The Reason They Never Told Newbies About Tech Trees
Anyway, things proceeded more or less like that — the ending featured a copious eruption of cursing from a maximally enraged Dr. Midori.
Aside from that trivial incident, however, nothing had happened that could really be called a serious problem.
So I gathered up the sludge that had once been Jacomo's gang and packed them into cryogenic storage tanks, ostensibly to be used for reinforcing Woolongi's body, and resolved to get my full tech-tree plan underway.
Of course, before any of that — as a genuinely green newbie, I couldn't exactly go picking things while having no idea what any of the 'technical terms' meant, one by one.
If you scroll through the tech tree description windows you'll see every word under the sun popping up,
and the problem is the structure is all SF — military SF at that — so unless you were already into that stuff, a LOT of it will be flat-out incomprehensible, y'know;
So don't go flooding the gallery with questions about every single thing you don't get. Just cram what's written here into your skull and be on your way.
Not in any particular order, I'm just writing whatever I remember.
Missile : Yes, the same missiles we all know. If you fire it and it flies toward the enemy as a guided projectile, just consider it a missile — that covers 90% of cases.
Torpedo : I know, it's space, and you might ask what the difference is between a missile and a torpedo. But in this neck of the woods, 'torpedo' encompasses ALL projectile types that aren't missiles.
In other words, if a warhead is spotted containing some unidentified weird-ass something, or if it comes flying at you as a glowing something-or-other like those Strack photon torpedoes over there, it all counts as a torpedo.
Railgun : A thing that dumbly accelerates a massive shell with absurdly powerful electromagnetic force and slams it into you.
It accelerates rounds to anywhere from 1 to 20% of light speed, and the strongest ones hit you at literally the speed of light — if it connects, you are just flat-out fucked.
Earth Coalition uses them mainly, but other factions handle them just fine too.
Ship Type : This is NOT the 'ship class' stuff like battleship, cruiser, destroyer, etc.
It refers to the individual ship designs that nations create within each of those classes.
For example, think of the battleship category containing the ACIC's Achilles-class battleship and Demonia's Baalzebul-class battleship.
Frigate / Corvette : Collectively known as 'frigates'.
Apparently nobody wanted to make the class system needlessly complicated, so they're overall pretty plain.
Frigates run about 100 meters max, corvettes about 50 meters, and the funny part is that the actual difference between them is simply whether they're capable of long-range space travel or not,
so even though their sizes differ by a factor of two, their firepower often barely differs at all — be careful when you're commanding them.
Destroyer : Averages 100 to 150 meters.
The first genuinely space-dedicated warship, and simultaneously the first ship with proper anti-ship weaponry and orbital bombardment capability.
Hate to phrase it this way, but think roughly of the same class as those destroyers that carry around the assault-infantry uncles spreading democracy.
Cruiser : Averages 200 to 300 meters.
The de facto mainstay of space combat.
Battleship-class and above are just too expensive and hard to build,
so my recommendation for pretty much everyone — veteran or newbie alike — is to use cruisers as your core.
The problem is it's not just the users; the factions and nations run the same way,
meaning the sub-types and sub-classes are so absurdly varied that your head will crack wide open trying to keep track of them.
For the record, some big heavy cruisers stretch up to 500 meters, but they're extremely rare, so you won't be seeing many.
Battleship : Average size 1 kilometer.
In games like this, it's what they call the flower of space combat.
But once you actually get into serious space warfare here, you'll honestly feel like it's treated as a pie in the sky,
because even a full star system pooling all its resources can only field about 3 of them in peacetime, so their day-to-day presence gets really faint.
Of course, once a battle starts, their overwhelming firepower, defense, and sheer size make their presence spike hard —
which is another way of saying they also draw an absolute metric fuckton of aggro.
Hurl one into the frontline carelessly and it'll get focus-fired and blown up, and your mentality and your star system's capital can blow up right along with it.
Dreadnought / Battlecruiser : In other SF settings these are treated as an upgrade over the battleship, a separate thing entirely, or an evolution of the cruiser.
Here, they're just plain and simple subspecies of battleships.
To be precise: a dreadnought is a battleship with its defenses reinforced, and a battlecruiser is a battleship with its mobility reinforced.
The tradeoff is that dreadnoughts are painfully slow, and battlecruisers hurt bad if they trade blows head-on with a battleship.
Also, in this game the official term is 'cruiser-battleship', not 'battlecruiser'. Call it battlecruiser and the enraged veterans will drag you into a one-on-one meeting and cave your skull in. So don't.
Super Dreadnought : The TRUE successor class to the battleship.
The Four Great Powers only recently finished developing them and entered mass production, so each nation has exactly one sub-type.
Practically speaking, the strongest ship a user can operate.
Titan : These serve as flagships even among the Four Great Powers.
You'll almost never get your hands on one as a user; they're only obtainable after you devour a faction in single player.
The Performance Hexagon : Split into Attack, Defense, Mobility, Speed, Uniqueness, and Upkeep Cost.
Based on those stats, you can make a 'rough' judgment of how a given ship will actually fare.
Of course it's only ever rough, so judge the fine details yourself.
More updates planned. Peace out~
"Yeah. Complicated as hell."
After being freshly reminded that this was precisely one of the reasons the SF genre never managed to succeed back on Earth, I crammed as much of the information into my head as it would hold, and resolved to spend some serious time figuring out just where I ought to pick from.
But the moment I pulled up the status window with that thought in mind, sure enough, just as the veterans had said, every manner of information came floating up before me — and so...