A Sneak Peek at the Tech Tree (2)
And setting aside those absurdly unfair curses and debuffs, once I'd heard the rest of the talk about magic, I came to a realization: the main purpose of the entire magic tech tree was none other than weakening enemies in every conceivable way instead of delivering pure firepower — or, alternatively, providing a set of support-type auxiliary abilities.
And as if to confirm that my realization was correct, our resident gallery brain (probably) — one Dr. Midori — had this to say.
So, magic cannons and whatnot — you get ranged attacks, and apparently you can pull off orbital bombardment or fleet battles with something like Meteor without any special prep work.
On top of that, it spams all kinds of insane debuffs in real time, and you can even hypnotically recondition enemies into allies.
And sure, they say if you hit the ceiling you can contract with an Outer God and puppet an entire star system with one hand.
The problem is that the road to that ceiling is one hell of a long and brutal one.
Look, honestly, at first I couldn't be bothered to say anything, but then this topic came up and I watched players lose their damn minds, all scrambling to become Prisma☆Magical boys and girls, and I freaked out and wrote this.
Most importantly: the spells colloquially called "magic cannons" — Dragon Breath and the various beam-type spells — are, let's be blunt here, just ordinary magic with the firepower and range cranked up to hell and back.
But that stuff? No debuffs.
What IS there is either mind-bogglingly expensive or burns through way too many materials;;
On top of that, those long-range magical beams are astronomically more expensive than a plain old railgun or beam weapon with the same power and range.
And here's the biggest thing: the magic tree is pointlessly bloated with all sorts of niche branches, so if you pick your path wrong or invest in something weird, you end up with a dead build on a dead tech tree. Guaranteed.
In short: growing it is brutal enough as is, and if you choose wrong, you are thoroughly, irreversibly screwed. That's the structure.
Plus, the money and resource drain during growth is astronomical, so sunk costs make it hard to just walk away cleanly.
So PLEASE, do not start with the magic tree. Pick ONE main tech tree, invest in it appropriately, and then use magic as support with just a handful of skills.
Unless the RNG gods bless you with an SSR/SR shower, you will get stomped. For real.
That was how they kept hammering in the warning, post after post, declaring in no uncertain terms that this was dangerous and please, for the love of god, don't do it.
And at the same time — was it their way of keeping newbies like me from fixating on that needlessly convoluted and punishing "magic tech"?
Before long, I could see our resident veteran friends scrambling to throw up posts about other tech trees, clearly desperate to defuse the situation.
Of course, these were rushed efforts, and as the veterans had long insisted with their own mouths, dumping "too much information" at once — as the whole magic-tech meltdown had just demonstrated — risked planting strange little brain-worms in newbie heads and causing another disaster. So for the most part, none of it strayed beyond the level of Dr. Midori's post from moments ago...
To summarize up front: the science tech tree is, for all practical purposes, the exact opposite of magic.
What do I mean? First of all, science is the undisputed best when it comes to pure weapons technology.
Look, in straight-up combat, science is the one-trick pony — this is space, after all, and if your engagement range is short, you just get mercilessly pummeled, right?
So range and firepower are locked down solid here, no question.
And melee isn't entirely off the table either — you've got your ultrasonic blades and beam swords, plus every gun imaginable, beam cannons, railguns, the works.
The problem: these types are utterly helpless against the flanking approaches of everyone who isn't science.
For example, when the magic crowd attacks, they'll hide behind stealth spells and start slinging curses, right?
Then pure science has to either dig up the blurry heat-smear of the cloaked zone with infrared or scanner arrays and land a preemptive strike — or just grit its teeth and eat the hit.
And if wuxia or faith superhumans come hopping onto the interior of your ship, pure science is in for an extremely rough fight.
Ah, sure, you can wriggle out of it somehow by deploying some giant superweapon or applying biotech like our resident ScienceWhiz over there, but in most cases the attrition rate becomes just as catastrophic as with magic, and it inevitably drifts toward the hybrid structure people call "magitech" — science fused with magic.
Optimal setup: fifty-fifty science and magic, plus one spoonful of faith. 👌
Let's be honest here: what a newbie should actually be touching isn't pure magic tech.
The magitech meta — developing science-centered with magic tech as backup — is the best route, period.
Why? Because the three paths I'm about to mention are, without exception, entirely dependent on lucky encounters.
Psychic powers are at least somewhat connected to the science tree — they pop up relatively often as a byproduct of body-enhancement research fiddling with brains and physiques, so they're comparatively tolerable.
The problem is that faith and wuxia are, quite literally, "lucky encounter" trees.
What do I mean?
Faith is a randomized tech tree that unlocks if you latch onto the Earth Alliance or the Babel Cult and hustle away at anything Outer God-related.
The performance itself is genuinely busted — a real "believe hard enough and anything is possible" vibe — but
the problem is that, fittingly for such busted performance, the appearance rate is abyssal.
The Earth Alliance crowd are shadowy puppetmasters by nature, so if they sniff one coming, they'll throw weird quests at you specifically to block it.
The Babel Cult goes, "If it manifests, wonderful! ^^" — but the moment you belong to anyone other than them afterward, you're not merely a heretic, you're an apostate, and they will chase you to the ends of the universe, beat you down, and forcibly re-convert you.
And last but not least, "wuxia" is a somewhat different story.
Strictly speaking, it should be called mugong — martial arts — not "wuxia," but that mistranslation stuck early on and everyone just accepted it, so let it slide.
Anyway, what's wrong with THIS one, you ask?
Wuxia feels uniquely disconnected from every other tech tree, and outside ACIC territory there's simply no way to obtain it at all.
And true to form for the ultimate hyper-capitalist one-trick nation, everything costs credits — every single thing, it's "sell, sell, sell, sellyoursoul," full gacha-hustler behavior.
On top of that — is what you bought even intact? Nope.
There's a loot-box gimmick baked in, so completely independent of your own development, it just hands you whatever the hell it wants.
In grade terms: while we're running around decked out in SRs and SSRs,
you can roll the ACIC wuxia gacha and have the glorious experience of pulling an N or an R — a UR at absolute best.
And it's not just about grades, either.
Say you've prepped a melee specialist specifically to use wuxia.
Problem: that melee specialist is fantastic at punching people — and the mugong you pull might be a sword art, a spear technique, or something meant for an archer.
So what's the verdict?
Just like Dr. Midori said — stop obsessing over weird nonsense and go with the magitech meta. That's my recommendation.
And frankly, the science meta is so broad that drilling into a specific branch over there is far better anyway. 👌
The problem was that staying beneath that level of detail didn't mean the sheer clown-show absurdity failed to come through, either.
Having read through all these posts, I was left feeling, how should I put it...
"What kind of dumpster fire even IS this."
And at last, I understood exactly why the veterans had been so achingly cautious about feeding information to newbies.