SO ALEX when are we getting maxios back? I'm at home playing in Guatoya's Disc again but it feels lessened without my post-ruination backwater planet to off-dump my unwanted spoils onto.
I liked the aesthetic of an independent kill-fleet taking up home in a backwater, decivilized husk of a world, dumping the unwanted leavings of their conquests onto the micropopulace that has no income to compete with market prices any other way, picking up a trickle of refugees and supplies as they go.
I get that the Marines thing was broken but I legitimately love the aesthetic of a broken non-market that constantly puts out a tiny amount of basically free "crew" who are just looking for a way off the rock they were born on, in quantities too small to be worth attempting to cheese but still thematically meaningful enough that I always developed a habit of hitting maxios to grab refugees, even if I was already at capacity if only to drop them off at the next market
Edit: also it gives context to the ruin planets. Without maxios Penelope's Star is a lot less relatable because the distinction between these planets that were and the planets that are is a sharp, immediate one. All the dead planets are already dead, and speak of catastrophe, but having maxios there, clearly broken & unrecoverable with a pitiable trickle of free manpower of people, otherwise valuable, so desperate to get away that they'll climb aboard a warship for almost nothing. It stands as a reminder that every planet you find that Was isn't just a piece of rock that had a bomb dropped on it but is a physical monument to sometimes hundreds of years of struggle and suffering by millions of people trying to scrape what they could from what they had, and ultimately having either failed or escaped. It's a reminder that the things you do matter on the small scale, because a shipment of food that is but extra credits for you is the entire life of thousands of people
