Post by horrorTerror on Jun 14, 2015 18:36:23 GMT -5
Ah, the political backstory to Sburb. For those who skimmed that part of the FAQ or otherwise simply do not care about the battle between the forces of the kingdoms of Light and Darkness, I will repost it here for convenience's sake.
From the prelude section, article on Quests and Lore part 4.
Blah blah blah, heroic stuff. But hey, Prospit and Derse get these huge armies, why can't you? Screw being a champion, we all want an army to do our junk for us. Nobility is supposed to be the rich people sitting on their asses commanding other people to do stuff like operate their estates, not godwarriors strifing down imps in person. And that's where the Tactical variant comes in. This terrifying rambling randomness collected cheerily freshly from coherent corrupted player people summarizes Sburb's tense Tactical Variant version. I noticed you guys had access to it sometimes (it's mentioned in a guide for Tacticians as a way to make defeating the Black King easier, and there was a talk about strategies in the chat section) but there were no detailed guides so I figured "screw it, I'll put one here for you"
Tactical is not available in every session. Sorry for you strategists who want a small army, try getting a bunch of followers to team up or something. The signs of Tactical being available range from subtle stuff like imps being better at strategy even if no prototypings would affect it, to less subtle stuff like consorts saying "We should all team up and fight the [insert latest quest problem here] ourselves! But we need a leader lol nevermind", from ludicrously specific and hard-to-find stuff like the Skaia.net lab having books like Sun Tzu's Art of War in among the complex science stuff, to noticeable stuff like the Panoramic Imaginarium having a large section full of statmirrors that show you stuff that has nothing to do with you personally unless you decided to start a business or army already. But, there will be signs. Playercount will also be quite high, and prototypings will usually have a level of nastiness that an army would be really nice. You will almost always have a Tactician player and their Tactician's Hubris will be utterly horrifying. Your sprite or a prophecy may mention it outright that you will be leading an army at some point and at that point unless your pepleader is enough to make npcs that don't normally follow people follow you in particular it is pretty clear tactical is available and will be used. For various reasons, tactical sessions tend to last very long (especially if someone prototyped something hard to destroy thus making everything have gel viscosity and health vial through the roof), usually a few years.
Tactical mostly operates on two major additional statistics, Approval Rating (how much what you're commanding likes you, both by-individual-group and overall, which means whether people will follow orders without abuse of pepleader and mind control or even follow you at all) and a stat configuration that determines the form and effectiveness of command abstractions somehow. The rest of the stats added are minor and hard to remember, and many of the rest just take existing stats and do more things with them, especially pepleader for obvious reasons, verballistamina for other reasons, boonwhatevers and grist for resources, the secondary shipping stats (no, glitching them up for more commandingness is not worth it) especially HNNG for consorts for some reason but it's buggy and terrible like the rest of the game but worse, carapace rep for obvious reasons, and the invisible stat for corruption if you're siding with us or them or you know who. The command abstractions are linked to your player pendant, which becomes the Tactician Pendant (ugh, sburb stop reusing terminology it's confusing and we KNOW you have nothing against using weird words for stuff) when you engage tactical and enter the middle glut. It's one of the two secret pendant states that fit in that unknown state mentioned in the FAQ. The second and other secret pendant states concern many other things, something else entirely. Tactician pendant is basically player pendant and overrides Skaia pendant except for the actually useful and game-essential features and player stuff that pops in when it should. It also causes pinging to identify the owner player, Skaia, and field commander heroes. It is distinguished from the Player Pendant by being slightly larger in the actual pendant part thingummy. The larger pendant is the same color as player pendant besides a skaia-tinted edge liner for skaia pendant when that activates, and the outside part's color that changes depending on the composition of your army.
There are two major ways to engage Tactical, starting with your moon or starting on your own Land. There's a third method that involves a metric gigaton of corruption but that's just a shortcut to starting on your own land. It is not advisable to start with your moon for many reasons but I'll include it for completeness' sake. Oh, who am I kidding. Don't join the moon crazies I'm only telling you because you should know what it is so you can avoid it and it might lead to more corruption to solve the problem with violence.
To start with your moon, go to your dream moon and ask either the Queen herself, a sufficiently high-ranking agent like Jack Noir or that Prospitian archagent disco partier, or a military commander on-Battlefield during your Legendary Nap, to screw all that land shet and get in on this competition by joining their bid for the Ultimate Reward instead of making your own. You will be chastised for generally disobeying Sburb's mandated heroism and effectively leaving your land to die, but if you're persistent enough you can eventually make them go fine and hire you to do some military contracting. You will eventually be allowed access to the Battlefield or somewhere and can start killing those enemy carapaces and after they realize you are ridiculously good you get promoted or something a bunch of times and eventually you get to handle part of your moon's military whatnots. And now for every reason why this is a terrible idea.
If you are working with Derse, your every action works to accelerate the Reckoning, and if you are incompetent or sabotaging enough to allow Prospit a temporary lead you will end up in a lot of trouble with Derse and likely get killed. If you want to turn against Derse you will have to have a ludicrously high Approval Rating to have any chance of success and it's going to tank your black carapace rep to extreme enemyship and a kabillion things can and will go wrong and the BQ and agents will terminate you and oh freaking Jenna it's not worth it please don't side with Derse if you want your session to stand a chance of success and more importantly stay alive the horror stories are just brutal.
Even if you're on Prospit, you will be unable to drive Prospit to a victory unless [The War Will Never Stop] is glitched and if that's so you have bigger problems and Prospit will not hand over the rights to the Ultimate Reward and you'll have to force someone to get the vital meteors defense-portal'd etc. etc. There are some secondary reasons why Prospit is required to lose by the game and they come up here. This is not worth it and you will likely get trashed by Derse and end up having a fast Reckoning anyways.
