Video Game / Battle Pirates

Battle Pirates is a Real-Time Strategy Massively Multi-player Online game developed by video game company "Kixeye". The game takes place decades in the future where the world has been flooded by water, dividing civilization into two main factions:

• The player-controlled Forsaken Alliance, comprised of the survivors from the lower and middle classes of pre-diluvian civilization;
• The Draconian Empire, the primary NPC faction comprised of the upper-class citizens, high-ranking military personnel, and the remains of pre-diluvian governments

Later updates to the game added a third faction called the Reavers; these people are described as survivors of clashes between Forsaken and Draconian forces, who adapted salvaged wreckage from both factions to craft their own ramshackle fleets.

A fourth faction - the Scourge - surfaced later; according to the developers, this new faction is composed of survivors who chose to colonize the seabed, and whose hostility was provoked by Reaver uranium-dredging operations.

A fifth faction - the Legion, comprised of former Forsaken personnel led by ex-Councilor Zoe Vasquez - came into being during 2016, as a result of a bloody civil war between those who supported Vasquez' take-no-prisoners attitude towards Draconian aggression and those who supported Captain Harlock's guerrilla campaigns.

Players take control of their own forsaken base, which they must fortify and upgrade to be able to research stronger technology and build better defenses and fleets. Gameplay consists of "Base attacks" and "Fleet vs Fleet" (FvF) combat. The player constructs their own ships by using a combination of hulls, weapons, armors and specials.

---

This game provides examples of:

• Action Bomb: The Unstable Core special has the benefits of the researchable Engine Upgrade, and the Reaver Scout Engine special boosts combat speed even further than either Unstable Core 3 or Engine Upgrade 3 at the expense of reduced weapon range. If a ship equipped with either of these specials has its health depleted, the ship explodes, damaging nearby enemies (and leaving a fiery patch that damages any enemy ships that pass through it). Very useful if put on "instant-repair" ships, like unarmored Sea Wolves or Light Cruisers.
• After the End: Battle Pirates takes place after the world is subject to a global flood. The flood results in civilization splitting into several factions.
  • The Draconian empire consists of the upper-class and the government, they seek to destroy the Forsaken and gain control of the world's resources.
  • The Forsaken Alliance (controlled by the players) is made up of the lower/middle class citizens who were left behind after the flood and had to resort to piracy to survive.
  • Later updates added a third faction: the Reavers. This faction utilizes their own unique tech, based primarily on jury-rigged technology salvaged (or stolen) from both the Draconians and the Forsaken. Their hulls appear to be Forsaken and Draconian hulls smashed together, while using weapons based on radioactive damage and extremely high rates of fire. The aesthetic evokes a cobbled-together, "improvised technology" look.
  • A fourth faction called the Scourge arrived in a series of monthly events in 2015; this group has its own unique technologies and ship designs, including fast-moving submarines that release EMP blasts when enemy ships get too close and weapons that deal corrosive damage over time.
• Allegedly Free Game: Subverted, you can research all end-game tech and earn the best raid prizes without spending a cent on gold, but it may take longer and people that spend money on gold have a slight advantage over those who don't.
  • Gold can be used to speed up repairs, builds, and researches at time reduction of 30 minutes per 1 gold. High-tier raid hulls with good builds can take up to several weeks per ship, making it advisable to use gold unless you are comfortable with waiting.
  • Gold can be used to instantly finish incomplete unfinished blueprints, instead of gradually earning blueprint parts by hitting salvages.
  • Gold can be used to send "premium" gifts to your friends, such as blueprint parts, mega resource crates, and amounts of gold.
• Artificial Stupidity: If your ships get in the range of an AI enemy's weapons, they will stop moving to fire at you, meaning that they can fire at you with missiles but avoid moving closer even if they have powerful ballistic weapons.
  • This is one of the problems with base guarding ships, if they are set to move, they will also stop when any of their weapons are able to fire at the enemy. This makes mixing weapon types a bad idea as just putting one missile on a powerful ballistic ship would make it incapable of moving in for the kill on its own.
• Attack Drone
  • The Draconian Typhoon - first encountered in the Storm Warning arc, and later relegated to encounters in the Eye of the Storm campaign - uses this as its primary attack mode.
