Please Explain, Mr. Veteran
But no matter how hard I racked my brain over it... how should I put this.
It's a little embarrassing to admit, but honestly, from where I stood, the best I could manage was something along the lines of 'the black stuff is letters, and the white stuff is a page.'
First of all, thanks to the Scientist and Researcher traits sitting fat and proud in my status window, I — a perfectly ordinary person — had at least acquired a certain degree of scientific literacy.
And when it came to bioengineering specifically, I'd even wound up with a bizarre cheat out of nowhere that made me something of a genius of the age... but that was beside the point.
The problem, as I just said, was that all of that scientific learning and talent existed strictly within the bounds of 'bioengineering.'
When it came to every other branch of science, I was still working with the knowledge and sensibilities of your average layman. So even though I tried my utmost to comb through the material with an open mind, by this point I could feel my head overheating — dangerously close to bursting outright.
On top of that, there was Elena, who'd been backing me up all this time.
No — let's be honest here. Elena, who had effectively served as my second brain, was in absolutely no position to give me an answer this time around.
It went without saying, really. Elena was, after all, a native of this world, which meant she had no way of seeing the 'status window' at all.
Even our super-ace adjutant, the great Elena Vermut herself, couldn't very well offer advice about something that was literally invisible to her eyes.
Besides — and this bears repeating — right now Elena was off being ground to dust alongside Heisenberg, working to stabilize the star system while I sat here agonizing over grand abstractions.
Even for me, whose conscience-triangle had worn itself down so badly it was morphing into a circle, the thought 'yeah, no, this one's on me' was impossible to suppress.
And so, with problems stacked upon problems in every direction, my mind naturally turned to a single desperate cry: 'Help me, Gallery-Mon!'
Was it because there was no shortage of newbie friends out there acting exactly like this? When I opened the gallery with that thought on my mind, sure enough —
— [You Crazy Whiny Bastards] (105 comments)
— [Dats some cwayzee twalk!] (16 comments)
— [Uwu twuttiwi~] (10 comments)
— [YouMustRespectMeIAmANewbieWhoTookOverAnEntireStarSystemInHalfAYearAndTheLiving...(abridged)...] (87 comments)
— [Being a newbie is sho hawd, plan my tech tree 'FOR' me] (35 comments)
"Very interesting."
It was exactly what I'd expected, mind you — but seeing hordes of newbies melting down precisely on schedule was another thing entirely.
Watching all those users acting like this, a quiet worry began to creep over me: what would happen if the veterans got so fed up with it that they stopped sharing information altogether?
Of course, our veterans — suspiciously newbie-friendly as they were — responded with the usual 'saw that coming,' while simultaneously explaining that this kind of reaction from newbies was only natural...
Look, I did tell the newbies that a rough skim would be enough to get by
but it's the modpack version, so it's stupidly complicated, and the documentation is written for the vanilla version
so yeah, of course you can read it and still not understand a damn thing, right;
— Anon(1): So it wasn't just me! [reaction image]
— Anon(2): fr fr fr; [reaction image]
— Chicken Curry: No, come on. Surely this much is understandable?
Realistically speaking, there were probably plenty of people like me who'd been transmigrated without ever having touched the game even once — so maybe that was why.
Watching reactions like Chicken Curry's get treated as the opinion of a tiny, fringe minority, I could only conclude that the world was a genuinely baffling place.
And I wasn't the only one thinking it. Another user must have felt the same, because they quietly posted the question to the gallery... only for the gallery's resident veterans to render their verdict:
— Earth Gaia Sprout Alliance: WE'RE the weird ones, genius. How many veterans does this game even have besides us?
— Earth Gaia Sprout Alliance: There's actually a decent number of people with skills like ours who've never dropped a single piece of info in the gallery and just spend their days lurking memes and shitposts
— Invincible: Veterans of the same tier don't attack each other right now because it's still too costly. But some of them are already salivating over the perfect openings to beat the living hell out of other users
— Dr. Midori: So grow strong and develop quickly, yeah? Be good little meat shields for us
"Hmm... come to think of it, that's true. I can't believe I hadn't considered this. Hoo."
He was right.
Frankly, it was an obvious fact when you stopped to think about it — if we hadn't been so busy, realizing it only now would have been the strange part.
By any reasonable estimate, something on the order of one hundred to one hundred fifty thousand users had been forcibly transmigrated — and yet the named veterans regularly visible in the gallery numbered, at most, a few dozen.
Even if only one percent of a hundred thousand users were veterans, there should have been at least a thousand of them. So when you asked the perfectly natural question — 'what, exactly, are all the inactive veterans doing right now?' —
then, just as Dr. Midori had said, the conclusion followed with uncomfortable smoothness: from the veterans' perspective, serious consideration aside, all of us newbies were effectively being lumped together as 'teams' of disposable meat shields.
Of course, that grim mood lasted all of about thirty seconds.
Whether our excessive seriousness caught them off guard, the gallery's atmosphere sank dangerously for a moment — and immediately afterward:
— Chicken Curry: is what I WOULD have said~
— Dreadnought: Why is everyone taking this so seriously lmaooo it's barely been three months since we got isekai'd, you people lmaooo
— Dr. Midori: I was just making a joke...
