The New Update (2)
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Until just yesterday, the users of the Gallery had been half-dead on their feet. The moment the event message — no, the official notice — popped up in front of their eyes, every last one of them went feral. Veterans and newbies alike dove into deep, passionate discussion about the coming update.
And as always, those conversations were fueled by the game's lingering ghosts and old-timers, who — with the wiki no longer accessible in this place — took it upon themselves to dump every scrap of information they still carried.
[Update Notice Screenshot]
The veterans already know this, but the update that just dropped was never supposed to hit all at once in the original game.
Every single one of those features is basically a major update by this game's standards.
And they're unlocking all of them at the same time?
These bastards forced everyone through a six-month tutorial using the pirates, got the player base roughly power-leveled, and now they're trying to ram through everything up to the final pre-possession update as fast as humanly possible.
You see the factions listed in the update, right?
Space Kaiju, Aliens, and the Earth Federation.
Plus the Space Pirates on top of those three.
From now on, commanders can pick one of these four factions to join — or just go it alone.
Oh, and clan membership is completely separate from faction allegiance, so you're gonna see absolute chaos clans with all four factions mixed together lmao
In the process, a few of the veteran grandpas — whose dementia everyone had always treated as a running joke — seemed to have developed the real thing, much to the gallery's collective amusement.
So shut up, mine your resources, and stockpile your fleets.
I'm not joking. You fr need to stockpile.
The pirates just got beaten back and the Pirate Empress is still in one piece, so they're the lesser concern — but the second the Space Kaiju, the Aliens, and the Earth Federation all show up, there will not be a single boring moment left.
[Alien Extermination Poster(?)]
If you're about to accuse me of policing how people play, just leave.
I'm saying this because the number of factions that will be raiding players is about to jump to four, and holding them off alone is going to be an absolute nightmare.
If you belong to a faction, at least that faction's fleets won't attack you.
But if you stay neutral and join nothing? Then if your luck runs sour:
Pirates hit you first thing in the morning. You fight them off. Right before lunch, the Space Kaiju invade. You barely scrape through that, sit down for dinner — and the Aliens warp in. You tear through the Aliens, finally crawl into bed — and an Earth Federation inspection fleet shows up to "check if you're doing your job properly" and opens fire.
To be precise: lore-wise, we're base commanders dispatched by the Earth Federation. Refuse to swear loyalty and they come after you for "going rogue." Yeah.
The one exception: if you're in a clan and your clan leader belongs to a specific faction, then as long as you stay in that clan, that faction won't make the first move against you.
With no properly organized wiki to lean on, the veterans were putting on a full display — flexing their knowledge and straining every neuron to pass tips down to the newbies.
But even in a gallery this lively, there were always a few people willing to look reality in the face.
[Orangutan Scratching Its Head]
I get that the update is insane.
But why is nobody mentioning that it doesn't open for another week?
Until that fancy event actually drops, aren't we still stuck in the same old no-update stretch as always?
And yet everyone is already acting like it launched. Genuinely bizarre.
To people whose eyes had already spun out over the update, that kind of practical talk might as well have been spoken in another language.
Having watched the whole circus, I closed the gallery window and picked up the thread of my thoughts once more.
The New Update (2)
As far as our faction went, anyone with eyes could see we were locked in as Pirates. That much was set in stone.
I mean — the Pirate Empress was my subordinate. What else was I supposed to do about it?
But contrary to that assumption of mine, reality held one critically important distinction…
"You're asking about your faction selection, Commander?"
"Yeah. Our base is basically Pirate territory at this point, so… I figured faction selection might not even be available."
"Hmm… No, that's not the case."