Not specific to either moon, you invariably have to answer to and seriously obey a larger party (unless you get handed the reins or take them by force, neither of which is easy) which can come at obscenely bad times, failing to Earn Your Wings beforehand can lead to location problems, there are so many glitches it's not worth it, etc. You will also murder your carapace rep with the other side as being an active military officer of the other side tends to raise a lot more flags than diplomatic guest. Seriously. No. Don't do it. You will usually only have to deal with a moon tactical if someone is suffering from Questant's Lament because of the whole join-the-side-thing or very rarely Phantasmagoric Waltz with a bad sleep ratio and an independent walk-stab-walk or megalovania problem, especially if drunk, because anyone with foresight knows how this is going to end but if you're out of your mind and not with Rain who knows. Look, it's glitchy and ugly and it's more likely to be taken by people who have already become a problem. Make deals with us or your Denizens if you have to in order to get rid of this, please.
And now for the part we've all been waiting for, doing it the better way with your land. The first thing you've got to do is get your Land Reputation really, really high normally. Once that's dealt with, start going village by village doing stuff until you've exhausted virtually all the very early-game quests and eventually the village chief will give you some appellation like the [insert heroic word] of [context of consort village] here, which is almost a surefire marker of Tactical since normal sessions don't lead to consorts caring so much about all the stuff you do for them dear Jenna seriously. You're gonna have to seek out a lot of hidden quests and you'll probably have to come back later after doing some sidequest or main quest stuff, especially if your land has a special different thing according to first contact. Post-Denizen land reformation tends to be the point where all subsequent quests are done. Once you've racked up enough of these (luckily just a few) it splits into two options, again, but it's picked by your session so whatever. It can and has happened pre-Denizen-slaying, but if so your session is going to be almost all-tactical and you will have control so early everyone won't even have entered yet.
The first option is to assemble your fledgling rulership village by village. This usually happens if there are many many consort villages on bad or independent terms with each other or the consort capitol, especially if the game has decided that they must fight each other in addition to the underlings and whatever else could kill those poor innocent consorts for stupid game being full of its stupid reasons for things. You basically go village to village getting appreciation until at some point they declare you nobility or something and you gain control of them. Once you are Land Nobility you enter the middle glut phase and sort of expand your dominion village by village more until you've got the land and can continue.
The second option is to end up being handed rulership of the entire land suddenly and abruptly. After defeating your Denizen and getting a few appreciation appellations is usually the point where this happens, especially because of the whole lore thing actually being consistent for once in Paradox Space and all assorted afterlives including hells thereafter. Anyways, you get called to the consort capitol and the consort king says he's giving you control of some stuff and then you enter the middle glut phase. Your player pendant becomes the Tactician Pendant when this happens.
The middle glut phase is ludicrously session-specific. Your mythological role, land, consort type, session prototypings, you, the choices you've made, even a bunch of obscure stuff all plays into this. It will basically consist of learning your personal command abstraction(s) (they range from everything from player commands to more meta abstractions) from your consorts and tactician pendant like an infernal guess-and-check tutorial for once, miraculously mostly-bug-free figuring out build order stuff and how to create...more units...somehow...I think ectobiology shenanigans, aspect powers, construction interfaces with server, and alchemy were mentioned at many points but it was ugly and everyone got into this huge argument about pattern determination and I was distracted by an offer of squiddle treats from someone seeking eldritch advice so I missed most of it anyways. If you do not have total Land control yet, there are also quests to earn more of it. This is where consorts seek you out and give you Tactical-specific quests the most, but they can continue into the later midgame. What you have and will have access to varies immensely by game, because the glut is random-quest-gen tier confusing and Sburb appears to be meta-betatesting Tactical changes across version drift, so....who even knows. How it even works is up to major variation.
The chief types of structures you will encounter will have variants of the [resource generator], [unit production], [fortification], [organizational], [utility], [decorative], or [ability] tags, while units will usually fall into the various [soldier] derivatives, [constructor], [resource acquisition], [specialist], [caster], [vehicle], or [hero] designations, plus something defining whether the unit is [consort_[type here]], [carapace_[type here]], [underling_[type here]], [other_[type here]] etc. Having more than one of these designations is not uncommon, except for what species it is for units for obvious reasons. To build a structure, get all the stuff you need then use your command abstraction to order it to be so. The constructors will build it and it'll be dealt with in a few days, weeks, or months depending on the nature of the game.
[resource generator] is exactly what it sounds like. These things deal with acquiring, abstracting, and streamlining access to all the things you would need in a typical Sburb RTS-like thing. Most of them deal in grist, boondollars, items of various kinds, approval rating, infrastructural needs, construction, storage, population supportability, or session-specific other resources, it varies.
[unit production] is also exactly what it sounds like. These...make units. Through various means. I've seen ectobiology, vat cloning, the nasty, training facilities to hire random filler npcs and make them skilled in helping you, Captcha Cardmonsters upscaled, even outright game magic of cheating them out of nowhere like it does with Lands and other spontaneous generation spawnings like underlings.
[fortification] is structures rigged to be like...fortifications and stuff. Walls. Towers with snipers in them. Cannon platforms. Ditches and moats. Stuff you would want on a castle, plus actual castles and stuff. Even furniture forts, some with a consort guarding them. Expensive for the most part but getting a few sniper towers set up around your dwelling spire with consort furniture forts inside everywhere plus some grist collector units roving around will effectively make your house a nice safe grist farm. Sure, passing through your First Gate got rid of the atomyk ebonpyre but that doesn't stop spawning entirely and security is nice. Have your Life player add a crystalanth and then set up that machine that naturally plays the appropriate Song of Life and suddenly you've got an autohealer machine to keep this place running.
[organizational] is all those useful research structures and build-me things that don't do much themselves besides handling bureaucracy and making other structures possible. Consort chieftan homes, carapacian paper-pushing offices, science labs, village construction management sites, the works.
[utility] is basically utility things that would be nice to have like firefighting services and armories or whatever that indicates that this will either be really useful or not very depending on your session and the derivative of utility used. Usually stacks with something else.
[decorative] basically means this structure looks really pretty according to the game abstractions. There's some complex shenanigans with these, parks, and approval rating but...eh, it's Sburb you'll probably find it by accident.
[ability] is structures that DO things. Massive aspect casting, passive or direct healing, awesome stuff. Usually expensive but still.
[soldier] and derivatives are basically the generics who actually fight. Nothing much to say here. Strife specibus varies.
[constructors] actually take your grist and boondollars and other things and make or buy the stuff and build it. Again, general.
