Some new / changed bad guys?

[chrislocke2000 (OP)]

Much as I love our favourite spoiler races, NA may be a great opportunity to revamp some of them and also introduce some new ones so thought I’d start a thread to see what ideas people may have.

My current favourite idea is a bit of a cross between the bugs from Star ship Troopers and the organism from Evolution. This would basically be an organism that has no ships but would instead use planet launched probes to expand across the galaxy.

The organism would have very high tolerances for temperature, gravity and atmosphere and an inbuilt genetic evolution coding to allow it to adapt to hostile environments including airless worlds. The race would feed off of bio mass and metabolised TN materials (or whatever they get call in an NA setting!). Once adapted to a new planet / asteroid or having started to grow the equivalent of infrastructure in order to survive the organism would start to consume all the available resources, increasing in size and coverage of the planet. Once it had reached a certain critical mass that colony would itself start to send out its’ own probes to colonise nearby planets and in turn nearby systems. Clearly this would create an exponential growth that would be hard to deal with if left very long.

Combat wise each colony would grow the equivalent of troops to attack and kill local residents and protect the hive or whatever you want to call it. These would be pretty tough and could be in the equivalent of PDCs for the purpose of defence from aerial bombardment. A straight bombardment may also miss pockets of the organism and allow it to re-grow at a later date.

Inbound probes could be treated as heavily armoured missiles and destroyed although this may trigger increasingly large waves of probes from the launching colony. Probes destroyed on the ground could result in the launch of even larger probes that hold troop equivalents. Maybe work on the simple basis that everytime an attack fails the next wave will be twice the size.

Ships in system may be seen as more food and could come under sustained attack from launched probes, possibly from multiple colonies at the same time.  Potentially these would be smaller versions of the interplanetary and inter stellar probes. Hit ships would then have to deal with the equivalent of boarding actions so as not to be overrun and end up getting digested.
 
I would think that a lot of this could be covered off within the current system by basically giving them installations etc and would give a very different dynamic to many of the other spoiler races where people will typically just leave them alone until they are happy they can deal with them without problem.

The evolution mechanic might work very well from a tech comparison situation as well with the organism being able to match observed tech on engine effects / armour etc as it is encountered. In some respects this might mean that you don’t won’t to fight with your most modern tech and perish the thought that one of the probes hits a system with a certain advanced spoiler race in it.

[xeryon]

I have been thinking about this as well.  I have noticed in Aurora that there is a lack of a certain assimilating race that everyone has come to know.  I think a race that 'infects' your ships and colonys and takes control of them, thus gaining control of your property and absorbing some of your technology in the process could be a lot of fun to deal with.

[Steve Walmsley]

Interesting idea. It has been a while since a new special bad guy was introducued. I'll give it some thought for the next version.

Steve

[jseah]

Such a race would further encourage players to be highly xenophobic and insanely territorial.  You don't want to be sharing your tech with an NPR if they are just going to get overrun.  And the assimilating missiles would mean players would treat any incursion by something unknown as an immediate threat to blow out of the sky. 

Well, not like we weren't that way already.  Eat nuclear fire!

[Arwyn]

Here are a couple of other ideas;

Parasites- (aka; The Vang-by Christopher Rowley, Genestealers from 40k, the Parasites from Invasion of the Body Snatchers) 
The race is parasitical. They grow everything from organic material they assimilate from other races. In the Vang books, the Vang themselves are basically neural material, they take over a host and proceed to bioengineer it to suit their own uses. So, if a few of these get loose and start replicating, it can overwhelm a colony fairly quickly. The plus side, is their ship building takes a while. In the books, they were endangering the galaxy, and got stopped when another race used a weapon that caused their sun to go nova. Genestealers infect populations with their genetic material and co-opt their maternal/paternal instinct to protect the stealers. Lots of nasty fun to be had with these guys! Not as dangerous as Consumers, but harder to kill off. Left unchecked, very dangerous.

