Fleet Points Over the Limit
Of course, before any of that…
"Ah, right—Jessica. For today's daily quest, send Tiamat out. Might as well put the Krakens through their paces while we're at it."
"Yes, Commander."
Same as always—I kicked off the WWE, or rather, the daily quest first.
Anyway, once I'd cleared everything that needed handling right away, I leisurely pulled up the fleet status…
Right there in plain sight sat the over-cap point total—and smack in the middle of the list, occupying a slot it had no business holding, was a single battleship. Both of those things were needling me.
Back during the Zenobia Empire's invasion, every capital ship that should have embodied the sacred player creed of "Big ships are always right!" had instead gotten skewered like soft tofu and sunk in disgrace. The battlecruisers and battleships had put on such a pathetic showing that I'd been thoroughly, deeply pissed off.
So I'd gone beyond simply scrapping any further battlecruiser or battleship construction—I'd decided to dismantle the ones I still had left. Resource income had gotten good enough that I no longer needed a dedicated mining fleet, so aside from a bare minimum held in reserve for emergencies, I was going to scrap the lot of them and dump every freed-up slot into destroyers. The only exception would be a single armor-reinforced heavy battleship kept on temporary tanking duty.
The problem—as the fleet status window made painfully clear—was that one battleship was still sitting there, completely at odds with my plan.
And the reason? Kraken Unit 3, which had dropped out of nowhere.
"Haah. This situation got messy."
"What do you mean, Commander?"
"Eh, it's nothing."
Originally, that battleship was supposed to be dismantled so I could fill the freed points with destroyers specialized for evasion and anti-air. But right in the middle of mass-producing those destroyers, events like the Astral Expo and the 4th Anniversary celebration had hit one after another. My brain had been so buried in event content that I'd completely forgotten about dismantling the battleship.
Naturally, with no further orders from their commander, base personnel had simply continued whatever ships were already under construction and prioritized repairs for my direct-contract mercenary fleets—including the Rhodes Mercenary Group. The result: that one surviving battleship had nowhere left in the shipyard and ended up idling in a docking berth.
If nothing else had gone wrong, I would've finished the events, remembered the battleship, dismantled it in short order, and immediately started slamming out new destroyers into the freed-up point slots.
But then the Kraken showed up.
That's right. During the 4th Anniversary event, a completely unexpected third Kraken had been impregnated—no, pulled—in a miracle of pure gacha luck. Overnight, my fleet points had rocketed past the hard cap, and the entire plan had gone sideways.
Even if I dismantled our battleship buddy now, it wouldn't bring us back under a limit we'd already blown clean through.
Cold. Damp. Complicated. (1)
So there I was, muttering under my breath about how the whole fleet plan had come unraveled, when—
"Commander, I have something to report. Shall I brief you now?"
"What is it, Jessica?"
"Well—the number of commanders who have taken up residence inside our territory has just surpassed seven thousand."
"Oh."
Hearing from Jessica that the player count in our territory had broken seven thousand, I finally understood why neighboring players and users from other sectors kept calling this place a clan in all but name. I nodded to myself.
Yeah, at that scale you're scraping the bottom edge of large-to-extra-large clan territory.
No joke—if you ranked the Central District by raw size alone, who the hell was bigger than me right now?
With that thought, I watched today's escort, Ignis, put on a spectacular Bolshoi sword dance, then opened the gallery. With the event over and nothing better to do during the downtime, players had apparently decided this was the perfect moment to start picking apart other factions.
[As always, a 3D model of the Central District that looks like a rotten orange.gif]
It's that time again—your regularly scheduled, deeply nauseating breakdown of the Central District power map!
As you can see, the place is still crawling with moldy little pockets of influence everywhere, to the point that even News Boy's media outfit can't keep up.
Same goes for me, so if something's wrong, figure it out yourselves.
I'll just hit the big chunks.
1. Icarus's Kingdom
Recently tied in with the Leviathan Squadron, the Pirate Union fleet, and the Space Kaiju faction—plus the representative offices of the Big Four clans—so the place is stupidly stable.
Maybe that's why the player population living there keeps climbing. Word is they've broken seven thousand.
Some people claim it's over ten thousand. Absolutely not. Yeah.
2. Free Legion Faction
You all remember those Yellow Turban types who were running wild a while back.
They split into the Free Legion and the Freeists, and this is the group that formed around the original officer-tier players plus the ones who charged at Icarus and got their asses thoroughly handed to them.
Started around three thousand, absorbed nearby players and small clans, and ballooned to five thousand.
Apparently there were clashes with surrounding players during the process, but I dunno the details. Can't tell if those were pre-existing feuds or fallout from the mergers themselves lmao
3. New Central District Entrant Clans
[Eight clan emblems—all with populations around 2,000.jpg]
You might ask why the first two get their own sections while these get lumped together.
Simple: these guys are all roughly the same size.
New players who entered the Central District number somewhere between ten and twenty thousand total, but instead of consolidating into one clan they mixed and matched into this weird hybrid mess, and the whole thing got kind of awkward.
There's talk of them forming another clan alliance or whatever, but nothing solid yet. Yeah.
4. Central Stronghold Association
This is the faction that tried to forcibly elect Icarus as Central Ju-ttak last time and got publicly dunked on when the man himself refused.
It's basically a social club of "mayor" players who run Level 4+ strongholds in the Central region.
Not a clan. Remember that. Yeah.
Anyway, they've gone dead silent since that whole mess blew up, so most people treat them like they don't exist—but this faction is way bigger than it looks. On pure headcount of players docked in each stronghold's central docking zone, they look like the smallest group on this list.
The catch is, as Icarus has demonstrated more than once, these people can drop "stronghold mercenary corps" on demand and instantly double their combat power. They hold actual strongholds, so if they get attacked, the docked players and the stronghold defense fleets all count toward their force. lmao
And more than anything, these guys have a habit of playing dirty politics. Slip up and you can get politically railroaded and dogpiled into oblivion in no time.
5. Everyone Else — Small Clans and Regular Players
These are the players who still carry the classic "Central den of thieves" energy we all knew up through last year.
You might think individual nobodies don't matter, but add up every player from the factions listed above and you still don't crack forty thousand.
More precisely, forty thousand give or take ten thousand either way—
But the players in this leftover bucket? The remaining hundred thousand. Yeah.
And mixed in among them are a tangled mess of sub-1,000-member clans, too.
Ah, and if you're about to say every other sector is the same so what's the big deal—