[resource acquisition] gathers those resources for you in the first place, picking up drops or manning resource structures.
[specialist] You will absolutely love these people when it comes to questing. They are experts at dealing with weird puzzle shit and things that need to be done depending on their specialties. Need to build a bridge? Screw rickety hastily made pile of wood, pull over a constructor and assemble a shiny new legitimate-looking bridge! Incomprehensible puzzle? No precognitory people to abuse? pew pew soup cans solved.
[caster] is for units that do fakey fake game magic. Like your Secret Consort except usually more reliable. Somewhere around wizard enemies in shiny firepowers.
[vehicle] is for vehicles and carrier machinery. Is often misapplied and becomes a general robot-thing.
[hero] is for anything that is in the high-power tiers yet explicably following you. Like, agents and stuff like the pirate consort because of his ludicrous defenses. If you've formally gotten a coplayer to effectively sign their soul over to you and you've inducted them into the ranks of your army so they can do quests for you or whatever they count here. Most named carapaces with a decent power level go here. I have no idea what in hell kind of mind control you have over somecarapace to do this but if you've got a ringwraith or sceptrewraith following your orders they qualify for heroship instantly. Corrupt things are usually marked as heroes to create a buffer layer of abstractions between their/our messy code and the game itself due to exceptions.
After you figure out how to make certain sentient game abstractions do your bidding, you sort of take over your land on a wide scale. You are still supposed to do stuff, but a lot of people tend to get lazy and rely on their inefficient consort army to zerg rush the enemy into oblivion and eventually do all questing that doesn't require aspect abilities or personal presence (and the former can be alleviated with the Aspect Wizard consort hero and the latter with a Mist player). This death spam tends to be absolutely devastating to your Approval Rating and to a truncated extent your land rep and if you have a Flesh player they will likely begin following around your army and building an second army of zombies out of the corpses of the fallen simply because of the sheer excess of free corpses. It is usually seriously worth it to keep doing normal questing stuff yourself, especially for treasure.
The middle glut phase concludes when you have pretty much total control of your land as a reasonable military commander, enough mastery of your command and most of your structures and techs set up to the point where you can set it and be done with it and go back to focusing on other things until such point as an army of game abstractions would be useful like softening up the Black King or dealing with remaining Dersite forces during the Reckoning.
You can also extend this process and take over other Lands but this is nasty and not recommended if the player is alive. The regular thing about Nightmare Heir knelling and the implication that other players could do something like that with a living player for that land is involved but nobody I talked to except some dead guys from doomed timelines did it because why in hell would you do that. Tactical sessions tend to glitch on landgen and landdeath more extensively, resulting in dead players' lands sometimes remaining viable for takeover and unverified lands that have no player and eventually almost always have to be cleared to get all that darn creative potential airgrist out of it by violent-denizen-slaying showing up unless you can get them to deal and activate the slaying-of-the-denizen flag early since there's no player to do it and they honestly just want to go onto the next session like a speedrunner so they can troll people. The battle for one allegedly took everyone's armies, a swarm of godtier players (including a high-level Breath player who decided to see how much damage tornado drill spam could do), and PM with a regisword but the denizen went down eventually. It is recommended you take a dead player's land ASAP if you want to buy more time as it will stabilize back down to working (allowing you to farm its atomik ebonpyres for grist, its economy for boondollars and approval rating, and its villages for troops and quests) and hand you right and some ability to do any Duties remaining, so coupled with their player pendant and that planet's Aspect Wizard consort hero and/or Secret Consort with beholding a dead player becomes slightly less damaging to success probability, if not mental health. Plus the denizen will have released the hoard and gone into mope mode so unless you apply hugs as an Aggrievance treatment (how good an idea this is usually depends if you had this denizen before and you are meeting again on friendlier terms and if you're godtier so a denizen rage kill to say leave them alone doesn't permakill you) or try to kill them (lol not a good idea) you should be able to just ignore him or her.
The main benefits to taking over more lands mean different consort troops and more extensive resources. While almost all the spawns will be ohgodwhats on an angry land, any underlings that aren't will almost always be high-level and so, so worth it to make into Captcha Cardmonsters. Regular dead lands will have underlings that don't even resist being caught in abstractions so if their material type and prototypical data is good, you can catch them all easy. Both the additional assets and the captcha cardmonsters are fully integrated, handing you access to the dead player's stuff if you take their land and allowing you to have a shitton of Underlings in your shiny new army.
Prospit and Derse can be taken either diplomatically or by force but by force will utterly tank your rep with that side, be prone to insurrections (though Derse's general anti-royal sentiment and Parcel Mistress or Prospitian Mailwoman and her dersite counterpart Overworked Deliverygirl being incredibly badass because mail ninjas will usually lead to being able to handle these with the mail manager herself without even denting her health vial) and often lead to an accelerated reckoning if you don't know what you're doing. If you can get them like before the second player enters or whatever sure hax on your part. It's a complex blob of dialogue options to take the moon by diplomacy and it's sometimes impossible but brute-forcing it with consort diplomats can get stuff done if your carapace rep with that side is like 'you are practically a national figure now'. Prospit and Derse do not exactly have very much in the way of exploitable grist resources but their economy will hand you booncases in a few days if you know who to invest in, like planetary stock exchanges if you abuse time travel or precognition on them. Which is a perfectly good way to win the economy. If you have a Gristwidget you can abuse the lunar or planetary economy and an alimentator, cruxtruder (theoretically), fast-regenerating verdancy, or other infinite material sources to pay for converting large amounts of replicable junk into grist, and the lunar economy is usually more expendable. The second use for the moons are grinding Approval Rating via events, especially when coupled with moonjacking. Whenever an event occurs when you're in charge of that planet (even if you obviously used the moon rockets to align them so you could do so) your Approval Rating goes up a little, though you will have to pay for certain expenses but it's worth it so much and easily handled. You will need this badly if you are irresponsible with your army and/or heavy with the losses. As far as troops, carapaces are usually slightly higher-statted than consorts and their heroes are way better especially with equipment use, but unless you copy some cloning equipment from the Veil producing carapaces takes way more time and other resources. Retasking military production of Prospit will get you reckoning'd unless you know what you're doing (like, you are an actual military commander AI and have specifically checked all possibly relevant game code and done some serious scans to verify the stats and abstractions of Prospitian military forces and done examinations of battlefield procedure and risk across countless sessions and all of that jazz and are using your supercomputer-brain to figure out better tactics, and you had better have gotten Tactician's Hubris out of the way if you're a Sage or Seer) and Derse's production will be run almost entirely by hard-to-sabotage loyalist insurrections so you can't retask that. Prospit also gives you the Tectrix of the Arbitor when you take them over. It's a feather pen that can turn into Tectrixcalibur, a decently overpowered sword great for a commander or a bladekind user. Neat, huh.
