Screenshot The Dynamic Duo Play AI War: Fleet Command!

[#!/dev/haru]

Starring Harudoku as Sam Raimi and Integrity as Bruce Campbell

Welcome to Haru and Integrity Play AI War: Fleet Command!


AI War: Fleet Command is a wonderful game brought to you by Arcen Games, a wonderful (and tiny) studio that's spent the better part of the last five years, producing no less than SIX content expansions and many patches to fix bugs, improve and streamline the general play, and generally make the user experience as friendly as possible while ensuring the game has some wonderful tactical depth.

The flagship (heh) game in question is sort of a hybrid of a space RTS and a 4x game, aptly described by one reviewer as "Sins of a Solar Empire meets Supreme Commander meets simply nothing else". One of the many twists the game offers is that the players, representing the remaining human factions after a pair of rogue AI cores nearly destroyed the entire human race, cannot ever fight each other; the entire game is focused on the delicate balance of humankind desperately attempting to re-grab the reins of power from its AI overlords without being noticed. The AI represents effectively infinite resources, you see, but in its human-programmed arrogance, doesn't believe you enough of a threat to take it down... so instead of massing up an army bigger than the AI can fight off, your goal is to remain unknown and unnoticed until you're ready to alpha strike the AI homeworlds and deliver a crushing blow before they can destroy you.

Integrity and I will be switching off styles, in some posts representing a cool, analytical technical readout of the situation and in others representing the continuing flavor and story, the human struggles in the world dominated by AI. We'll do our best to make it obvious which is which; the descriptive poster of the update will focus on keeping the readers up to speed with what's actually happening, and the other will focus on being entertaining.

Now, we get to the interactive bit. Here, we have a map of the available starting planets:

Each player must choose a starting planet, and we need YOUR help! Each planet comes equipped with the same furnishings... but they also all come with bonus ships. Please vote for which ships, among the following, you'd like to see us use!

[spoiler=Voting is closed, but for posterity's sake]
Teleporting Leech
Teleporting Leeches use a special mechanic known as 'reclamation'; in short, any ship they damage (for over 50% of its health) will be converted into an allied ship on death. Consequently, more powerful ships and bigger starships are immune to these units' damage types, but on the plus side, they can teleport instantaneously and are also shaped like teeth, which I think is a point in their favor.


Spire Tractor Platform
Using an array of powerful tractor beams, these ships are what we know now as the scourge of anyone using Spire Stealth Battleships (which, for some inexplicable reason, are not immune to tractor beams). You can do some tricky things with them, like pulling entire sections of the enemy army away from objectives to protect, but mostly you'll just mass them up for chaff for your more important ships.


Zenith Viral Shredders
What do you get when you cross a chainsaw with self-replicating nanomachines? Well, in this case, you get these wonderful things. While they're unable to attack many ship types (remember where I said 'chainsaw'? Yeah, I meant that they're literally melee ships, attacking by crashing into the enemy), they actually self-replicate, creating duplicates of themselves like a weird cross between the Zerg Swarm and the 'grey goo' that so many sci-fi novels are obsessed with. I'd like to repeat that first part, though: They're literally a cross between a chainsaw and self-replicating nanomachines. Seriously. Come on, guys.


<Sweet Guitar Riff> Autocannon Minipod
These ships are, put bluntly, pretty much chaff, but they have a really cool name and weapon type and you can make a load of them for very, very cheap.


Lightning Torpedo Cheater
Someone, at some point asked the question "Hey, what if AI fleet ship swarms were just useless? Why don't we introduce a new ship type to completely invalidate them, and find out?" Then, they forgot to remove it for the public release, and the fans fell in love so that they could not remove it. These things are monstrous and amazing, but also holy shit they completely invalidate fleet ships. They shoot miniature lightning torpedoes that don't lose damage even though they hit an area, making them perfect for blowing up huge swarms of, for instance, neinzul. Please note the previously-mentioned AI types.


Spire Railcluster
Much like the Lightning Torpedo Cheater Frigate, these are good against small ships, but unlike those, they don't completely invalidate most, if not all of them, and require some tactical use. They're basically large starships that mount many powerful (but very low-range) railguns and in practice they're quite fun to use.


