The Central Zone Raid Begins
A Level 9 stronghold is tough enough that you can just sit and hold, and even if the fortress main batteries are weaker than the Grand Cross, there are five of them. Totally doable, right? Right.
So what are the players planning? They’re going to bait the Grand Cross all the way out to the Level 9 stronghold—the Daedalus Research Fortress.
Once they’ve dragged it there, while the Grand Cross and Daedalus are busy hammering each other, the players will jump through the gate at Icarus’s Tannhauser and hit it with a surprise assault.
Maybe it was because the Central Zone’s raid methods were just… weird, compared to every other sector. Gallery users who found the analysis post suspicious kept popping up again.
Author: Anon
[Central Zone Raid Analysis Post Capture.jpg]
Can’t they just use nearby gate strongholds and hit it from every direction at once?
Why are they only using Icarus’s base?
The distance is awkwardly long, too—if you only go through the Tannhauser gate, the accuracy is garbage and you can’t even slip cleanly inside the Grand Cross. You can’t all go at once either, so if you’re unlucky you just get fed in piecemeal and shredded, right??
In the other zones, people could at least claim the results came from players grinding themselves raw. In reality, those zones had proper factions holding the line in front and behind, which let them use clean, polished methods to dismantle the Grand Cross.
The Central Zone had no such factions, and the player powers there were all roughly the same size. That was the whole problem.
Users who’d been wailing without realizing that fact were promptly labeled clueless by the ones who did.
And while the gallery chattered on like that, our Central Zone players piled effort on top of effort—on top of even more effort—and somehow managed to lure the Grand Cross into position.
Author: News Boy
[The Central Zone Grand Cross lining up a main-battery shot with the Level 9 stronghold “Daedalus Research Fortress” in range.jpg]
More precisely: the instant the Grand Cross fires its main gun to attack Daedalus—
[Roughly 50,000-strong player fleets massed in front of Tannhauser.jpg]
—the player fleets assembled at Tannhauser will ride the gate in for an assault and open the attack.
[Player fleets near Daedalus, outside the Grand Cross’s bombardment range.jpg]
Also, since the Tannhauser gate can’t send every player fleet through, the users waiting outside the bombardment zone will launch a separate offensive of their own.
At long last, after an endless wait, the Central Zone’s grand raid battle raised its curtain.
Fortress versus fortress.
Naturally, the opening move belonged to the Grand Cross—the one that had been lured all the way here and come toddling after the bait. It threw the first punch.
The moment the Grand Cross appeared near them, Daedalus’s defensive fleets scrambled out to intercept… but the Grand Cross’s main gun fired faster than those fleets could leave Daedalus and drag the enemy into their own effective range.
Fleets that had sortied for a screening action were fleets one second and scrap the next. Permanently open fortress main batteries and other defensive installations took the opening salvo and shattered. Daedalus started the fight already eating serious damage.
Even after a Grand Cross main-battery shot that had one-shot Level 8 strongholds, Daedalus looked far less damaged than the players had expected. It wasn’t the Central Zone’s only Level 9 stronghold for nothing.
If anything, the fortress was furious that some junkyard mobile citadel had the gall to sprint in firing a big fucking gun. With a beast’s ferocity, it launched an all-out counteroffensive.
On the fortress command’s will, the defensive fleets of Daedalus itself and four surrounding Level 3 strongholds charged the Grand Cross as one. And because it was a Level 9 stronghold, it used the specialized function of a Level 7 stronghold—the gate—to dive combat fleets straight into the Grand Cross’s interior.
KRAAAAAAAAAA—!!
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!
One battery had been lost in the opening catastrophe, but four fortress main guns still remained. Against a Grand Cross that packed higher single-shot firepower at the cost of having only one main gun, Daedalus opened up with a full battery barrage and settled into a desperate, grinding artillery duel.
And of course, that chaotic, spectacular mess was exactly what the player coalition that had dragged the Grand Cross here wanted.
The coalition’s upper ranks watched for a moment. The second they confirmed that the Grand Cross’s surveillance nets and interior defense forces had shifted to deal with the Daedalus fleets deep-diving inside—
The Central coalition players judged this was their chance. While Tannhauser poured indiscriminate gate assaults into the Grand Cross’s interior, forces from every direction launched a full-scale offensive against it.
The NPCs might sneer and call it a “junk fortress,” but the Grand Cross’s defensive power was anything but pathetic. Daedalus’s fleets had penetrated cleanly and were trying to carve up the interior defenses with surgical precision—but the Grand Cross already kept enough forces inside that it could spare power elsewhere. It shut that attempt down at the source.
No—worse. It turned around and annihilated the Daedalus forces that had dived in, shaking off the “junk fortress” reputation with interest.
But the Grand Cross only looked like it was winning up to that exact point.