Even if you ignore taking the moons, once your Denizen is out of the picture and Skaia authorizes your entry, you and/or your troops can start fighting on the Battlefield yourself once you acquire or alchemize some relevant vehicles or a ton of flight equipment to ferry yourself and them to there. This will usually be a colossal waste of time until the Reckoning is nigh anyways and BK is going to demolish WK quickly. It will badly damage your carapace rep to be competing with a side, so you had better negotiate either an alliance or neutrality treaty with Prospit to avoid having to deal with two armies and be prepared to lose all favor in the eyes of Dersites everywhere if you want to try clearing out the field beforehand. The game in normal cases considers it an imperative to ensure that the Reckoning occurs and WK will refuse to trigger it on the Battlefield so it's seriously just a better idea to to avoid challenging the Black King beforehand. Even if you think you can, don't. Sages and seers who do not know about this and even some that do will often end up getting their mandated plan failure here. Derse's army is actually decently formidable sometimes to everyone except a high-end player anyways.
At this point once you've taken everything you want, Tactical takes a sideline unless you are doing some questing that allows for using an army to kill all the things that need killing. Pretty much all major plot arcs work the same otherwise (sorry, no Nightmare Heir bypass for you. Try using the infamous pendant exploit where you use a rangedkind and snipe the Nightmare Heir in where his pendant would be the second he appears. Instead of sniping your bullets out of the air his determine-danger scripts might bug out and not bother the first time, giving you enough margin for error to do the Earthsea Borealis in one shot). Just...Unless you have some ludicrously powerful aspect abilities or endgame weapons it's gonna be difficult to do the underworld with an army, but it's possible. In the same way that killing a denizen without their consent is possible. Angels, even the lesser ones that seem to disguise themselves in code as Hope-aspected, can stand a whole minute of sustained fire from a singular copy of Ahab's Crosshairs, a mid/lategame riflekind directed energy weapon. The obvious answer is to spam well over 60 ranged weapons of equivalent or greater power and appropriate rangedkind specibus per angel in the Underworld before sending them in. There are well over 130 angels down there absolute minimum, so you will likely need well over 8000 soldiers in Angel-corruption-resistant-armor armed with high-end rangedkind, plus several heroes with the same or better equipment in order to brute-force the Underworld. It is recommended you rent several dozen Speakers of the Furthest Ring as well, probably a good idea to get the aid of a couple horrorterrors too. Flooding the Underworld with Others corruption tends to piss off and more importantly occasionally weaken the angels. If you're going to break the Law, you had better be able to exterminate every one of those white winged dildoes. Anyways, if you just leave it alone in a sustainable generate-resources-produce-and-arm-soldiers build, by the endgame you'll have a large army of consorts plus any followers you got, and you can wipe out the Black King's bodyguard army when the Reckoning is a coming.
....wow that's a nasty first draft I could use some help sorting that out. Anyone seen or been through a Tactical session that can offer some decent advice?
From the prelude section, article on Quests and Lore part 4.
Being a sandbox game, the premise of Sburb is mostly political. The Players take on the role of nobles in exile from their respective territory, or [Land], which has been stolen by an evil force called the [Denizen]. Since they were driven out, the exiled Players have been fostered by two powerful kingdoms, the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness, two powerful nations that are competing for something called the [Ultimate Reward]. This Ultimate reward is something that lies dormant under a mystical battlefield over which the two kingdoms are fighting each other and have been doing so since forever.
From there, it is pretty clear that this mysterious Ultimate Reward is the hot shit since everybody wants to get their grubby fingers on it. That is the Player's cue that they should aim to get that prize all for themselves. As it turns out, the Battlefield and the Ultimate Reward lies on some kind of holy ground. In order to compete on these grounds for the Reward, the Players must first reach independence. Cast in the role of the exiled nobles, the players are urged to prove themselves, to repossess their Land, to recover their status and tip the scale in their favor all the way to the magic battlefield planet thing called [Skaia].
That is the situation where you stand at the start of a session. You can gather this much information by asking for an audience with the queen NPC of your respective kingdom. Before you do that, remember that barging unannounced into the royal palace is not polite. Also, flying in court is considered a lack of courtesy. Just request for a meeting, wait until you are summoned and then walk up to the throne to ask the queen what's up with all the dream racism and warmongering.
The queen’s first reaction is always to reassure you that you don’t have to worry about anything. You need to push some buttons a little to unlock the right dialog option. Try pleading for peace between the two kingdoms with a long monologue on pacificism, or try saying that you don’t want to go to sleep just to see some color-coded mannequins hating on each other. If you play your cards right, the queen will explain the political situation that I described above.
This exposition will involve a lot of weird terms like [Heir Sansparent], [Heir Conditioning] and [Heir Transparent] which refers to your political status. The queen will also explain that Players are given the honorary title of Prince/Princess of the dream kingdom as royal guests, which entails a whole bunch of respect but doesn’t carry political weight. This part can be a little confusing since the words heir and prince are part of the lore but they have nothing to do with the Heir or Prince title. You'd think that somebody would have caught that bad design during early testing but apparently it's still in the game. Anyway, the point of the queen's answer is basically that the war between the black kingdom and the white kingdom is going to continue regardless of what you think. Wow rude. On the other hand, it's fair to say that the relationship between the two kingdoms isn't exactly a war. The dream kingdoms do not directly assault each other. They only send troops to the Battlefield to compete for the right of obtaining the Ultimate Reward. it's kinda like entering a battle royal in a big arena where the last man standing is the victor. That’s how it works. Only an Heir Transparent, someone who is the official heir or heiress of a Land, has the right to put a claim on the Ultimate Reward and enter the fray on the Battlefield.