Protector Starship
You know how in MMOs, there's a dedicated class for tanking when you go on big raids? Enter the Paladin of the game, the Protector Starship. They mount special modules that, instead of, for instance, taking hits for other ships, just go ahead and shoot down all attacks of certain weapon types before they can reach your fleet. They require some good tactical thinking, so consequently, they usually end up doing nothing.


Spire Maw
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you could make a space ship that eats other space ships? No? Wow, I must be weird. Well, still, that's what this is: Simply, it eats other ships, chews them up, and swallows them so it can eat more. I don't know if you knew this, but Fighter MK Is are actually a delicious part of this complete breakfast.


Saboteur
Unlike the Age of Empires II units of the same name, these ships make OTHER units suicidal. Using the same system as the reclamation system, a ship hit with this gets a fatal case of the space gonorrhoea, and explodes violently and disgustingly on death, damaging other nearby ships.
<picture redacted>

Electric Shuttle
Using weak, but wide-areaed weapons, these shuttles do much like the Lightning Torpedo Frigates do, but unlike those, actually require you to put in the effort of flying closer to the enemy and putting yourself in harm's reach to manage it. Unfortunately, they can't get a full attack boost from things like friendly flagships, but they're still relatively potent. Unfortunately, this makes them rather boring.


Gravity "Parrhesia's Favorite" Drain
The ultimate in amazing gravity-altering technology, these powerful and deadly ships annihilate swathes of units singlehandedly. Also, the units they annihilate are mostly their own allies by the sheer unadulterated force of their own uselessness. By spending metal on these, you are actually dragging not only your whole army down, but also the power and, hell, dignity of your entire team. As a great man once said, "why the fuck am I stupid and useless for making these?"


Anti-Armor
What the fuck do you think they do?


Zenith Paralyzer
Much as the name implies, these units PARALYZE (see what they did there?) enemy units, rendering them unable to move or fire. Much like most utility units in this game, their roles in combat mostly come down to annoying a few people before keeling over from superior firepower and dying. This will become a theme, don't worry.


Translocator Starship
Someone looked at a group of AI fighters and said, "Hey, those are getting awfully close. Can you build a gun that does no damage, but makes sure that they're as far away from me as possible? They're really making the view from my penthouse apartment kind of trashy." And, with the power of bureaucracy, it was done: The Translocator Starship was born, and the galaxy was never the same as they kept pushing enemy ships out of the convenient range of all the other weapons, thus annoying everyone forever. But hey, the view is gorgeous now.


Neinzul Combat Carrier
NOW we're talking. This ship is a ship that produces more ships (which also happen to be living alien hivemind creatures, I guess?) to overwhelm and annihilate enemy units. A few of these (and the ship cap is low, so you'll only ever HAVE a few of these) and you can flood a planet in short-lived suicidal death machines hellbent on destroying everything in the short existential terror of their lives. Fuck yeah.


Infiltrator
Space Planes are wonderful, fast, swarming units (of which you can build many), capable of cloaking themselves, kiting enemy units, slipping past defenses, wreaking havoc, and generally just existing in huge enough swarms to pretty much annihilate anything short of a fortress or a golem, and even these can't handle their radar dampening range, which effectively says "You can't shoot me unless you can outspeed me". Of course, they also move too fast to be caught. Now, this would be nice, but we didn't roll Space Planes, and Infiltrators are basically the beta, shit versions of them.

Advertisement:

BECOME A HARUTOPIAN PILOT! (or someone else in this universe)

The Empress Needs You!

If you think you have the skill, the luck, the RAW FORCE OF WILL necessary to pilot one of our powerful ships (or be a researcher on one of the science labs we bring to our other planets, or just a normal peasant, or whatever else), leave a name and a preferred role IN THIS THREAD (with however much descriptive fluff as you'd like to type up) and we'll include YOU in our Let's Play!

Join the Integristani Fleet today!
Handy with a welder? Got good reflexes? Bring glory to yourself, your house, your Sultan, and your God! Enlist today!
Not so handy with a welder? Hand-eye coordination more like hand-die coordination? Our cutting-edge science vessels are guaranteed to require no more than a grade school education, with openings for those with more talent! No army marches without support back home: be that support today!

