A Beginner's Guide to Constructing Your Phase 2 Outpost: Introduction.

Interview conducted by Colonel Jefferson Ames, U.S. Army.

Interview subject, Ostrichka Corporation Representative Sitska, after four rounds of something called Proximin Ale in one of the hub bars.

You know you guys are fucked, right? Nobody who has a chance of constructing an outpost needs to know any of this. They've already been doing it for longer than your species has been out of the caves or trees or stagnant swamp pools, wherever it is you crawled out of. You look like the monkey types. Is that right?

Well, doesn't matter. These techniques get handed down from parent corporation to child corporation. Sometimes somebody comes up with a refinement, but it's pretty much the same strategy.

Anyway, fine. Step one is picking a good location. What's good for almost all of them isn't going to work for any of you because they're going to target you right away. So you're going to have to choose a spot they don't care about that much. It's still got to be worth your time though.

There's basically four tiers of resource generating locations. Alpha tier, forget about that. Those belong to the big boys. Beta tier, if you could take and hold one of those all the way through to the end of phase two, you'd be in good. You won't be able to. They might let you hold onto it at the beginning, at least for a while. That'd give you a pretty decent income. After that, they're either going to buy you out or send in an overwhelming army that you can't possibly defeat.

Delta tier, those are probably worth your time, but you'll never be able to grow it big enough to sustain the sort of outpost you'll need to make a serious phase three entry bid. And gamma tier, they'll let you have a gamma tier node. No question about that because nobody wants them.

So there's your answer. Anything you can hold onto, you don't want. Anything you want, you can't hold onto. Like I said, you're all fucked.

I played through the introduction in the building outposts for noobs guide that Colonel Ames had sent me for a third time. I had already given grandpa a copy as well as a rundown of the conversation we'd had. Like an idiot, I hadn't thought to record it.

Grandpa was perusing the guide, looking serious. I’d taken a quick look myself. There were dozens of chapters covering all sorts of different rulesets, and scenarios. Way more than I’d be able to study in the next couple days, especially since we still had to recruit the rest of our team. I’d checked with Bill and Bob, and they were in. Juana was working with Arjun to put together a list of candidates for us.

"Ames’s the one who put this together," I said. "And he still sent it to us? Seriously?"

"There's good information in here," Grandpa said. "Just have to get past all of the depressing parts about how we are doomed to lose and our species is going to spend the next ten thousand years as serfs, peons, and zoo exhibits."

"We should bring Veda into this." We were sitting in the elevator on the way back down to the surface. Sage had downloaded a bunch of media onto the birthday present Veda had given her. It was basically a space iPod that let her watch shows wherever she was. She was sitting back in her seat and giggling at some teen drama.

Grandpa and I were taking advantage of the mostly empty elevator to strategize. "I don't think we should tell Veda," Grandpa said.

That surprised me. He was usually a straight shooter and I would have expected him to say we should lay our cards on the table.

"Ames is right about a lot of this. All the aliens have their own agenda. Veda's been mostly straight with us, but there's still something she hasn't revealed. I don't want her to know just how much Ames is entrusting us with."

"They've got agendas, so does he. I am a little burned out on that whole patriotism bit after our encounter with Waters."

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"I get that," Grandpa said. "I really do. But Ames isn't wrong. When the aliens are done here, they're going to pack up this circus and leave. Then 100 trillion or 1 quadrillion or however many aliens move into the neighborhood. What happens to us puny 8 billion earth folk then?"

"I don't even know how much a quadrillion is, but it sounds like a lot." I knew how many zeroes were in the number, but I couldn’t picture it, couldn’t reason from "billion" to "quadrillion".

"You two grew up with me, out on the Strip. You know what it's like to have nothing. Me, I grew up on a reservation. That's even worse, because it's nothing and the stink of that nothing follows you everywhere. You get off the res and try to make a life for yourself and all anyone around you says is "there's that Indian off his reservation again" or tell you to get back to it. One of the reasons I didn't go back after marrying your abuela. Not that the strip's a whole lot better off, but at least I had land that was my own."