None of this crap is terribly important, the bottom line is that you need to embark on a vague quest to become the champion and defender of your Land. This is the basic geopolitical setup of a session and this is where the land quests begin.
From there, it is pretty clear that this mysterious Ultimate Reward is the hot shit since everybody wants to get their grubby fingers on it. That is the Player's cue that they should aim to get that prize all for themselves. As it turns out, the Battlefield and the Ultimate Reward lies on some kind of holy ground. In order to compete on these grounds for the Reward, the Players must first reach independence. Cast in the role of the exiled nobles, the players are urged to prove themselves, to repossess their Land, to recover their status and tip the scale in their favor all the way to the magic battlefield planet thing called [Skaia].
That is the situation where you stand at the start of a session. You can gather this much information by asking for an audience with the queen NPC of your respective kingdom. Before you do that, remember that barging unannounced into the royal palace is not polite. Also, flying in court is considered a lack of courtesy. Just request for a meeting, wait until you are summoned and then walk up to the throne to ask the queen what's up with all the dream racism and warmongering.
The queen’s first reaction is always to reassure you that you don’t have to worry about anything. You need to push some buttons a little to unlock the right dialog option. Try pleading for peace between the two kingdoms with a long monologue on pacificism, or try saying that you don’t want to go to sleep just to see some color-coded mannequins hating on each other. If you play your cards right, the queen will explain the political situation that I described above.
This exposition will involve a lot of weird terms like [Heir Sansparent], [Heir Conditioning] and [Heir Transparent] which refers to your political status. The queen will also explain that Players are given the honorary title of Prince/Princess of the dream kingdom as royal guests, which entails a whole bunch of respect but doesn’t carry political weight. This part can be a little confusing since the words heir and prince are part of the lore but they have nothing to do with the Heir or Prince title. You'd think that somebody would have caught that bad design during early testing but apparently it's still in the game. Anyway, the point of the queen's answer is basically that the war between the black kingdom and the white kingdom is going to continue regardless of what you think. Wow rude. On the other hand, it's fair to say that the relationship between the two kingdoms isn't exactly a war. The dream kingdoms do not directly assault each other. They only send troops to the Battlefield to compete for the right of obtaining the Ultimate Reward. it's kinda like entering a battle royal in a big arena where the last man standing is the victor. That’s how it works. Only an Heir Transparent, someone who is the official heir or heiress of a Land, has the right to put a claim on the Ultimate Reward and enter the fray on the Battlefield.
None of this crap is terribly important, the bottom line is that you need to embark on a vague quest to become the champion and defender of your Land. This is the basic geopolitical setup of a session and this is where the land quests begin.
Blah blah blah, heroic stuff. But hey, Prospit and Derse get these huge armies, why can't you? Screw being a champion, we all want an army to do our junk for us. Nobility is supposed to be the rich people sitting on their asses commanding other people to do stuff like operate their estates, not godwarriors strifing down imps in person. And that's where the Tactical variant comes in. This terrifying rambling randomness collected cheerily freshly from coherent corrupted player people summarizes Sburb's tense Tactical Variant version. I noticed you guys had access to it sometimes (it's mentioned in a guide for Tacticians as a way to make defeating the Black King easier, and there was a talk about strategies in the chat section) but there were no detailed guides so I figured "screw it, I'll put one here for you"
Tactical is not available in every session. Sorry for you strategists who want a small army, try getting a bunch of followers to team up or something. The signs of Tactical being available range from subtle stuff like imps being better at strategy even if no prototypings would affect it, to less subtle stuff like consorts saying "We should all team up and fight the [insert latest quest problem here] ourselves! But we need a leader lol nevermind", from ludicrously specific and hard-to-find stuff like the Skaia.net lab having books like Sun Tzu's Art of War in among the complex science stuff, to noticeable stuff like the Panoramic Imaginarium having a large section full of statmirrors that show you stuff that has nothing to do with you personally unless you decided to start a business or army already. But, there will be signs. Playercount will also be quite high, and prototypings will usually have a level of nastiness that an army would be really nice. You will almost always have a Tactician player and their Tactician's Hubris will be utterly horrifying. Your sprite or a prophecy may mention it outright that you will be leading an army at some point and at that point unless your pepleader is enough to make npcs that don't normally follow people follow you in particular it is pretty clear tactical is available and will be used. For various reasons, tactical sessions tend to last very long (especially if someone prototyped something hard to destroy thus making everything have gel viscosity and health vial through the roof), usually a few years.
Tactical mostly operates on two major additional statistics, Approval Rating (how much what you're commanding likes you, both by-individual-group and overall, which means whether people will follow orders without abuse of pepleader and mind control or even follow you at all) and a stat configuration that determines the form and effectiveness of command abstractions somehow. The rest of the stats added are minor and hard to remember, and many of the rest just take existing stats and do more things with them, especially pepleader for obvious reasons, verballistamina for other reasons, boonwhatevers and grist for resources, the secondary shipping stats (no, glitching them up for more commandingness is not worth it) especially HNNG for consorts for some reason but it's buggy and terrible like the rest of the game but worse, carapace rep for obvious reasons, and the invisible stat for corruption if you're siding with us or them or you know who. The command abstractions are linked to your player pendant, which becomes the Tactician Pendant (ugh, sburb stop reusing terminology it's confusing and we KNOW you have nothing against using weird words for stuff) when you engage tactical and enter the middle glut. It's one of the two secret pendant states that fit in that unknown state mentioned in the FAQ. The second and other secret pendant states concern many other things, something else entirely. Tactician pendant is basically player pendant and overrides Skaia pendant except for the actually useful and game-essential features and player stuff that pops in when it should. It also causes pinging to identify the owner player, Skaia, and field commander heroes. It is distinguished from the Player Pendant by being slightly larger in the actual pendant part thingummy. The larger pendant is the same color as player pendant besides a skaia-tinted edge liner for skaia pendant when that activates, and the outside part's color that changes depending on the composition of your army.
