We’ve all been down the road to turmoil town at least once. The road is familiar, with all the same sights and sounds every time you hurtle unstoppably down it.

There’s Friday’s early surge in undermining just off the junction, followed by Sunday’s “Ewah still isn’t fortified guys!!!” a little further down the way, and right at the end of the road, who can miss Thursday morning’s last minute snipe?

But that’s not the only route to Disasterville. Oh no, there’s a more circuitous route that takes you somewhat round the houses, but before you know it, kicks you off the bus at turmoil terminus.

It starts with a difficult cycle.

You’re struggling to keep up with fortification because the undermining effort has been just a wee bit heavier of late and nobody was quite prepared for it. Every hour, like clockwork, you check the Galnet predictions and find your power is looking at -299CC next time around. Each time you do this, you wonder just how many systems you’re going to have to finish off before that number looks less insane, and you weep.

Piling in the dissidents (or whatever your fortification material may be) you truck back and forth, hemorrhaging credits like crazy just to keep up with the seemingly incessant wave of crafty underminers stirring up revolt in the home-worlds.

And then it’s over. Turmoil is avoided, narrowly, by virtue of a pair of failed expansions. The new cycle dawns and the power awakes to a CC balance of roughly half of bugger all.

“Fantastic!” you think as you keep up the momentum, fortifying *all the things* because you’ll be damned if you’re going to end up in the same position this coming Wednesday!

Only the undermining seems to have abated. Things have calmed down, and before you know it, you’ve got a dozen fully fortified systems and an incoming CC projection over 350. Now, to a less forward looking commander, this seems like cause for celebration. We’re as far as can be from going into turmoil it seems, only it doesn’t seem that way to you. You know what happens when there’s cash left over. It gets spent. It gets spent on shockingly awful systems. A mixture of worthless dives and border worlds, selected for their lack of any redeeming economical features or their politically contentious locations.

“We must outprep these Guru-damned awful selections!” you say to yourself, and in that moment realise that with all the hard won resources now available to us, the scale of the expansion budget means that we have to defuse not one, not two, but three of these economic and political landmines, and we have to do it sharpish. But better replacement systems are few and far between.

Struggling to maintain a positive outlook, you turn back to the only occupation you’ve known for weeks now, and continue fortifying.