Icarus, True Victor of the Event
The users who styled themselves citizens of the Most Noble (abridged) Republic had by now drifted well into the territory of hardcore stans. Even watching Icarus gather mercenary companies and his own fleet at the sewing machine, they simply pretended not to notice.
The mercenary users docked at Tannhauser could see just as clearly that Icarus was openly up to something strange… and yet.
To the misfortune of any users not affiliated with Icarus's faction(?), the mercenary players here also kept their mouths shut, quietly waiting for the scraps that would fall their way. Everyone else had already left Tannhauser, so they had no way of knowing how the situation was unfolding.
And so our Icarus's plan to gobble up Daidalos went off without a single user getting in the way — a thoroughly, splendidly clean success, or so the story goes.
Icarus was free now!
But even if the users of the Most Noble (abridged) Republic had looked the other way, once the base was taken the whole situation went out as a global message in every direction. That other players would come charging after Daidalos was, without exaggeration, a cosmic certainty.
Granted, most users were busy brawling over the Grand Cross and carving up each other's ships, so they were too spent to move casually.
"Commander, fleets belonging to other commanders are being detected near Daidalos."
"Aigoo, they're moving fast."
Apparently there were still players who hadn't taken part in the Grand Cross assault at all — ones who had simply scattered in every direction, either blocking unmanned fleets or quietly snacking on them. They were pushing toward the Daidalos perimeter far faster than we had expected.
Watching that unfold, I chose not to dig in at Daidalos with a purely defensive posture…
"Let's see. We've still got a ton of mercenary companies left, right?"
"Yes. Daidalos's defensive forces were almost completely wiped out to begin with."
"At the mercs' travel speed, taking the surrounding escort bases is impossible, right?"
"The closest one is doable, but everything else would burn more than a full day just on transit."
"Then we've got our answer."
"Yep."
Instead, I went on the offensive — seizing the bases between our home territory and Daidalos, stitching the two together into a continuous route, and then putting the overflowing defensive fleets of those bases to work.
Once Icarus's sharp little mobile campaign(?) was underway, the other users were left with nothing to do but sit there sucking their thumbs.
[Image: Daidalos and the old Tannhauser territory now "connected".jpg]
This is fucking insane.
I just asked if I could sit out the fighting and watch instead, got permission, and stuck around the whole time.
His decision-making is wild.
He hits Daidalos with a lightning empty-house raid and swallows it whole. Then when Central Zone users start hovering around, he doesn't dig in with the mercs to shore up the defense —
he cancels the contracts on most of the mercenary companies at Daidalos,
takes the single closest Level 3 escort base between Daidalos and Tannhauser first,
and at the same time, like he's swimming in resources, mass-contracts a ton of new mercenary companies out of his home base,
uses them to eject and blitz the nearby low-level NPC bases out through the gate, links the route,
then immediately pulls defensive fleets from the other bases and parks them on Daidalos for an emergency hold.
And to keep the route from getting cut in the middle, he relocates the clustered settlement users who were living in his territory onto the bases.
Technically the people moving wanted it themselves, but still.
Thanks to that, a play that should have left his defenses so thin the old bases got stripped bare ends up airtight — because he docks other users into the chain and fills the defensive quota. Fucking perfect.
Users suddenly realized that the one who had walked away with the biggest haul from the event wasn't the newly crowned ranker Snow Leopard — it was Icarus. And with that, they rediscovered a very old truth: the world really is all about timing.
While watching Icarus expand his territory like that and lock down ironclad control, the players also woke up to one more fact.
[Image: toad with an exclamation mark floating over its head]
Think about it. What even are user armbands?
The admins said managing everything themselves was too hard, so they handed gallery mod powers to the Rank 1–10 players hanging around the board.
But half the old rankers just got completely ejected from the rankings.
So the new users get the armbands, and the old armbands all get wrecked.
A long, long time ago — specifically, after the Ancient Empire's Capital event, when Monalisa rocketed into Rank 2 and entered the top ten alongside Koenig — a system that had held solid for over two years finally cracked. A new armband regime(?) was about to take the stage.
While the Grand Cross event was still running, the users stuck with armband duty had been far too busy to pay attention. In that gap, the pranksters whose fifteen-day full bans had expired poured back out in droves, and the gallery filled up with a whole different kind of chaos.
[Image: gallery feed completely plastered with gore bait and aggro threads.jpg]
Are the armbands even working!?
But even through all that chaos — setting aside the old-school "clan leader" type users, maybe —