Edited February 4, 2015 by Utsuho Reiuji

[Specta]

SPIRE MAW

CONSUME YOUR ENEMIES

EDIT: ALSO

NEINZUL COMBAT CARRIER

I forgot my second vote sorry

Edited February 1, 2015 by Specta

[Dandragon]

Neinzul Combat Carrier

overwhelm the enemy

Zenith Viral Shredders because

[#!/dev/haru]

A vote from an outside source has been added:

Spire Maw

Viral Shredder

[#!/dev/haru]

A vote from an outside source has been added:

Combat Carrier

Viral Shredder

[Freohr Datia]

Rukodiora ship pls

Queen bee machine pls

(Gravity Drain and Neinzul Combat Carrier)

I also love me a good view but I decided to go with those instead :c

[#!/dev/haru]

A vote from an outside source has been added:

Autocannon Minipods

Autocannon Minipods

[#!/dev/haru]

A vote from an outside source has been added:

The shuttle is cute, you should use it (Lightning Shuttle)

The chainsaw ship, clearly (Viral Shredder)

[Kinumi]

SPIRE MAW AND LIGHTNING TORPEDO FRIGATE

[Hatari]

Because it's Haru-chan~

Infiltrator

ChainSaw Ship

[#!/dev/haru]

A vote from an outside source has been added:

Neinzul Combat Carrier

Spire Maw

[Ether]

Uhh... RAILGUNS(Spire Railcluster) and uhh... I seem to be unpopular opinions guy but mind(inner computing system?) control seems fun, Teleporting Leech.

Edited February 1, 2015 by Ether

[#!/dev/haru]

A vote from an outside source has been added:

Teleporting Leech

Neinzul Combat Carrier

[Parrhesia]

Spire Gravity Drain, Saboteur.

Edited February 2, 2015 by Parrhesia

[#!/dev/haru]

A vote from an outside source has been added:

Viral Shredder

Viral Shredder

[roymbrog]

Spire Maw and friggin chainsaws, please

Need to grind the enemies up so they can digest properly

[#!/dev/haru]

A vote from an outside source has been added:

Spire Maw

Neinzul Combat Carrier

[Inactive Account]

The grey goo one and the one Parrhesia seems to have had adventures with.

(Hey look, I love Utsuho and Integrity enough to actually post on the forums.)

[#!/dev/haru]

We love you too, kdanger

[Phoenix]

Spire Railcluster
Zenith Paralyzer

Reasons ...

[#!/dev/haru]

(Commence post one, the first half of my half of the first update (say that three times fast. The trick is, it's really easy)! I'll post the second half concurrently with Integrity, in the morning. Those of you who aren't too into the game may want to wait for Integrity's explanatory post before delving into this!)

[spoiler=Audio log, year 5 Post Tenebras, Date 93. Commander Jordan Jesus of the Light Starship H.S.S. Pyrrhic Victory.]Five whole years since the AI, well... annihilated everything. We, the remnants of the great Harutopian Empire, got stranded on this terrible, isolated outpost, Planet Yoloswag.

WE were the ones who created the Golemnite AI Core, intended to wipe out those dastardly Integristani. WE heralded the doom of our entire race. And what are we doing now that we're in a position to start recovering?

Mass-producing ANOTHER AI-controlled army, of course!
Order came down from the Empress herself. Now we have these creepy, grey-goo buzzsaws floating around instead of a human fleet to command. How does my TOP TIER Light Starship, the well-earned pinnacle of my work as an XO, use its considerable battle capability to support mindless, unthinking nanoswarms?! Why are we combating the AI... WITH MORE AI?! Command is insane.

Report has it, our scout starships have managed to scout out a few of the AI-controlled worlds... and they even think they've spotted some remnant Integristani, in a nearby star system.

I was CERTAIN my order would be to crush them. I mean, AI or not, one can't deny these Shredders are pretty good at wiping out human chaff... We'd have clear route to start building up for real. But NO. Pinnacle flagship of the whole fleet, and what do I get to do? Sit at home and protect the command station. Bah.

