The Veterans' Heart-Stopping Rollercoaster Rhetoric
As you might expect, watching something so absurd get selected from a single misclick left me quite literally unable to contain my shock.
Flailing in a full-blown panic, I kept pulling Ggomuli out of the mini-aquarium, only to feel the poor thing squirming like a jelly slime, trembling from head to toe with no idea what to do either.
The one silver lining was that after spiraling into panic like that and wondering, 'Wait, can't I just keep freeloading off the warm teat of Demonia?' I opened the gallery back up, and‧‧‧‧‧‧
<Ah, don't worry, newbies>
Posted by: Earth Gaia Sprout Alliance
Normally a confirmation window pops up before you pick anything, going 'You SURE? For real?' so nobody fat-fingers it by accident,
but among the people who pick and then immediately regret it, some go 'Wait, does this mean I can't receive Demonia support anymore?'
or worry that the adjutant and all the Demonia troops currently taking care of you will bail and leave you flat broke.
I don't know how it is now, but going strictly by the original game's rules:
unless you stand up in person and formally declare rebellion against Demonia, they'll accept you as 'one of ours' no matter what, so there's nothing to worry about.
So if you're a pirate? Then you're basically a Demonia-affiliated privateer fleet.
If you go the minor-nation meta, think of it as a headquarters employee dispatched to an outsourcing firm.
For a space monster, you'd technically be a beast-tamer of sorts.
I feel a little gross name-dropping, but did OverinvestedBeauty get ANY flak from the Demonia home office the entire time they ran the Black Scourge? If anything they got MORE support, with people going 'yo, that's actually insane.'
Yeah, it's a bit weird, but to summarize: no matter what you do with your national tech tree or research tech tree,
the home office just sees it as 'a front-line officer out in the field twisting themselves inside out trying hard,' so they honestly don't care much.
Plus, your adjutant and troops keep swearing loyalty to you unless they were freshly dispatched (ex: been there less than a week), so no problem there either.
BUT. If you accidentally — or on purpose — attack and damage or sink a fleet belonging to the home office itself rather than your own command?
Then instantly, any Demonia soldiers and fleets under your command for less than a week abandon you and return home,
the home office cuts ALL your support and reclassifies you as a 'rogue individual,' and your life gets very, very bad.
And most importantly, like I said: if you openly declare hostility toward Demonia?
If you just randomly declare war out of nowhere, Demonia goes 'what is this idiot on? Mind-control brainwashing?' and sends inspectors to investigate and verify the facts first before dealing with it.
But if, without your knowledge, the other players around you jointly fire off a declaration of war too, then the home office treats you all as traitors and rebels and may send a fleet to steamroll you.
Once you've blocked that, it's everyone for themselves from then on. Yeah.
[Comments]
"King. Emperor. God. And you. Five syllables, five cheers."
Thankfully, it turned out our glorious Demonia, the One and Only Empire wasn't the type to abandon a poor, pitiful consul just because her national tech tree was a little off.
A system-induced misclick had spiraled into a problem with no take-backs, but I could feel for myself that this was, on balance, not an outright disaster.
Of course, that didn't mean the current situation was good, either.
Just like one of the other veterans had said before, riding a national tech tree other than Demonia's meant that support no longer arrived as Demonia fleets and troops in the flesh, the way it always had until now.
Posted by: Dr. Midori
To be precise: even if you keep responding warmly to Demonia and broadcasting loud and clear that you have zero intention of turning hostile,
from now on, when you complete a quest or some objective and claim your reward, it won't come from Demonia's direct troops — it'll come from wherever you picked.
Especially if you chose a neutral faction, you're leaning hard on pure RNG, so good luck with that. Yeah.
[Comments]
"Oh, for the love of—"
Watching Dr. Midori's post mercilessly slam the door on the happy circuits the newbies were being handed back, and rudely wake them up to cold, hard reality,
I could feel tears blurring my vision as I thought, so this is it, I'm done for, aren't I.
Of course, our dependable veterans — as if they'd prepared for exactly this situation — pulled out yet another option, insisting there was still a way out‧‧‧‧‧‧
<Somehow or other, people who picked a neutral faction aren't entirely out of ways to get Demonia support>
Posted by: Invincible
It's a colossal pain in the ass, but there are about three methods.
One is the pirate meta that's come up before — becoming a 'Demonia-affiliated privateer fleet.'
This is the grind approach: staying a pirate while repeatedly clearing friendly events with Demonia, so it takes a while.
And when support does come through this route, it runs like a brokered trade — Demonia sells the fleet and troops to the pirates, and the pirates resell them to you — so it doesn't arrive instantly.
The silver lining is that Demonia genuinely beats the crap out of freebooters, so even the pirates don't slack off? Figure the margins.
Of the remaining two, one is cracking open a sub-national tech tree fast as hell, setting THAT one to Demonia,
then swapping the sub and main so your main national tree becomes Demonia.
Back in the game days, users switched nations all the damn time, so this is only natural, right?
Problem is, standing up a sub requires a certain level of development, so unless you're willing to sink in a ton of time or grind your way to hyper-accelerated growth like an absolute madman, there's no way around it.
And the last one is, frankly, less a clever trick than the kind of thing only a monstrosity would think of;;;
You conquer Demonia. Or become one of its executives.
To be precise: because Demonia runs like a proper villain organization, once you get strong enough, they'll headhunt users who aren't their own — like some corporation scouting executives.
So if you're sitting on plenty of resources and capital when they come knocking, you pay up to the Demonia Empire that came to recruit you, right?
Then you're instantly promoted to top executive, and instead of the old support system, you get to use Demonia's troops through 'requisition.' Yeah.
That's all from me. Later.
[Comments]
"So in the end, what you're telling me is that it's impossible."
The problem was that none of those methods were anything you could resolve in a day or two — one look told you that much.
And so, wailing that a single misclick had birthed this whole disaster of terrible odds, I collapsed on the spot, clutching the back of my neck.