  • Certain Forsaken-developed tactical modules allow ships to launch drones (so long as they're capable of mounting a tactical module in the first place, that is); the Blitz Drone is armed with cannons, the Siege Drone with miniaturized Siege Missiles, and the Piranha Drone with Piranha depth charges.
  • The Reavers, naturally, developed their own hybrid attack drone technology; while they look somewhat like the Forsaken Piranha Drones, they're armed with miniaturized slag throwers. Needless to say, they're called Firebat Drones.
• Badass Army: The Forsaken, which is composed of the players, with each player capable of destroying a vast amount of Draconian mines, salvages and outposts.
• Beat Them at Their Own Game: Draconians have access to better technology than the Forsaken players, with their own hulls, specials and weapons. These can actually be gained by earning enough blueprints from salvages, or winning them from monthly raids or weekly missions. This means that you can use the Dracs' own powerful weaponry against them.
• BFG: The Crossbow series of railguns fits the description pretty well. They are the only ballistic weapons that can penetrate walls, and they do massive damage to buildings. The Crossbow III can annihilate most targets in one shot. The Necessary Drawback being that it is extremely heavy and has a very long reload time. The Arbalest introduced in the March 2015 raid also fits the bill, being basically a Crossbow that fires while moving.
  • The Particle Accelerator Cannon does relatively low damage to ships, but is fairly effective against buildings and walls. Plus, there's a (very low) chance that the Particle Accelerator Cannon will fire a Particle Blast - an attack that deals over 100,000 damage to any structures within a certain radius of its point of impact. (Of course, the more Particle Accelerator Cannons you have mounted on your fleet, the greater the odds that any given salvo will include a Particle Blast.)
• Body Armor as Hit Points: Or rather, Ship Armor as hit points. In this case, armor is hit points. Your ship's maximum health is increased by adding heavier armor.
• Boring, but Practical: The Harlock's Aegis flagship isn't as flashy as some others with high weapons bonuses or cool overload effects, but its tactical field gives a 45% defense bonus against all damage types and negates fire and ice fields, it has excellent sub detection, and it has accuracy and range bonuses to countermeasures. This makes it the best defensive flagship in the game as of this writing.
• Bottomless Magazines: Played with. Each weapon does have a reload time between salvos. However, no matter how long a battle goes on, how many shots you fire or how many targets you hit before returning to base, your ships will never, ever run out of ammo.
• Call-Back: The event arc that ran from November 2015 to January 2016; it involved attacking Draconian supply convoys in retaliation for recent attacks on Forsaken territory, in a nod to the very first series of special events in the game's history. And, just like those first events, the arc was named Revenge Raid.
• Charged Attack: The various flechette launchers have a variant on the "collect" type, as shots from these weapons build up a charge on the targets they hit; when the charge reaches maximum, it unleashes a "radioactive shockwave" that hits everything in a certain radius.
• Color-Coded Armies:
  • Forsaken ships are almost always grey and a shade of green
  • Most Draconian ships are black and navy.
  • Reaver ships are usually silver and black, with an exposed orange engine core.
  • Scourge ships, thus far, are all silver submarines.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: While you are able to use Draconian technology, you still have to deal with usual limits such as weight. The AI on the other hand, has no such limitation. For example, in certain salvages you can find a drac Light Cruiser with 3 siege cannons, if you were to earn the Light cruiser and try the same configuration, you would not be able to build the ship due to weight limitations.
  • Not only do Draconians ignore weight restrictions, but also weapon limitations as well. For example, the drac Dreadnought is incapable of mounting torpedoes... when built by a player, but in high level Draconian outposts you can find Dreadnoughts armed with torpedoes.
  • You know how you can only have 5 ships in one fleet? Well in Draconian military fleets (in the monthly events), you'll find at least 10 ships, they must have pretty big docks.
  • Typically, if you stumble upon something that Draconians are able to do that you can't, the developer's explanation is usually "The draconians are more technologically advanced, and are therefore capable of utilizing technology we cannot." keep in mind that you can earn draconian technology.
• The Computer Is a Lying Bastard: The loading screens often advertise featured hulls that the player can earn, but the loadout does not always match what the player can do. For example, one of the screens shows a Dreadnought X equipped with 8 siege mortars. The siege mortar is the heaviest weapon in the game as of this writing, and trying to load 8 of them on a Dreadnought X would exceed the weight limit even with no specials or armor.