[spoiler=Audio log, Year 5 Post Tenebras, Date 94. Commander Jordan Jesus of the Light Starship H.S.S. Pyrrhic Victory.] Command has moved most of the stronger Viral Shredders out, alone, leaving me with nothing but a pile of junky bolt-cutters to protect the homeworld. First they ignore my counsel on the dangers of using AI, then we don't move out on our SWORN ENEMY... and now I can't even rally anyone to defend the homeworld! The AI has finally noticed us, something about a million buzzsaws flying through their territory? Luckily, the chaff they left seems to have been enough...

...though there was a slightly close call when another starship-- wait...

...That was MY starship! That was the same class and design, and it had the same-- COMMAND TOLD ME I WAS IN CONTROL OF THE PINNACLE OF HUMAN ACHIEVEVMENT!

That's it! We're going to take that planet The Empress Exalted was talking about in the previous briefing, something about an 'important fabricator'? I've had enough of defending from this worthless chaff! XO, set a course for planet...
*sounds of a map screen turning on*

.... ....Amanda Hugginkiss.... Through Traverse Town and... Your Mom?! Has somebody been messing with the map screen?!

...Whatever. Onward, you damn freaks! Set the buzzsaws to come with us.

Fuck Command's orders. I know what I'm doing! I'll save humanity myself.

Edited February 5, 2015 by Utsuho Reiuji

[Excellen Browning]

What difficulty are you guys playing on, anyway?

[#!/dev/haru]

Difficulty is 7/7, AI 1 is Golemite, AI 2 is Neinzul/Neinzul. Golems-Hard is confirmed on, but you'll have to wait for future updates to find out more.

[Integrity]

SPEAKING OF

[spoiler=LETTUCE DANCE]ALRIGHT GUYS here I am with the first explanatory update. There are A LOT of game mechanics in AI War, so I'm going to leave most things unexplained and go on a thing-by-thing basis. If you see something in the interface that I don't explain, feel free to ask about it and Haru or I will explain off the update list, otherwise I should manage to get to everything in time. Lets go!

Let's start with a view of a world. There's a lot to take in here, so I'll point to the really important stuff:

Top bar, left to right: current planet & game time, metal stored & income, knowledge stored & income. The other stuff is relevant later, but that's relevant now.

Bottom-left: the production window.

Right bar: a list of everything on the planet.

Metal is money, everything else is pretty self-explanatory.

Except knowledge. This is what knowledge is for. Basically, every world you conquer has a certain amount of knowledge you can extract with your masculine and heterosexual science labs. You spend that knowledge researching things like, from left to right, better ships, better starships, better economy, better support structures, and turrets. We'll go over those bit-by-bit.

Behold the unit production screen. This is just for starships, not fleet ships; starships are bigger and more swole versions of regular ships that cost more and have a much lower fleet cap. Speaking of, you can only have a certain number of each ship; Fighters (the basic type) are capped to 96, while Heavy Bomber Starships are capped to 2 at a time. There are also 4 Marks for each ship, each progressively more swole and each with its own ship cap. Research Fighter Mk.II, get 96 more of them! It's a good deal. For now we can produce Mk.I of all the basic units, plus Neinzul Combat Carriers.

The first half of the game (and a bit of the second, hell.) is all about scouting. Basically, at the start of the game you have no idea where you are or what the fuck's going on in the galaxy around you. All you know is there are these wormholes, and those wormholes lead places. Scout ships (and starships!) gather scouting intel, which lets you see what kinds of enemies are on the world as well as how many of each kind. On top of that, Haru and I turned on a special option that makes it so we don't even know what the galaxy looks like without scouting first, or even what the planets are named. Surprises will abound.

Pictured: a planet that isn't mine. We'll actually be knocking the AI off of this one pretty soon.

These little mad ripped devils are our first new unit spotlight and the source of all of your scouting woes.