There are two major ways to engage Tactical, starting with your moon or starting on your own Land. There's a third method that involves a metric gigaton of corruption but that's just a shortcut to starting on your own land. It is not advisable to start with your moon for many reasons but I'll include it for completeness' sake. Oh, who am I kidding. Don't join the moon crazies I'm only telling you because you should know what it is so you can avoid it and it might lead to more corruption to solve the problem with violence.
To start with your moon, go to your dream moon and ask either the Queen herself, a sufficiently high-ranking agent like Jack Noir or that Prospitian archagent disco partier, or a military commander on-Battlefield during your Legendary Nap, to screw all that land shet and get in on this competition by joining their bid for the Ultimate Reward instead of making your own. You will be chastised for generally disobeying Sburb's mandated heroism and effectively leaving your land to die, but if you're persistent enough you can eventually make them go fine and hire you to do some military contracting. You will eventually be allowed access to the Battlefield or somewhere and can start killing those enemy carapaces and after they realize you are ridiculously good you get promoted or something a bunch of times and eventually you get to handle part of your moon's military whatnots. And now for every reason why this is a terrible idea.
If you are working with Derse, your every action works to accelerate the Reckoning, and if you are incompetent or sabotaging enough to allow Prospit a temporary lead you will end up in a lot of trouble with Derse and likely get killed. If you want to turn against Derse you will have to have a ludicrously high Approval Rating to have any chance of success and it's going to tank your black carapace rep to extreme enemyship and a kabillion things can and will go wrong and the BQ and agents will terminate you and oh freaking Jenna it's not worth it please don't side with Derse if you want your session to stand a chance of success and more importantly stay alive the horror stories are just brutal.
Even if you're on Prospit, you will be unable to drive Prospit to a victory unless [The War Will Never Stop] is glitched and if that's so you have bigger problems and Prospit will not hand over the rights to the Ultimate Reward and you'll have to force someone to get the vital meteors defense-portal'd etc. etc. There are some secondary reasons why Prospit is required to lose by the game and they come up here. This is not worth it and you will likely get trashed by Derse and end up having a fast Reckoning anyways.
Not specific to either moon, you invariably have to answer to and seriously obey a larger party (unless you get handed the reins or take them by force, neither of which is easy) which can come at obscenely bad times, failing to Earn Your Wings beforehand can lead to location problems, there are so many glitches it's not worth it, etc. You will also murder your carapace rep with the other side as being an active military officer of the other side tends to raise a lot more flags than diplomatic guest. Seriously. No. Don't do it. You will usually only have to deal with a moon tactical if someone is suffering from Questant's Lament because of the whole join-the-side-thing or very rarely Phantasmagoric Waltz with a bad sleep ratio and an independent walk-stab-walk or megalovania problem, especially if drunk, because anyone with foresight knows how this is going to end but if you're out of your mind and not with Rain who knows. Look, it's glitchy and ugly and it's more likely to be taken by people who have already become a problem. Make deals with us or your Denizens if you have to in order to get rid of this, please.
And now for the part we've all been waiting for, doing it the better way with your land. The first thing you've got to do is get your Land Reputation really, really high normally. Once that's dealt with, start going village by village doing stuff until you've exhausted virtually all the very early-game quests and eventually the village chief will give you some appellation like the [insert heroic word] of [context of consort village] here, which is almost a surefire marker of Tactical since normal sessions don't lead to consorts caring so much about all the stuff you do for them dear Jenna seriously. You're gonna have to seek out a lot of hidden quests and you'll probably have to come back later after doing some sidequest or main quest stuff, especially if your land has a special different thing according to first contact. Post-Denizen land reformation tends to be the point where all subsequent quests are done. Once you've racked up enough of these (luckily just a few) it splits into two options, again, but it's picked by your session so whatever. It can and has happened pre-Denizen-slaying, but if so your session is going to be almost all-tactical and you will have control so early everyone won't even have entered yet.
The first option is to assemble your fledgling rulership village by village. This usually happens if there are many many consort villages on bad or independent terms with each other or the consort capitol, especially if the game has decided that they must fight each other in addition to the underlings and whatever else could kill those poor innocent consorts for stupid game being full of its stupid reasons for things. You basically go village to village getting appreciation until at some point they declare you nobility or something and you gain control of them. Once you are Land Nobility you enter the middle glut phase and sort of expand your dominion village by village more until you've got the land and can continue.
The second option is to end up being handed rulership of the entire land suddenly and abruptly. After defeating your Denizen and getting a few appreciation appellations is usually the point where this happens, especially because of the whole lore thing actually being consistent for once in Paradox Space and all assorted afterlives including hells thereafter. Anyways, you get called to the consort capitol and the consort king says he's giving you control of some stuff and then you enter the middle glut phase. Your player pendant becomes the Tactician Pendant when this happens.
The middle glut phase is ludicrously session-specific. Your mythological role, land, consort type, session prototypings, you, the choices you've made, even a bunch of obscure stuff all plays into this. It will basically consist of learning your personal command abstraction(s) (they range from everything from player commands to more meta abstractions) from your consorts and tactician pendant like an infernal guess-and-check tutorial for once, miraculously mostly-bug-free figuring out build order stuff and how to create...more units...somehow...I think ectobiology shenanigans, aspect powers, construction interfaces with server, and alchemy were mentioned at many points but it was ugly and everyone got into this huge argument about pattern determination and I was distracted by an offer of squiddle treats from someone seeking eldritch advice so I missed most of it anyways. If you do not have total Land control yet, there are also quests to earn more of it. This is where consorts seek you out and give you Tactical-specific quests the most, but they can continue into the later midgame. What you have and will have access to varies immensely by game, because the glut is random-quest-gen tier confusing and Sburb appears to be meta-betatesting Tactical changes across version drift, so....who even knows. How it even works is up to major variation.