Consumers-
Basically, this is the pattern the Swarm fall into, but you could rev them up a bit my adding in ground troops and bonuses for the worlds/biomass they consume. The bigger the biomass, the larger they get, so they could be a potential game destroyer if they hit a very "green" system. Just to give the Invaders something to worry about! These guys would be your Star Trek Borg, or 40K Tyranids. Very scary bad guys!

Raiders-
Because we still don't have Pirates in Aurora! Star Vikings, Pirates, slave raiders, ect. A race that isn't necessarily out to conquer a planet, but the DO want you resources/tech/population. Not so much a game ender, but annoying as hell. Dangerous in the early game, more annoying later on, they just would add a random "WTF?" factor to the best laid plans of Presidents, Emperors, and Kings. Might make for some fun RP as well.

[wilddog5]

i was thinking of an enemy for the invaders that looks down on the "lower" lifeforms (they seek to protect the life that they think is of value and you might not...)

[Tanj]

I would be quite interested in seeing a few 'optional' variations on the current random NPR's actually, sort of like a standard NPC race but with certain unique characteristics. For example a fast expanding but technologically slow race (like the Bugs from the Rigellian Diary), or a slow expanding but high-tech race etc.

Ideally at game creation you could then choose which you want and which you don't (like we do with the current Star Spawn and Invaders). Then they can expand and colonise like the other NPR's at start-up, but with a certain flavour to them.

Space Pirates/Slavers are also a cool idea 

[UnLimiTeD]

Taking ideas from conventional 4X games:

Mechanoid races that have less problems with atmosphere and some mechanics related bonus, but slower growth, maybe in combination with mineral consumption.
Probably lower unrest and no economics bonuses.

Races with interesting metabolism.
Like "breathing" reactive particles; Such races would need dense atmospheres, but be resistant to noxious gases and radioactivity.

The Invaders could be remodeled a bit after the Shivans of the Freespace Series;
A race that tracks sub-space movement, in our case hyperjumps, and thus preserves balance by only 'destroying the destroyers', aka fighting high tech races..
They traditionally also come with strong shields and specialized weaponry.
Might also help balance them a bit.

I'd be nice if races could be generated with different breathing gases, like f.Ex. Hydrogen.

[jseah]

From my past posts:
Higher G races make better crews (wrt. max accelerations) but have less qualifying planets.  Low G races can't accelerate as fast but can colonize many moons. 

And a very old one:
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,2828.msg33910.html#msg33910

[Thiosk]

I've always liked the idea of the planetary organism-- i've always thought of it as a carnivorous plant with several life phases-- germination; its initial growth and combat phase (as it kills off the planet's indiginous species), domination; its planetary-scale utilization, and then a late spore stage where it is releasing the pods in search of new fertile ground, after it has exploited the planet.

on the topic of new mechanics:
While civilization bonuses could be interesting for us as player, I'm not sure how effectively interesting it will be for the computer controlled races to have different tolerances and bonuses.  You can basically pretend just about anythign from the existing lifeforms, as there is essentially no included backstory.

We've got the swarm as your biological insectoid (the evidence of which is that they lead fluid on hits), invaders as interdimensional lifeforms with exotic weapons, and mechanical automated defensive systems, the precursors (no need for atmosphere).

The most interesting thign to me about these races are their fundamentally different economic strategies.  Being able to play the game with those strategies would be very interesting.

It would be marvelous to be able to play a game as a swarm force, for instance, where you are raiding and attacking colonies to acquire more minerals and or biological compost.  

Or perhaps you are an invader, and you are generating wormholes to attack colonies for whatever purpose is determined.  

I don't think it would be interesting to play as precursors, unless it was a survival game mode where ships keep entering your system and you have to fend off ever increasingly difficult attacks with an ever dwindling force.

I'd love to see the existing aliens used in new ways, too, perhaps as new disasters.  For instance, and invading fleet could come not from a jump point, but from a light year away at some velocity large enough that it will arrive in Sol after 25 years, making the entire goal of that game the high-speed bootstrapping and construction of a mighty fleet to repel the immense attack, or series of attacks, on its arrival.

anything to expand the economic options for different races and then play as them would be mightily appreciated.

Somehow i ended up in a newtonian thread.  But I suppose it still stands.