NUS: Tachyon Sentinel

Scouts are invisible, yeah? That's awesome, they can ghost places and check stuff out for you and I bet real scouts wish they were invisible. Unfortunately, stationed right at the wormholes on most AI worlds are tachyon-beam-emitting Tachyon Sentinels, which decloak ships that pass by. Then your scouts, with their shit-ass durability, get eaten by the other ships, and your scouting raids peter out.

Our galaxy after a few waves of scouts. A whole lot of the game goes into planning what worlds to go take next for reasons well explore soon. Haru lives up in Yoloswag, while I made my home down in what turned out to be the Shire. I think I won that deal.

And the AI's already attacking me.

NUS: Tackle Drone Launcher

Tackle Drone Launchers suck, kind of. Their shtick is they fire these little dudes every so often who fly away and tractor beam enemy ships they fly near and carry them a long way before expiring. They're incredibly annoying and hard to beat if your fleet consists of ships they counter, and 100% worthless if you have static defenses or ships they cant tractor.

Sort of amusingly, I have a force field over my command station and no defenses, so he just gets to shoot me for a while.

Eventually the Neinzul Combat Carriers that got voted in finish construction and do their thing. Haru already did a spotlight on them but get ready to see a lot of them in the future.

So here's how metal works.

Every planet has a certain number of asteroids surrounding it. If you own the planet, you can build extractors on them to give you a certain amount of metal per second, forever. Every command station you build gives you an amount of metal based on what type it is. Every enemy ship that dies on a world you own orbits that world and provides scrap. It decays at a fixed rate and you get a cut of that depending on what command station you have built; the most efficient is the Home Command Station at 40%.

There's other ways to get metal but theyre not likely to come up. Well go over it if they do.

Time to start the assault on Nomad's 11. I've built a massive !!2!! types of ship for this attack

NUS: Neinzul Enclave Starship

Basically, replace the Combat Carrier's drones with slightly less fighty drones and you have this, the thing the Combat Carrier was based off of. I can have both, so why not swarm them in Neinzul?!

Oh, hey, the AI is using one of our reject ships.

Neinzul attacks tend to go like this. Pounding through this force field will take a while, but we need to get at the guard post beneath. Guard posts come in a lot of varieties and are generally the major priority when attacking a world.

Neinzul attacks are also really bad for your kill:death ratio.

At this point the AI has a confusing mix of our reject ships. Weird.

Strategic time! Remember how I said stuff about command stations earlier? The AI has them, too, and in different varieties. This is the vanilla kind, which basically just says we own this world and you don't and doesn't do anything else. Killing it raises the AI progress by 15, plus 5 for the associated warp gate. Lets talk about those two things!

AI progress is a measure of how much the AI hates you. At the beginning, the AI doesn't even think you're a threat. Taking a world from them will make them take you more seriously, which in turn ramps up their offense against you, which you don't want. There are many other ways to ramp up the AI progress and ways to knock it back down once you've brought it up, but it's a balancing act either way. Every planet you take ramps up the AI progress, but also gives you more knowledge and more metal from owning it, plus there could be other goodies...

Warp gates are how the AI fights you. Basically, the AI has a trillion million ships stationed somewhere and it warps them from there to come fight you. Warp gates are the source of this: no warp gate, no reinforcements. Remember how I said guard posts are priority targets? Until the warp gate is destroyed, every time the AI reinforces a world every guard post on that world also gets a reinforcement wave, which it will usually use to come fight you. No guard posts, fewer reinforcements.

Meanwhile, here's a thing the AI can do. See the [Reprisal] in the top-right? The AI has its own version of scrap: as you lose ships on AI worlds, the AI salvages the remains and puts them into a savings account. Once the AI deems it appropriate, it spends that account on a reprisal wave at one of your worlds. These can get fucked-up nasty if you lose a big attacking fleet, and they naturally come after you lose the ships you would use to defend against it.

This one, naturally, is pathetic and completely ignorable.

NUS: Attractor Drone

I have literally never seen one of these before.

NUS: Heavy Bomber Starship

My units in that screenshot. They move fast, hit hard, and have decent durability. I'm fond of them overall, and will be relying on them more than usual this game.