The talk was getting gloomy and I was feeling worse. "Alright, but what I don't like is that Ames is foisting some mysterious other teammates on us sight unseen. What if they come in and try to start bossing the show around? What if they do something that's going to hurt our friends? Our plan was for just those of us who've trained for this to go into phase two. For this outpost," I tapped my head as I looked at the very long table of contents in the How to Build an Outpost guide. "We're going to need everyone. The whole guild and then some. I don't know if I want to bring Grace and Rosa into this sort of situation."

Grandpa's eyebrows raised. "What about Juana?"

"She can take care of herself." I shifted uncomfortably, aware he was teasing me. "Look, you heard what Veda said. Death might not be permanent in phase two but it leaves scars."

"I know I'd spare them if I could but what else have we got to live for?" Grandpa asked. "We can't go home."

That had been an unpleasant revelation when Veda informed us that attuning to a soul coin meant that we were now technologically bound to a reality engine or reality engine derived technology. We might be able to go back to earth but it would take the help of some very expensive alien prosthetics.

Same for Mama Grace and everyone else in our coalition. Everyone else on Threshold. Most of them didn't know that yet. They were still dealing with digging out from underneath 20 years worth of debt that the reality engine exploitation committee had foisted on us all.

"Before we can get out of here we've got to negotiate buyout packages for everyone who has put themselves into our coalition," Grandpa said. "We owe them that much. It will be easier to do if I'm a position of strength. Whatever Ames’s up to, it's going to leave us in a stronger position. Besides," he said, "the first six or seven steps are pretty compatible with what Veda wanted anyway. All we have to do is get these new players on board, write up a proposal and send it to her."

He leaned back in his seat and folded his hands across his chest. "And that, my dear boy, is exactly what junior officers were invented for. I suggest you start working on the proposal now. You can finish filling in the details once we've met our new friends."

I groaned. "I should never have let them promote me."

"Cheer up," Grandpa said. "At this rate you'll be a captain by your next birthday."

"Oh yeah? I haven't seen a board of promotion around here."

"Between me and the colonel, I think we can probably swing it." Grandpa closed his eyes and pretended to snore.

I spent the rest of the trip down studying the first couple chapters in "How to Build an Outpost."

There was no point in getting ahead of myself. The outpost guide itself mentioned that until you had completed step four, you really didn't need to worry about the more advanced steps.

So I focused on the first four. It wasn't that bad, honestly. We needed to select a location that we could claim and guard. The higher the resource spawn rate of a location, the better our income would be, but we'd also need to spend a correspondingly large amount to defend and exploit the location. Too valuable a resource node would attract attention from other players. They would try to take it away from us.

The defenses that we had to defend our node from the reality engine spawned opponents - I mentally tagged them as "creep" like a couple of MOBA-style games I had played back a few years ago - would also let us defend against the enemies. I decided I would refer to them as "champions."

Ames’s guide, although quite thorough and depressing, tended to use army-style phrases to refer to enemy combatants and their capabilities. I thought I would translate everything into something a little more readable.

In fact, the more I read, the more I thought this reminded me of a tower defense game. We needed to build up our defenses, kill attacking spawn, collect resources from them, use them to strengthen our defenses, and also to pay off our miners and backers. Put it that way, it didn't seem so intimidating. I started to make notes. We were going to need more than just the initial attack team. Building an outpost would cost a lot of money. If we could put our crafters to work right away, then have them sell what they made back to the aliens coming in to take a piece of our engine, we’d be able to build up a warchest. Supplement whatever Veda and the colonel got us. But I didn’t want to equip our enemies too well. This was going to be a delicate balance.

By the time we were back, I had a few good ideas, which was, of course, why Juana was waiting at the elevator station to derail everything for me.