The chief types of structures you will encounter will have variants of the [resource generator], [unit production], [fortification], [organizational], [utility], [decorative], or [ability] tags, while units will usually fall into the various [soldier] derivatives, [constructor], [resource acquisition], [specialist], [caster], [vehicle], or [hero] designations, plus something defining whether the unit is [consort_[type here]], [carapace_[type here]], [underling_[type here]], [other_[type here]] etc. Having more than one of these designations is not uncommon, except for what species it is for units for obvious reasons. To build a structure, get all the stuff you need then use your command abstraction to order it to be so. The constructors will build it and it'll be dealt with in a few days, weeks, or months depending on the nature of the game.
[resource generator] is exactly what it sounds like. These things deal with acquiring, abstracting, and streamlining access to all the things you would need in a typical Sburb RTS-like thing. Most of them deal in grist, boondollars, items of various kinds, approval rating, infrastructural needs, construction, storage, population supportability, or session-specific other resources, it varies.
[unit production] is also exactly what it sounds like. These...make units. Through various means. I've seen ectobiology, vat cloning, the nasty, training facilities to hire random filler npcs and make them skilled in helping you, Captcha Cardmonsters upscaled, even outright game magic of cheating them out of nowhere like it does with Lands and other spontaneous generation spawnings like underlings.
[fortification] is structures rigged to be like...fortifications and stuff. Walls. Towers with snipers in them. Cannon platforms. Ditches and moats. Stuff you would want on a castle, plus actual castles and stuff. Even furniture forts, some with a consort guarding them. Expensive for the most part but getting a few sniper towers set up around your dwelling spire with consort furniture forts inside everywhere plus some grist collector units roving around will effectively make your house a nice safe grist farm. Sure, passing through your First Gate got rid of the atomyk ebonpyre but that doesn't stop spawning entirely and security is nice. Have your Life player add a crystalanth and then set up that machine that naturally plays the appropriate Song of Life and suddenly you've got an autohealer machine to keep this place running.
[organizational] is all those useful research structures and build-me things that don't do much themselves besides handling bureaucracy and making other structures possible. Consort chieftan homes, carapacian paper-pushing offices, science labs, village construction management sites, the works.
[utility] is basically utility things that would be nice to have like firefighting services and armories or whatever that indicates that this will either be really useful or not very depending on your session and the derivative of utility used. Usually stacks with something else.
[decorative] basically means this structure looks really pretty according to the game abstractions. There's some complex shenanigans with these, parks, and approval rating but...eh, it's Sburb you'll probably find it by accident.
[ability] is structures that DO things. Massive aspect casting, passive or direct healing, awesome stuff. Usually expensive but still.
[soldier] and derivatives are basically the generics who actually fight. Nothing much to say here. Strife specibus varies.
[constructors] actually take your grist and boondollars and other things and make or buy the stuff and build it. Again, general.
[resource acquisition] gathers those resources for you in the first place, picking up drops or manning resource structures.
[specialist] You will absolutely love these people when it comes to questing. They are experts at dealing with weird puzzle shit and things that need to be done depending on their specialties. Need to build a bridge? Screw rickety hastily made pile of wood, pull over a constructor and assemble a shiny new legitimate-looking bridge! Incomprehensible puzzle? No precognitory people to abuse? pew pew soup cans solved.
[caster] is for units that do fakey fake game magic. Like your Secret Consort except usually more reliable. Somewhere around wizard enemies in shiny firepowers.
[vehicle] is for vehicles and carrier machinery. Is often misapplied and becomes a general robot-thing.
[hero] is for anything that is in the high-power tiers yet explicably following you. Like, agents and stuff like the pirate consort because of his ludicrous defenses. If you've formally gotten a coplayer to effectively sign their soul over to you and you've inducted them into the ranks of your army so they can do quests for you or whatever they count here. Most named carapaces with a decent power level go here. I have no idea what in hell kind of mind control you have over somecarapace to do this but if you've got a ringwraith or sceptrewraith following your orders they qualify for heroship instantly. Corrupt things are usually marked as heroes to create a buffer layer of abstractions between their/our messy code and the game itself due to exceptions.
After you figure out how to make certain sentient game abstractions do your bidding, you sort of take over your land on a wide scale. You are still supposed to do stuff, but a lot of people tend to get lazy and rely on their inefficient consort army to zerg rush the enemy into oblivion and eventually do all questing that doesn't require aspect abilities or personal presence (and the former can be alleviated with the Aspect Wizard consort hero and the latter with a Mist player). This death spam tends to be absolutely devastating to your Approval Rating and to a truncated extent your land rep and if you have a Flesh player they will likely begin following around your army and building an second army of zombies out of the corpses of the fallen simply because of the sheer excess of free corpses. It is usually seriously worth it to keep doing normal questing stuff yourself, especially for treasure.
The middle glut phase concludes when you have pretty much total control of your land as a reasonable military commander, enough mastery of your command and most of your structures and techs set up to the point where you can set it and be done with it and go back to focusing on other things until such point as an army of game abstractions would be useful like softening up the Black King or dealing with remaining Dersite forces during the Reckoning.
You can also extend this process and take over other Lands but this is nasty and not recommended if the player is alive. The regular thing about Nightmare Heir knelling and the implication that other players could do something like that with a living player for that land is involved but nobody I talked to except some dead guys from doomed timelines did it because why in hell would you do that. Tactical sessions tend to glitch on landgen and landdeath more extensively, resulting in dead players' lands sometimes remaining viable for takeover and unverified lands that have no player and eventually almost always have to be cleared to get all that darn creative potential airgrist out of it by violent-denizen-slaying showing up unless you can get them to deal and activate the slaying-of-the-denizen flag early since there's no player to do it and they honestly just want to go onto the next session like a speedrunner so they can troll people. The battle for one allegedly took everyone's armies, a swarm of godtier players (including a high-level Breath player who decided to see how much damage tornado drill spam could do), and PM with a regisword but the denizen went down eventually. It is recommended you take a dead player's land ASAP if you want to buy more time as it will stabilize back down to working (allowing you to farm its atomik ebonpyres for grist, its economy for boondollars and approval rating, and its villages for troops and quests) and hand you right and some ability to do any Duties remaining, so coupled with their player pendant and that planet's Aspect Wizard consort hero and/or Secret Consort with beholding a dead player becomes slightly less damaging to success probability, if not mental health. Plus the denizen will have released the hoard and gone into mope mode so unless you apply hugs as an Aggrievance treatment (how good an idea this is usually depends if you had this denizen before and you are meeting again on friendlier terms and if you're godtier so a denizen rage kill to say leave them alone doesn't permakill you) or try to kill them (lol not a good idea) you should be able to just ignore him or her.
