This page describes the post-Apotheosis branch of the Paranid story line if you choose the War option (blowing up the station).

For the Peace option, see Paranid Unification.

Waring: you’re going to need 21 Bandannite Crystals toward the end. These are hard to buy, and annoying to find. If you have any, hold on to them to make life easier.

Fight!

You wanted a war, and it starts here.

All the ships that were escorting the Duke turn hostile and try to kill him for blowing up the station. Which… yah, that was you. So you need to save him. Gride will send in some reinforcements, so get to their side and start working on surviving. (The mission is to “protect the duke” but he can survive without you — his ship can’t be destroyed.)

You need to fly to within ~15 km of the Duke’s ship to trigger things (ships turning hostile, Gride’s reinforcements being activated).

Note that it’s possible to end up aggravating the local police forces, which will be a problem if you have assets in the sector. If this happens, you may wan to consider reloading and stying on the edges of the battle instead of trying to engage directly.

If you need to, reset back to an earlier save point and bring in some reinforcements before completing the mission and exiting the station. [You can wait in the station for a long as you like — there’s no time limit — but be aware that leaving the station will count as having made a decision.]

Note that you won’t suffer any reputation penalty from the battle, as long as you don’t attack any ship that isn’t hostile. There’s a chance you may trigger friendly fire from HOP police forces, though, so be prepared to evacuate ships from the sector if needed.

Be sure to collect any valuable ship mod parts in the drop from the battle

Once everyone’s dead, you have a break. Go talk to Dal when you’re ready to continue.

The Insurgence

Your main task here is to deliver 36 fighters to BUC to form the core of their new fleet. You can take as long as you want to assemble this fleet, but you need to deliver them all at once.

Once the fleet is delivered, you’ll need to go destroy a couple of small fleets in Nepolito’s fortune. The fleets consist of a destroyer, several gunships, and several fighters. The fleet isn’t large, but it is well armed. Be sure to take sufficient force with you.

As you fight them, the “unaffiliated” forces will either be destroyed or surrender (which turns them into BUC ships).

Once the ships are destroyed, you’ll to be told to wait for “the next step”. You’ll be contacted and told that this next step is that you need to undertake a very large construction project for the Duke, building him an entire ship building industrial base.

This potion of things is just sink for construction materials, so obviously you’ll need a pile of cash or your own factories producing supplies. If you’re in the middle of a war or trying to supply materials to an ally, this can put severe strain on your production.

From the Ashes

Your new friends want a base. A vast, sprawling base with more ship production capacity than any other faction has by default.

You don’t need to supply a manager (though see below), but will need to if you want to operate the base to your own benefit while it’s still under construction.

You may also want to start building infrastructure to supply the base, if this is part of your longer term plan.

Station

The build itself is straightforward: add a bunch of modules and deliver the needed supplies.

There are a couple things that might trip you up:

• Some of the modules have to be Paranid, not those of another faction (storage, defense disks and bridges, housing), though you can use any connector pieces you have.
• Adding turrets to every defense disk and bridge won’t be enough; you’ll also have to add turrets to the storage modules and maybe even add extra defense modules. Check the turret count of added modules carefully to make sure you have enough to meet the minimum count.
• When it says “2 S/M ship production” it means two S/M production bay modules (not just the ability to produce two ships at once).

Once the build is done, the station will automatically transfer to BUC control. If this doesn’t happen, you missed something.

Manager

Once the station transfers you will be told you need to supply a 5-star manager. The BUC have little production capacity, so need a long reach to have any hope of supplying the monster station you just gave them.

You can try to find one by walking around stations, but more likely you’ll need to transfer one of your own station managers.

The manager needs to have 5-star manager skill, not 5-stars overall/combined.

The Gathering Storm

Having finished and delivered the station, you are rewarded with… nothing. Other than huge hole in your bank accounts.

Great.

Now, hey, surprise: turns out the station needs supplies to actually do anything useful! And you somehow volunteered to deliver them. This is a straightforward “deliver a bunch of wares to a station” mission.

You also need to supply some research materials for Boso to complete his assignment — Bandannite Crystal for one, which are difficult to find. Then some fairly standard items.

Oh, and a BILLION CREDITS. No problem.