• Cooldown: Reaver weapons - such as the Torrent Missile and Reaver Chaingun - fire in massive volleys; the Torrent Missile fires salvos of sixteen missiles, while Chainguns are capable of pumping out a whopping thirty shots per salvo. They also have the longest reload times in the game.
• Cosmetic Award: Medals. The only way to earn them is in player-vs-player combat, and they can't be traded for anything.
• Critical Existence Failure: Subverted. Ships that have almost no health left will be shown to be on fire in some parts of the hull, but their speed and firepower will remain untouched until they are destroyed.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Usually for a ship to be good at a role, it needs to have weapons, armor and specials that are dedicated to that role. This almost always makes using a ship for anything other than its usual purpose a bad idea.
  • Base hitting hulls usually utilize mortars or siege missiles to destroy bases, except some blitz hulls (like the thresher). Mortars have a long flight time, making them unable to hit moving targets, and siege missiles have lower range than other missiles, allowing the ship to be kited by cutlass or assault missiles. Base hitting ships can fall to faster and more agile ships.
  • Fleet vs fleet hulls are usually fast and make use of weapons such as cutlass/assault missiles or ballistic weapons. Ballistic weapons are blocked by the walls in bases and missiles do half damage to buildings (except siege missiles). Fleet vs fleet hulls don't have the armor to withstand base defense weapons.
  • The Piranha depth-charge weapon does an absolutely massive amount of damage (piranha d-charge 3 dealing over 7000 damage), is a concussive weapon (Only a very few specialized hulls have concussive defense, and no armors or specials for concussive defense exist), and can damage submerged submarines. It downside however, is that is has a range of 18, the single lowest in the game. The fact that it is out-ranged by every other weapon in the game means that it is only effective on fast hulls (such as the Sea Wolf or Battlecruiser X).
  • The hulls mentioned under the Stone Wall entry below are far too slow to be used for anything but base defense. For perspective, you typically want your base-hitting hulls to have a minimum speed of 20 knots after engine upgrades, and FvF hulls should be closer to 30. The fastest defense hull is the Behemoth at a base speed of 8. With engine 3, you'll get it to 14.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Reaching level 50 makes anyone over level 50 capable of attacking you, negating the usual 5 levels higher/lower cap. It is physically impossible for you to have researched all the level 4 defense platform weapons and level 3 specials by then, and you are able to be attacked by players who may have the highest-tier raid hulls.
• Cut and Paste Environments: All salvages, outposts and raid targets of the same level are completely identical. For example, you'll find that every single level 23 salvage uses the exact same ships with the exact same loadouts.
• Death from Above: You can construct a ballistic missile (simply called rockets in-game) in your base and deploy it in combat. There are various types of warheads you can use: standard explosive with a splash radius, a bunker buster that can destroy a single building, a pinch to temporarily disable targets while your fleet closes to attack range, or a depth charge for taking out submarines. They become less useful at higher levels (except for the pinch), for several reasons:
  • They're unguided and have very long flight times that get even longer with the more advanced warheads, so you can really only hit buildings. This was mitigated somewhat by a game update that divided the rockets into "slow activation" and "fast activation" categories, with the fast activation rockets having shorter flight times.
  • Armor scales up faster than rocket damage, so by the time you can build a level 3 Orion, it still won't be powerful enough to take out most of the things you'll be fighting.
  • Originally, you could only have one rocket on your launchpad at a time and you couldn't build extras. So if, for example, you had a pinch on your launchpad and you needed a bunker buster, you'd have to use or scrap the pinch, then wait several hours for your bunker buster to build. This was changed in a later update, and you can now build and store up to 25 rockets at a time, but you can still only use one per battle.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: Ships with high amounts of armor are not invincible, as such, it is entirely possible for say, a dreadnought to be killed by a gunboat. But the dreadnought would have to be A) very near death B) be using very short-range weapons against a gunboat armed with torpedoes or C) using mortars, which due to their long flight time, are unfit to use in fleet vs fleet.
• Decisive Battle: Averted. Despite each monthly raid being advertised as "preventing the dracs from gaining a hold on the world map" or "dealing a big blow to the dracs", monthly raids don't seem to affect the Draconian empire's hold in the slightest.