The main benefits to taking over more lands mean different consort troops and more extensive resources. While almost all the spawns will be ohgodwhats on an angry land, any underlings that aren't will almost always be high-level and so, so worth it to make into Captcha Cardmonsters. Regular dead lands will have underlings that don't even resist being caught in abstractions so if their material type and prototypical data is good, you can catch them all easy. Both the additional assets and the captcha cardmonsters are fully integrated, handing you access to the dead player's stuff if you take their land and allowing you to have a shitton of Underlings in your shiny new army.
Prospit and Derse can be taken either diplomatically or by force but by force will utterly tank your rep with that side, be prone to insurrections (though Derse's general anti-royal sentiment and Parcel Mistress or Prospitian Mailwoman and her dersite counterpart Overworked Deliverygirl being incredibly badass because mail ninjas will usually lead to being able to handle these with the mail manager herself without even denting her health vial) and often lead to an accelerated reckoning if you don't know what you're doing. If you can get them like before the second player enters or whatever sure hax on your part. It's a complex blob of dialogue options to take the moon by diplomacy and it's sometimes impossible but brute-forcing it with consort diplomats can get stuff done if your carapace rep with that side is like 'you are practically a national figure now'. Prospit and Derse do not exactly have very much in the way of exploitable grist resources but their economy will hand you booncases in a few days if you know who to invest in, like planetary stock exchanges if you abuse time travel or precognition on them. Which is a perfectly good way to win the economy. If you have a Gristwidget you can abuse the lunar or planetary economy and an alimentator, cruxtruder (theoretically), fast-regenerating verdancy, or other infinite material sources to pay for converting large amounts of replicable junk into grist, and the lunar economy is usually more expendable. The second use for the moons are grinding Approval Rating via events, especially when coupled with moonjacking. Whenever an event occurs when you're in charge of that planet (even if you obviously used the moon rockets to align them so you could do so) your Approval Rating goes up a little, though you will have to pay for certain expenses but it's worth it so much and easily handled. You will need this badly if you are irresponsible with your army and/or heavy with the losses. As far as troops, carapaces are usually slightly higher-statted than consorts and their heroes are way better especially with equipment use, but unless you copy some cloning equipment from the Veil producing carapaces takes way more time and other resources. Retasking military production of Prospit will get you reckoning'd unless you know what you're doing (like, you are an actual military commander AI and have specifically checked all possibly relevant game code and done some serious scans to verify the stats and abstractions of Prospitian military forces and done examinations of battlefield procedure and risk across countless sessions and all of that jazz and are using your supercomputer-brain to figure out better tactics, and you had better have gotten Tactician's Hubris out of the way if you're a Sage or Seer) and Derse's production will be run almost entirely by hard-to-sabotage loyalist insurrections so you can't retask that. Prospit also gives you the Tectrix of the Arbitor when you take them over. It's a feather pen that can turn into Tectrixcalibur, a decently overpowered sword great for a commander or a bladekind user. Neat, huh.
Even if you ignore taking the moons, once your Denizen is out of the picture and Skaia authorizes your entry, you and/or your troops can start fighting on the Battlefield yourself once you acquire or alchemize some relevant vehicles or a ton of flight equipment to ferry yourself and them to there. This will usually be a colossal waste of time until the Reckoning is nigh anyways and BK is going to demolish WK quickly. It will badly damage your carapace rep to be competing with a side, so you had better negotiate either an alliance or neutrality treaty with Prospit to avoid having to deal with two armies and be prepared to lose all favor in the eyes of Dersites everywhere if you want to try clearing out the field beforehand. The game in normal cases considers it an imperative to ensure that the Reckoning occurs and WK will refuse to trigger it on the Battlefield so it's seriously just a better idea to to avoid challenging the Black King beforehand. Even if you think you can, don't. Sages and seers who do not know about this and even some that do will often end up getting their mandated plan failure here. Derse's army is actually decently formidable sometimes to everyone except a high-end player anyways.
At this point once you've taken everything you want, Tactical takes a sideline unless you are doing some questing that allows for using an army to kill all the things that need killing. Pretty much all major plot arcs work the same otherwise (sorry, no Nightmare Heir bypass for you. Try using the infamous pendant exploit where you use a rangedkind and snipe the Nightmare Heir in where his pendant would be the second he appears. Instead of sniping your bullets out of the air his determine-danger scripts might bug out and not bother the first time, giving you enough margin for error to do the Earthsea Borealis in one shot). Just...Unless you have some ludicrously powerful aspect abilities or endgame weapons it's gonna be difficult to do the underworld with an army, but it's possible. In the same way that killing a denizen without their consent is possible. Angels, even the lesser ones that seem to disguise themselves in code as Hope-aspected, can stand a whole minute of sustained fire from a singular copy of Ahab's Crosshairs, a mid/lategame riflekind directed energy weapon. The obvious answer is to spam well over 60 ranged weapons of equivalent or greater power and appropriate rangedkind specibus per angel in the Underworld before sending them in. There are well over 130 angels down there absolute minimum, so you will likely need well over 8000 soldiers in Angel-corruption-resistant-armor armed with high-end rangedkind, plus several heroes with the same or better equipment in order to brute-force the Underworld. It is recommended you rent several dozen Speakers of the Furthest Ring as well, probably a good idea to get the aid of a couple horrorterrors too. Flooding the Underworld with Others corruption tends to piss off and more importantly occasionally weaken the angels. If you're going to break the Law, you had better be able to exterminate every one of those white winged dildoes. Anyways, if you just leave it alone in a sustainable generate-resources-produce-and-arm-soldiers build, by the endgame you'll have a large army of consorts plus any followers you got, and you can wipe out the Black King's bodyguard army when the Reckoning is a coming.
....wow that's a nasty first draft I could use some help sorting that out. Anyone seen or been through a Tactical session that can offer some decent advice?