Here's one of the aforementioned goodies you get for taking some worlds. The AIs homeworlds (the ultimate goal) are protected by shields. You have to take one planet each with a B, C, D, and E shield generator and destroy that, in addition to taking all but one of the planets with A-Prime shield generators and destroying them, before you can even damage the AI homeworlds. Not a big haul, but you have to plan to have one in your conquest path.

Settling down is done with a command station. There are three major kinds of command stations:

Military command stations are equipped with railguns that push shit away like the Translocator Starship. They have high durability and increase the damage of friendly ships on their world, but they produce ass for metal and suck at salvaging scrap.

Logistic command stations produce a decent amount of metal and have the highest scrap efficiency, plus they increase the speed of all friendly ships on the world. They're fragile, though, and you would generally want to put them in frontier worlds to use the salvage efficiency, where having a Military command would be better. These guys are often pretty overlooked.

Economic command stations produce a fuckload of metal and have decent salvage efficiency and as a bonus produce a good pile of energy. Energy is pretty limited, so this can be a really good thing when added to the free extra money you get just from having them. They're really fragile, though, and have absolutely no active or passive defenses unlike the other two.

You start with Mk.I (of 3) of each kind of command station. If you research Mk.IIs or greater, every one you research will put a pod on your homeworld that has the same effect as that command station. It can be really nice to research Economic Mk.II and get that sweet extra money on your homeworld, or get translocating railgun defenses on your homeworld with Mil Mk.II.

Next to the command station are two structures that pretty much every world needs to have: an energy collector and a force field generator. Energy collectors are limited to one per world and produce a flat amount of energy for free; there's no reason not to have one on every world you own. Force field generators have a galactic cap, but provide a buffer of extra hit points to your (probably fragile) command station so it doesn't get suddenly nailed by an AI raid.

This is how you deal with Tachyon Sentinels. Some ships (Heavy Bomber Starships, Human Raid Starships, Space Planes, etc) are really good at raiding, usually because of high DPS and passive defenses like speed or cloaking. Send those puppies through a wormhole, target tachyon posts, blow them up, and get back to safety. You usually can't make a perfectly safe channel, but if your scouts get through one more world without getting shot at, they'll probably make it to one more new world without dying, eh?

SPEAKING OF RAID STARSHIPS

NUS: AI Raid Starship

Not only are these things fast, their shots ignore forcefields. Ours do too, for the record. They don't have too much punch, but they can pop up on a world and run really fast and go kill your fragile command station without much warning.

Or they can get zerged by Neinzul drones and die.

One advantage to the Neinzul strategy is you can jump your carriers through a wormhole, offload their (free, unlimited) drones and pop right back to your own world, leaving the drones to kill a few enemy ships. Repeat. Also,

NUS: Zenith Starship

I'll leave it to Haru to do a writeup on the races in the game, but there's four major ones: Spire, Neinzul, Zenith, and us. Zenith Starships are characterized by being fucking walls of HP that do not die.

Well end this with turret talk. Static defenses in AI War are REALLY GOOD and basically mandatory in a lot of situations. Additionally, the turret cap for most turrets is per planet. That first guy, Needler Turret? I can have 48 of him here and 48 more on my homeworld. Haru can also then put 48 of him here and 48 more on my homeworld. Downside is they're, well, static, and they cost a fair bit of energy to maintain.

[spoiler=from left to right if you care]Needler: modest range, good against heavy enemies.

Laser: short range, good against exotic materials like bombers and slightly less good against heavy enemies.

MLRS: modest range, good against light enemies.

Missile: good range, good against light enemies.

Flak: short range, good against light enemies.

Lightning: short range, good against swarms.

Heavy Beam (locked): good against everything forever but cap is galactic, not per-planet.

Sniper: what the fuck do you think

Spider: like a sniper turret but does less damage in exchange for doing engine damage.

Counter-Sniper: I don't actually know if/how these work.

Tractor Beam: incredibly good in the right situation; grab and hold lots of enemy ships; cap is galactic.

Tachyon Emitter: does what tachyon beams do: decloaks.

Last One: I don't remember what this is.

Infodump over. There's a lot more depth to go through, but well do that later.

Let's see if ip.board autoresizes the images.