• Elite Mook: The assorted "X-class" Draconian ships (such as the Battlecruiser X, Missile Cruiser X, and Juggernaut X) would fit the bill... if the Draconian military actually used them.
• Expy: The portrait for Grimshine, the Reaver commander, looks almost exactly like Jack as she appears in Mass Effect 3.
• Fragile Speedster: The Forsaken Sea Wolf is fast and great at kiting, but has only one armor slot and a very low inherent armor value. However, its low armor allows it to be instantly repaired during raids (which offer half-repair time) by using the 5 minute speed-up. A common strategy is to spam them at raid targets until they eventually win, since raid targets do not repair.
• Glass Cannon: Due to the modular nature of the ships, most of them can be built this way if you give them heavy weapons and light armor, but the Sea Wolf and Sea Scorpion are especially suited for it. They both have above-average speed compared to the other researchable hulls (blueprint hulls are in a different class entirely) and very low base armor with only one expansion slot, but 5 and 7 weapon slots respectively. It's standard practice to make your Sea Wolfs with no armor at all, so they can be instantly repaired during raids.
• Homing Boulders: It's possible for ballistic weapons and active countermeasures to home in on a target if it's moving fast enough, even when In-Universe they're technically supposed to just fly straight. This is especially noticeable when using countermeasures to defend against UAV's and missiles, where the rounds will often curve towards the target (or even do a complete 180 before closing in!) in order to shoot it down.
• Hypocrite: One of the mission briefings for the "Death Grip" campaign says the Draconians have scorched and poisoned the land with their zynthium-fueled technology. Zynthium is a necessary resource for every single thing the Forsaken faction (i.e. the player) builds - except, ironically, zynthium refineries.
• The Juggernaut:
  • The aptly named "Juggernaut", a Draconian hull with 8 armor slots, filling each slot with Depleted Uranium 4 armor gives it over 20000 armor points!
  • The Juggernaut X, an improved version of the Juggernaut, has the same armor but is slightly resistant to slow effects and increases the ability of drac armor mounted on it by 50%.
  • The Proto-Nemesis has over 48000 armor and 6 armor slots that enable it to take more damage than whole fleets!
  • The Hellstar is a Reaver modification of the Proto-Nemesis that is even more beefed up, with 52,000 armor points and massive damage resistances.
• Kill It with Fire: Several weapons use fire-like effects in one way or another:
  • Draconian Impulse Launcher shockwaves leave circular "burning" patches on the water that damage anything that survives the shockwave.
  • Several pieces of Reaver technology - such as the Reaver Scout Engine, the Unstable Core, and the Meteor Mortar - leave similar circular patches; the Reaver Napalm Missile, on the other hand, creates smaller patches in a straight line during its flight.
  • The Reaver Magma and Blaze Throwers are ship-based flamethrowers in all but name.
  • The Reaver Firebat Drones combine Forsaken Piranha Drones with Reaver slag-thrower technology.
• Kill It with Ice: The Draconian Cryo Launchers are an adaptation of the Impulse Launcher that creates a "cryogenic shockwave" which leaves ice fields in its wake; as one might expect, these ice fields not only damage ships within their radius, but they also slow ships down, increase weapon reload time, and increase the amount of damage affected ships take from other sources.
• King Mook: Most of the flagships are improved variants of standard hulls, like the Frostburn Interceptor, Borbas' Goresaber, Harlock's Aegis, High-Lander's Nuclear Cruiser, etc. While you can use a flagship with any fleet, it's most common to use it with a fleet of the standard hulls it's based on. For example, a Borbas' Goresaber would typically front a fleet of normal Goresabers.
• Lightning Bruiser:
  • The tier 5 Stingray is this. It is one of the fastest hulls in the game with a combat speed of 16 (17 after retrofits), its ballistic range and reload bonuses give it great ballistic firepower, and its 4 special slots let it accommodate engine upgrade, autoloader and hardened barrels with one special slot to spare. Its speed lets it close the distance between it and its foes quickly.
  • The Crusader also fits. With a base speed of 13 it is slower than the Stingray but still among the faster ships (especially if you use the Nuclear Accelerator, which gives bonuses to combat speed, ballistic range and accuracy), and it has even more firepower, with 8 weapon slots, 4 armor slots, 4 special slots, huge ballistic range, reload and damage bonuses, and a special feature that increases accuracy the more shots are fired at a single target.