— Invincible: Newbies are babies. Babies must be cherished
Everyone scrambled to defuse the unintended chaos, pleading with the gallery to please take jokes as jokes.
And so, once that accidental tempest settled down, the users' curiosity naturally gravitated back to the eternal question: 'okay, but what the hell are we actually supposed to do about this?'
In response to that burning demand, the veteran who normally handled these info posts asked everyone to hold on just a little longer and —
after a short wait:
Cba to type it all out, so I'm using abbreviations.
DME — The guys firing magitech beams off their battleships and orbital-bombing you with meteors. They're the original founders of Magitech, but their tech base is a total jumble — genuine, certified fusionpunk style.
Firepower, speed, mobility, defense, detection — all dead-center average. They compensate for the mediocrity with specialized ships that dump everything into a single stat, though.
How, you ask? Think a stealth destroyer that goes all-in on concealment for survivability.
Or a heavy cruiser that dumps everything into firepower, giving it a burst output rivaling a battleship.
Main weapons are beams and missiles, but since they're at least average at everything, they don't really discriminate.
Except carriers.
EU — Magitech.
Externally, they look exactly like what you picture when you think "humans from Earth" in an SF story. And unlike everyone else, they have a weird obsession with aircraft carriers + planetary assault landings.
The problem? In this world, carriers are treated as melee-only trash.
Why?
Because their fighters are too shit to achieve faster-than-light travel, that's why.
They're fine for fighting inside planetary orbit or atmosphere, but because of that limitation, orbital defense weaponry one-shotting the giant carrier happens way, WAY too often.
Now, per the lore, the Earth Alliance grinded obsessively against this exact weakness — using magic to teleport their fighters into combat, and piling on absurd layers of armor to produce the strongest carrier in existence, boosted to near-Dreadnought-class toughness.
But when both the lore and the actual gameplay keep producing the opinion "with tech that good, wouldn't it be smarter to just build more battleships instead of obsessing over carriers?" —
you can tell that even by this world's standards, the Earth Alliance's carrier obsession is regarded as monumentally retarded.
Though, to be fair, put the other way: the moment they close to melee range, your precious battleships and cruisers get snapped like twigs, don't they?
Here's another weird thing: for all their obsession with 'magic' — magical girls and magical boys and all that — they prefer RAILGUNS over beams for their ranged weapons. I do not understand it.
It's not like they refuse to use beams entirely either, which makes it all the more bizarre.
ACIC — Exactly as their slogan says: 'super-heavy armor, premium warships, big ships big guns.' Their ship classes fit that to the letter.
End-stage capitalists, so terrified of losing a single hull that they build everything insanely tough.
In exchange, they're pricier than everyone else — but the performance pays for itself.
Problem is, their internal meta is bizarrely a murim (martial sect) meta, so equipment interoperability with other factions is relatively poor.
They also feel pretty far removed from magic, so they only do the bare basics; anti-grand-magic countermeasures are handled by their martial warriors' 'qi' and battle formations. Which also makes them the living avatar of "if you don't keep up maintenance, you're fucked."
And do NOT forget: this is not a xianxia meta, it's a wuxia meta.
No nonsense like Immortal Rulers folding dimensions in half.
But the Heavenly Demon CAN fire a Heavenly Demon Death Beam to sink a warship, or crush black holes with the Ten-Thousand-Pound Hammer. That much is on the table.
BR — Flying temples, basically?
I'm not joking — they casually pull off miracles like dragging a 1km-class ship down into the atmosphere or hauling it back up on the power of faith alone.
At the same time, they'll spam area-of-effect attacks that other factions could only match with genuine super-large strategic weapons, all with infuriatingly effortless style.
The problem is they're too busy performing human sacrifices to do anything else.
And precisely because of that, their other tech development crawls — put them next to the other Heavenly Kings and they look bad.
Well, on the bright side, their upkeep costs are the cheapest of the four. Every cloud.
So what do these guys actually do? Screaming "SHIP-SLAUGHTER!!!" they charge in trusting nothing but their own defense, commit armies of superhumans through the power of faith, and wage glorious wars of attrition like some incredibly generic hammer-and-anvil war world.
They fire magical beams too, so factor that in, yeah.
Bottom line: if you want to use Babel Cult ships, you basically MUST take the Babel Cult priests (superhumans, absurdly expensive) as a mandatory set-menu bundle.
Remember — there's a reason their upkeep is so dirt cheap.
— Anon(1): If she's not a flat-chested girl firing the Heavenly Demon Death Beam while stamping her backstep to the Heavenly Demon Domination Footwork, then how is she even a Heavenly Demon, huh?
— ArmoredDinoTyranno: So to summarize: Demonia are traitless losers, the Earth Alliance are carrier-weebs, ACIC are big-gun stat-cuckers, and Babel Cult has nothing but ship-slaughter?
"So in the end, the damn complexity hasn't changed one bit."
With my head beginning to ache in earnest, I could only wonder, truly: was this really the best there was?