EDIT: fuken lmao the paste ate all my apostrophes, editing

EDIT2: lmao i think i put all my apostrophes back in

Edited February 2, 2015 by Integrity

[#!/dev/haru]

Official Harutopian Empire Communications Record 93271
Mission Commandant: Lieutenant Colonel Roy "Gekkota" Brogden
Communications Officer: Chief Operator Rae Spectronymous Bosch
Involved Party: Mk I Light Flagship Commander Jordan Q. Jesus
Involved Party: MK II Light Flagship Commander Ether E. Ethereal

[spoiler=CONFIDENTIAL TRANSCRIPT: GRADE 2 PERMISSIONS REQUIRED (oops I gave the whole forum grade 2 permissions)]Flagship Cmd. Jordan Jesus: Command, this is Cmd. Jordan of the H.S.S. Pyrrhic Victory, we have a problem, over.

CO Rae Spectronymous Bosch: Hang on, patching you through to command... they aren't happy with you, you know.

Jordan: And I'm not happy with them! Just let me handle it, over.

Rae: We have high-grade transmissions systems, you don't need to end your statements with 'ov--' You know what, never mind. Patched through.

Lt. Col. Roy Brogden: Command speaking. Hey, where did you take that ship, anyway?

Jordan: Not important. I'm having an issue, here... we blew up a Neinzul Control Cluster, and it was full of... more viral swarmers. Do you read, over?

Roy: You don't have to--

Rae: I already tried.

Roy: Ahh... Okay, so how is this a problem, aside from the fact that we have nothing defending the homelands now?

Jordan: The Neinzul Viral Swarmers encountered our Zenith Viral Shredders, and, well...

Rae: Images patching through.
We've got a technical readout...

...and a radar image.


Jordan: ...Command, they appear to replicating off of each other. This has been going on for two days, I don't know how long this is going to last.

Rae: What the...?

Roy: Huh? Wow. Well, they can't be gaining any more material on their own, I guess. How many shredders are left? Are yours losing?

Jordan: That's a good point... I came here with about 120, and I'm up to... 400, it looks like? Over. *in the background, a smarmy XO shouts "414!"* Over, I said!


Roy: You should be overwhelming them, eventually, then...

Jordan: We need to take this planet! Empress herself found one of the missing ship fabricators here, and we can't gain control of it if you don't send some backup here to... ugh... to Amanda Hugginkiss...

Roy: No can do.

Jordan: What?! Certainly you can see the import of this! Ov--

Roy: Jordan, you left us with no defenses back at home. We're fending off an AI Plasma Siege Starship as it is, the home command station is taking some damage. We lost some air pressure. We are in no condition to help you, and it's your own fault.


Flagship Cmd. Ether E. Ethereal: Patching in. Perhaps I can help.

Roy: Ah, Commander Ether of the... Light Flagship Mk. II, H.S.S. Prognostic Blade?

Jordan: Light Flagship... MK II? Wait... *technical readout opening*

... ...She said this was the strongest ship the Empire would ever be able to build! She lied! She... you...!

Ether: I can come help, just hang tight. I'm currently out on planet Your Mom, I can be over with a jiffy to support.

Jordan: All this horrible nonsense and I'm already being phased out for a new shiptype?! How can this day get any worse?!

Mysterious Transmission over all Channels (AI?): Look behind you.


Roy: Wait... what?

Jordan: Behind...? Wait, who destroyed that Viral Clust-- OH SHIT! Helmsman, hard to port, to the wormhole, hurry! They're-- They're...!




Rae: Ma'am... we've... we've lost communication with the H.S.S. Pyrrhic Victory.

...The planet seems to be ready for us to take control, now, though.

Roy: ... What a foolish fool. Alright. Ether, we're counting on you now.

Ether: Roger. I think we'll have the situation under control. Those bombers are self-attritioning like all Neinzul do. We'll warp through once they're gone.

Roy: See to it that you do. Good job not destroying 250,000 scrap worth of important Harutopian Military Hardware, I'll have to look into getting you in command of more boats in the future.

Ether: Roger that, Lt. Col. Maintaining radio silence.

Edited February 3, 2015 by Utsuho Reiuji