  • The new champion is the Heavy Cruiser. With a base combat speed of 18, it leaves every other top-tier hull in its wake, it has tons of armor, some of the highest damage resistances in the game, five special slots, three heavy weapons slots, and it's optimized for Scatterguns, massively powerful short-range weapons with Splash Damage.
• Long-Range Fighter:
  • Mortar and missile weapons both have long range and usually give this role to the ship they are on. Missiles have such high range that fast enough ships can destroy enemies from afar without them being able to close the distance to return fire; this technique is referred to as "kiting".
  • Certain hulls with the remote targeting feature take this to the extreme. For example, Mastodons can extend the range of their missiles by an extra 75% if there's another ship to spot for them.
• Isometric Projection
• Macross Missile Massacre
  • Any fleet using mid- to high-level hulls (such as the Sea Wolf, Hammerhead, or Sea Scorpion) and Draconian Assault Missiles (which fire salvos of two missiles per launcher every four seconds) will be capable of something fairly close to this - especially if the ship has a fairly high rank, since rate of fire increases with ship rank.
  • The Reaver Torrent Missiles are likewise capable of executing a Macross Missile Massacre - assuming, of course, your opponent doesn't have incredibly high resistance to penetrating and/or radioactive damage.
• Made of Explodium:
  • Reaver ships explode upon being destroyed, and the explosion is capable of harming any allied ships in the blast radius.
  • The Unstable Core special applies this effect to the ship it is equipped on.
  • Several Reaver weapons, such as the Throwers and Inferno Rockets, apply the effect to any ship they're fired at.
• Magnetic Weapons: The most powerful cannons in the game (shot for shot), the Crossbow and Arbalest, are described as railguns. They're designed to penetrate walls; something no other ballistic weapon can do.
• More Dakka:
  • The ripper cannon has a reload of 1.5 seconds. The Strike Cruiser X has an inherent ballistic reload bonus of +65%, plus autoloader 3 (A special that increases ballistic reload by 110%) gives you a 175% ballistic reload bonus. A SCX with ripper cannons can fire near constantly.
  • The Crusader can have even more dakka than the SCX, with an inherent reload bonus of 75% and 8 weapon slots to the SCX's 6.
  • There is also the Reaver Chaingun and the Torrent Missile,both of which can rain death upon the enemy before reloading. (This does mean that the Torrent Missile is extremely useful against fleets and bases with Anti-Missile weaponry, though.)
  • The tier 5 Thresher hull has an inherent rocket reload bonus of +60%, and with cluster warheads 3 (A special that increases rocket reload by 170%) has a reload bonus of +230%. The drac assault rockets and the Reaver rockets (Inferno and Dragonfire) reload in 0.75 seconds. A Thresher with Cluster Warheads 3 and Assaults rockets reloads every 0.2 of a second.
  • The Hellstrike takes the Thresher and cranks it up to eleven. After upgrading it in the Retrofit Lab, ranking it to Legendary and fitting it with Cluster Warheads 3, it has over a 600% rocket reload bonus. With Assault or Reaver rockets, this translates to 20 reloads per second.
  • Ditto the Goresaber, which is in essence an upgraded Hellstrike with improved stats, including a rocket reload bonus that is even higher than a fully retrofitted Hellstrike.
• Necessary Drawback: Your weapons can have high damage, short reload time, or low weight. Pick two.
• No-Sell: Ships with high enough armor will be able to shrug off low-level cannons, missiles and explosives like they are nothing.
  • The Hell/hailstorm anti-mortars and phalanx anti-missiles can protect their parent ships by shooting enemy projectiles out of the air, while they can't completely neutralize enemy fire, they can null their firepower somewhat.
• Non-Lethal K.O.: No matter how many times your ships are blown up and sunk, they can always be repaired. And considering each ship can gain experience bonuses, it's only logical to assume that each ship has a crew that somehow survives being repeatably blown up.
• One-Hit Kill: Very low-level ships going against high-level ones might not have enough armor to withstand a single hit.
• One-Man Army: Well, one ship army, the Proto-Nemesis is a massive behemoth. It has 48000 armor with 6 armor slots, 16 weapon slots (previous highest on one hull was 10), 5 special slots, massive defense bonuses, 120% faster missile reload and 170% faster rocket reload. Its downsides being that it is slow, can only be built once after you earn it, and you have to destroy draconian bases (which almost certainly would need multiple people) for a 0.1% chance to get it.
