Grand Cross (1)
"KRAAAAAAAAH!"
Some random piece-of-shit mongrel had gone and polluted a massive swath of posts with that kind of garbage, which meant me and every other user got hit out of nowhere with a full-blown gore-spam terror campaign. And it wasn't just those. Most of the reaction posts put up by floating anons had been "hacked"—or something damn close to it—and turned into pure ick-image dumps.
Midway through the event, the gallery had to pause everything and put a few troll bastards' heads on pikes in the town square…
[Capture of the 'ban results' the user mods posted.jpg]
Already 5,000 people cut.
First time I've seen this many get sliced in under five minutes.
That put the user mods—myself included—in a murderous mood, and even the staff looked pissed that certain people were more committed to a gore-image marathon than to actually running the event. So, just like the post said, not even five minutes passed before the trolls' concept-post terror campaign got the curtain dropped on it for good.
Anyway. With that trash taken care of…
[Shot of combat still going strong.jpg]
We're still fighting, you absolute bastards.
Why the fuck are YOU already done.
As posts like that made clear, Phase 2 still had a loooong way to go before it cleared. So I decided to stick to the original plan and, while I had the chance, get a real read on how the other users were reacting.
And with how many damn aggro-chasers were swarming the boards, the impression left by the Phase 2 "ship teleport assault" had sunk deep. The pure wow-wow reaction posts alone had already blown past ten thousand and were barreling toward twenty or thirty thousand.
Of course, what I actually wanted wasn't those reaction dumps—it was proper analysis threads. Different story. But the ratio of shitposts to substance is roughly the same no matter where you go in this world, so somewhere in those twenty or thirty thousand turds there were bound to be two or three hundred pieces of actual nutrition. An absolute, unshakable truth.
[Split image: one side shows small ships teleport-raiding a user fleet; the other shows a Dreadnought swatting down hundreds of fighters diving on it.jpg]
These freaks are running a completely different concept from users and every other faction.
Small-ship performance itself is about what the gallery predicted—basically zero AA, and everything else is mid. Especially the power plants being old-gen: outside the flagship-grade stuff, most of their ships are garbage on mobility. Beam weapons across the board don't hit that hard either.
Kinetic weapons are fine, though.
More importantly, AA is dogshit all the way up through cruiser class… and then the super-heavies suddenly get exponential AA. More precisely, they cut raw firepower and dump the points into AA and mobility instead.
And the real shit part: these bastards can run the teleport-strike package we already saw from the Rafflesia-class and the Kraken—on actual ships.
From everything I've personally run into, and cross-checked against other users' proof shots, the ceiling looks like Light Cruiser grade. And like every teleport ship we've seen so far, it seems capped at maybe once a day.
But it's not "a few ships" or even "dozens." A single super-heavy can throw nearly four-digit counts of small craft. From the receiving end, it's just pure hell.
Reading a post that bold and that packed with actual substance, I found myself nodding along. Yeah. That tracked.
And separate from the enemy-fleet analysis, there were also threads breaking down the user-side losses that had stacked up through Phase 2.
[Before & After list of users whining in the gallery.jpg]
Phase 1, the solo players living alone got mass-screwed.
This time it's flipped — people docked at strongholds and such took a little more of the beating.
Not that there's some dramatic, eye-popping gap like Phase 1, just saying.
It wasn't the player fleets that got carved up. The merc companies and faction expedition forces got shredded way harder than in Phase 1.
Rebuttals stacked on those posts immediately, and rebuttals to the rebuttals after that. Watching a thoroughly wholesome, bright little debate bloom in real time, I decided to just keep an eye on the gallery while the ships went through repairs.
And as always, the end of that kind of argument was a beatdown delivered by dropping hard facts on everyone's damage estimates. Once both sides actually put their data on the table, it was weirdly fascinating.
[Evidence that Phase 2 stronghold-type users took more damage than Phase 1 solo players.jpg]
I was right!
You bastard!