, put 5,000 ships in a single formation this time.
All told that's 250,000 ships. One player fields maybe 20–30 ships on a good day.
The entire temporary clan combined maybe scraped together 30–40,000. You really think that stops 250,000?
Sure, most of those 250,000 are small craft — but the battleships alone are coming out in the thousands lmao
There's a reason the veterans said after Tunguska that properly handling this takes a minimum of several thousand players.
"Someone put together a pretty solid analysis."
"Didn't you write that one, Commander?"
"Shh."
And that wasn't the only problem.
It was a method I'd used myself — Ratten Water too, for that matter…
"Still, I never expected those guys would actually try to fight it pure and head-on."
"They're just playing by the game's rules."
The second problem was that the temporary clan had failed at the exact strategy I'd used to take Avalon: seal the gates and lock the main fleets inside.
This one hit close to home — it was a problem that applied to me too, if I ever tried to crack Tannhäuser myself — so I went over it with extreme care. Being the first Level 7 base siege in the Central District, a lot of players had uploaded evidence footage to the gallery, and working from those recordings the picture came into focus.
"Tannhäuser's got a lot of problems, though."
"Like what?"
"The gates. Even Neranzara can't deal with them — and neither can the Kraken's point-blank strategic missile teleport."
"Ah… right."
That was it: the gate-sealing strategy I'd used during the Avalon occupation was, for me, simply not viable here. Not because the gates had absurd durability that our firepower couldn't crack — that wasn't the issue.
"There are way too many gates. Avalon only had five, didn't it?"
"It did. But Tannhäuser has fifteen… and they're scattered all over the place."
Avalon's gates had been clustered tight enough that simultaneous strikes were cleanly doable. Tannhäuser's were sprinkled across the entire base. With our firepower, locking down the main fleets through a coordinated gate strike was simply impossible.
The temporary clan weren't idiots, of course. They threw everything they had at destroying the gates, and they actually managed a spectacular ten out of fifteen. But before they could finish the remaining five, the main combat fleets came pouring through those surviving gates — and everything went sideways.
The even more serious problem was something else entirely. Because Tannhäuser was a gateway fortress, it housed a massive, beautiful large-scale teleport system on the inside. Main fleets that couldn't exit through destroyed gates could simply use the gateway teleports to appear — with zero warning — directly in front of the players' formations, or right behind them.
And as mentioned above, those fleets carried tens of thousands of small craft per formation, purpose-built for close-quarters brawling. The players' gacha-pulled ultra-high-performance ships and superhumans did what they could to hold the line, but the numbers gap was simply too grotesque. The moment the temporary clan's fleets were forced into a melee with the base defense forces, they collapsed outright.
And right as the situation twisted, the internal split between the clan leader's loyalists and the revolutionary faction erupted on top of everything else…
A thoroughly miserable failure was waiting to greet them.
But as always, there were plenty of people who treated someone else's failure as their own personal happiness — a whole lot of them. The moment the temporary clan's betrayal-and-backstab drama ran its course, the gallery exploded with reactions roasting them. Or more accurately, not so much roasting as the average player's instinct to process the whole mess as comedy.
<Toad cackling image>
Backstab after backstab after backstab, and every single one of them was naturally aimed at the post-conquest phase — that's what makes it so fucking funny
They genuinely never once considered they might fail to take the base. That's peak comedy, right?
And mixed into those reactions were posts that dragged me into it for no reason at all. The thrust, naturally, was why I hadn't swooped in and taken Tannhäuser myself after the temporary clan hit it…
<Old footage of 50,000 ships on the move.gif>
That guy will just spin up 50,000 ships whenever he needs them
Looking at how he fully mobilized the mercenary corps this time, I'm not even joking — he could probably field 100,000-plus, right?
So why sit still and not attack?
Did he cut some kind of deal or something?