• Painfully Slow Projectile: Mortars have a considerable flight time, which is long enough that they can reload before their mortars land, this makes mortars unfit for fleet vs fleet as fast ships can avoid them completely.
• Point Defenseless: Zig-zagged. You can equip point defense cannons on your ships and base defense turrets to shoot down missiles, mortars and UAVs. However, they have a very low accuracy rating, so they're almost never going to get all the incoming projectiles.
• Power Creep: A common complaint is that it's difficult to be competitive in the game if you don't have the latest and greatest hulls and weapons. A hull/weapon combo that beats everything in the game might be obsolete in a month, when a new raid format renders it useless. A subtle form of Allegedly Free Game, because building a full fleet of fully armed and armored top-tier ships might take months. Real-time. This is unfeasible when new hulls are released in every monthly raid, so to stay on the cutting edge you need to spend a lot of money on gold to speed up your builds. And if you take a month or two off you're stuck playing catch-up.
• Power Glows: The X-class Draconian ships have Tron Lines on them, signifying their experimental high-tech nature, and certain hulls can gain an inner glow if they're retrofitted five times in the Retrofit Lab.
• Punny Name:
  • One of the earliest event arcs involved attacking Draconian construction sites; this arc was fittingly named "Base Invaders".
  • One of the many time-limited campaigns involved fighting Scourge submarines armed with corrosive weaponry; appropriately enough, it was called Acid Reign.
• Short-Range Shotgun: The Scattergun class of weapons is basically a ship-mounted version of this. Its short range is balanced by massive damage and a wide spread.
• Shout-Out: SEVERAL.
  • One of the leading members of the Forsaken Council is named Captain Harlock.
  • The Goliath has a base armor value that is OVER NINE THOUSAAAAAAAAAAAAAND! Specifically, it has exactly 9001 base armor.
  • Several Rogue Crew portraits fit the bill. For example:
    • The leader of the Wrecking Crew is a woman with an eyepatch, a grenade launcher, and a bomb-disposal vest with extra grenades attached to the shoulders. Now, where have we seen an outfit like that before...?
    • The Bullseye Brigade's portrait seems to bear a striking resemblance to a certain cynical Brit.
  • One of the recently-introduced campaigns involves using fast ships equipped with short-range weapons (such as cannons and ship-mounted rockets) to destroy a set of bases protected with long-range defensive turrets. Appropriately enough, it's called "Run The Trench".
  • The third mission in the Fractured Empires campaign has this description:
  ''Grimshine has deployed high-powered Reaver monstrosities into combat. Draconian forces won't hold out long against firepower of this magnitude.
  • The general aesthetic of the Reaver faction is much like the Reavers in Firefly, down to the salvaged ships, exposed engine cores and the love of violence described in their flavor text.
  • One of the earliest event arcs was called Base Invaders; this doubles as a Punny Name, since the event revolved around attacking Draconian construction sites.
  • The second wave in the time-limited Acid Reign campaign (which has you fighting Scourge vessels armed with corrosive weaponry) is called "Terror from the Deep".
  • Amongst the tech that the Reavers salvaged and repurposed is a Forsaken tactical module that allows the ship carrying it to release small autonomous drones; while the Forsaken drones use more prosaic weapons - missiles, cannons, and depth charges - the Reaver drones use slag throwers. And, of course, they call them Firebat drones.
  • The June 2016 event, Civil War: Escalation, has an achievement tied to it called "What's So Civil About War, Anyway?"
  • The December 6, 2106 update introduced three researchable Conqueror-class hulls: the cannon-boosting "Athos", the mortar-chucking "Porthos", and the missile-spewing "Aramis".
  • The description of the Monolith (the Legion's answer to the Forsaken Citadel, released in the time-limited campaign Odyssey) contains the following line:
  "It's not just a star, it's full of stars!"
• Splash Damage: Mortars and Rockets have a considerable amount of splash allowing them to damage multiple targets; this is one of the benefits that makes them great for base hitting.
  • Some variants of the Draconian siege cannon have a (small) amount of splash that allows them to damage multiple ships if they are occupying the same space.
  • The infamous Proto-Nemesis applies splash to any missiles that are mounted on it, making it the only (obtainable) ship to add splash to weapons that don't have any to begin with.
  • The shockwaves generated by Draconian Impulse and Cryo Launchers qualify, as do the ones generated by the Forsaken Antipode Launcher.
• Stone Wall: There are a number of hulls that follow this pattern, being heavily armored and extremely slow at best; among them are the Draconian "Enforcer" and "Guardian", and the Forsaken "Goliath", "Rampart", and "Vanquisher" (the latter of which has five hundred thousand base armor points... and can't move. At. All.)
• Suicidal Overconfidence: The enemy AI will attack your ships regardless of how likely they are to lose. You can attack a level 1 salvage with Missile Cruiser X's, and the dracs will consider rushing you with corvettes, the draconian version of the gunboat, to be a good idea.
• Super Prototype: The Proto-Mastodon and Proto-Nemesis; the former is a prototype version of the Mastodon fire-support hull with minor imrovements to its defenses and damage (as well as the ability to occasionally launch Cryo Missiles in place of regular missiles), while the latter is a heavily-armed and heavily-armored prototype version of the Draconian "Nemesis"-class hull, which provides significant boosts to rocket and missile weaponry. (The Proto-Nemesis is also the only version of the Nemesis that a player can actually build, and it's so massive that it can use up the weight allocation for an entire fleet by itself.)
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: Weapons usually excel in one role, and lack in another. Ships built for fleet vs fleet are usually horrible at base attacking, and ships built for base hitting are usually terrible at fleet vs fleet.
  • Ballistic weapons do moderate damage and have fast reloads, but under-average range. Ballistics are best used on fast ships that can close distances quickly.
  • Missile weapons do moderate damage and have high range, allowing the technique of kiting, but they have below-average reload speed and do less damage to buildings (except the siege missile, which does more damage to buildings). Missiles are best used on fast ships that are effective at kiting.
  • Mortar weapons do high damage with a considerable splash radius making them capable of damaging multiple targets at a time, but their long flight time restricts them to base hitting. Mortars are best used on bigger, heavier ships.
  • Rocket and Scattergun weapons do high damage with good splash, but have a even lower range than ballistics (except drac rockets). Like ballistics, these should be used on fast ships.
• Timed Mission: All battles have a timer. When hitting another player's base, you'll have around 5 minutes to destroy it; if the timer runs out during the attack, it ends instantly. Fleet vs fleet battles also have a 5-minute timer. Draconian bases have a 25-minute timer, and the outposts in the weekly missions have a 15-minute timer.
• We ARE Struggling Together: The Forsaken faction seems to be a very loose confederacy of pirate captains (i.e. players), with the Forsaken Council exercising only nominal authority, largely by bribing the captains with valuable tech. Each captain has absolute authority over his or her own island base and armada, and is often allied with a number of other captains. Any Forsaken captain can attack any other captain of the appropriate level outside of their own alliance, and often does. The only thing that seems to unite them is opposition to the Draconian Empire, which has a much more strict command structure. The reason the Forsaken can never make any significant progress against the Draconians is probably that they never stop fighting each other.
  • Made even more explicit in two of 2016's event arcs (namely, Hostile Takeover and Civil War), where Captain Harlock and Zoe Vasquez - two of the highest-ranking members of the Forsaken Council - have actually come to blows over a disagreement on how to handle recent Draconian expansion; Harlock wants to continue a guerrilla-style resistance, while Vasquez wants to obliterate the Draconian Empire once and for all.
• What a Piece of Junk:
  • All of the Reaver hulls evoke this. They are among the best hulls in the game, but they look like piles of twisted metal that shouldn't even float.
  • The Locust UAV makes it explicit. The weapon's description states outright that the Forsaken and Draconians can't figure out how it manages to fly.
• Worf Barrage: Well, what do you think happens when a ship using high-salvo weapons (such as Reaver Chainguns or Torrent Missiles) comes up against a ship with high resistance to the main damage types these weapons deal? After assault and siege deflection were introduced it's even worse: ships with these properties negate a flat amount of damage from each hit from a ship or turret, respectively. If a ship has deflection, it won't take any damage at all from some high-salvo weapons, because these weapons are designed to have lots of low-damage projectiles.

---