The Borg.
Any and all Borg-like entities could be considered cliched. This thought has occurred to me often as I ponder any future to the Sins universe. What could so handily defeat the bulk of the Vasari Empire fleet, such that it also remains mysterious and unidentified?
Let us assume this phenomena will make an appearance in a future Sins game.
The most playable option is to incarnate the phenomena as a faction.
The most science-fictiony explanation is some insidious abstract phenomena... perhaps a chaining reaction spawned by some high science laboratory of the Vasari themselves. This is the least playable option, but one with the most solid theatrical integrity.
I wonder if for the sake of the game you could combine the two in some amicable fashion. Make a faction the result of some intertwined lab experiment.
DEFINITELY NOT: Zerg or Aliens rip-off organic beasts, BuckCraft "young hero punk hungry for power gets corrupted by said power and turns on former allies" plotline (and I use the term in the very loosest of literary senses... Blizzard storytelling in my opinion sucks and has sucked for some time), the even Eviller Vasari Empire - The Black Vasari, any race that adopts & replicates technology it encounters.
I would love to see a new faction that is deliberately imbalanced for the sake of cooperative play. A faction that is twice as powerful, pound for pound, as any existing single faction. This would present a grand opportunity for cooperative play teamwork. To Hell with completely equal competitive play for this group, this single faction.
I would also love to see the avoidance of any aforementioned cliches. I know the introduction of another playable faction rather than an insidious effect could be considered a cliche in and of itself, but then again this is a game environment. A new faction is a practical and sensible thing to introduce.
Difficult issue to mull. Any thoughts?
"Chain reaction spawning"... that'd be von neuman machines of some description then. Which is a cliche by your own description (VNM's are basically the idea used to make the replicators from Stargate).
Perhaps the Vasari are political disidents, they ran to save their own necks from the noose (i.e. we're playing the 'evil' empire... the good guys are heading our way). I'm sure that's been done before as well.
You want something completley unbalanced chasing them? Mash Borg/Tyranids together and sprinkle in some Xeelee magic.
Considering Ironclad lifted pretty much all of the races in Sins from other games/fiction, gave them a coat of paint and sent them on their way (Advent = tweaked Higarans, TEC = generic Terran and so on) I'd suggest that the thing the Vasari are running from is their own VNM nanotechnology gone bad.
Or
"The masters of Baryonic... erm... phase space" aka tweaked Xeelee, not that I'm complaining... seeing a Nightfighter kicking seven shades out of pretty much everything would be worth the price of admission
I dunno about what the threat should be or will be.
However, I do have a thought on my mind that bothers me.
If Vasari are so pants-dirty scared of that thing that seems to follow them wherever they go... how the phawk did they let themselves get involved in a 15-year position war (i.e. entrenchment story). If I were in their shoes, I'd have dropped this stupid war with those useless humans and just found myself another galaxy. Vasari didn't attack the humans to conquer them at all cost. They are simply passing, the TEC planets are just refuelling points in the light of their story.
I don't understand why Vasari decided they don't fear their nemesis anymore and instead want to conquer every single TEC planet out there, no matter how long it takes.
"Inhibitors", from Alastair Reynolds' "Revelation Space", would actually fit pretty well.
I certainly hope the mysteririous 'Threat to the Vasari' will appear in an expansion. Apperaing as a new faction does seem like the best option. I think something dark and creepy..... hmm.
Deffinitely agree with this. A cliche like that would ruin the game, I think.
To continue Warhammer 40,000 reference, Tyranid/Necron. They use material from everything they conquer, but are ridiculously hard to kill and can resurect themselves. Or maybe something like David Weber's Bugs in 'The Univers at War' weries. They simly use extemely overwelming numbers, and by the end of the game, huge ships the size of star bases. (I know there's all kinds of threads out there on larg ships. Chill, I'm not starting a thread like that here, just brainstorming for a new race )
Maybe introduce the new race in a co-op campaign? (read 'uber time intensive, almost no one would finish' - just brain storming, though)
Lots of cool possibilities, but this race is certainly a hole that needs to be filled.
great ideas in here, fun to read and think about.
i'd like to see something truly unrecognizably alien. i don't just mean some creepy space version of a humanoid or even non-humanoid animal. i mean some form of life totally unrecognizable to us humanoids, not even a chance at communication or understanding.
for those of you who have ever read any H.P. Lovecraft or other similar stuff this would fall into the category of "outer realms entities". tentacles with tentacles on them. eyes that see the 4th and 5th dimension but not the 1st-3rd. really weird stuff like that.
they would be invaders from a parallel dimension with capabilities and motivations so alien even to the mighty Vasari that they were impossible to resist. their bizaare extra-dimensional communications would severely disrupt phasic transmissions and thus be responsible for the conquered parts of the empire going "black" as the exile fleet was running away.
Christ I might go insane with glee if we saw some 'old gods' style evil entering the Sins universe. Imagine giant tentacle thing like you see in Hellboy flying accross a gravity well. Unfortunately game mechanics wouldn't suit this at all, are the tentacles going to stand and shoot? Are the tentacles going to melee everything while they are just standing there and shoot back?
Some wierd arse organic ships with some king of evil green suction rays or something might work I guess. Could make them Lovecraftian like.
well yeah, for game mechanics you'd just come up with cool graphics to paste on top of relatively normal mechanics. you could have some unique stuff like being able to spread "madness" down phase lanes instead of the normal culture, or maybe an economy based on a resource that only the invaders could perceive (extra-dimensional resource asteroids?).
i dunno, the point isn't to make the game mechanics so different, they should be close enough to the other factions that you'd still feel like you were playing the same game. i just think it would make for really really awesome visuals and background fluff material. who wants yet another light frigate with a laser gun. i'd love to see a giant space squid that grapples things with giant tentacles. even if the tentacles had the same range and damage as a normal laser gun, i'd just cackle with delight to see the different graphics. it would be way cool.
So the Photino Birds it is then
But seriously, I think it's going to be nanotech gone bonkers.
Organic ships would be really, really hard to pull of for a host of reasons - basically none of the things that set organic ships apart have mechanics the devs can implement in the current game.
The origin of the threat (starting near the center of the Vasari empire and quickly taking out its homeworld) lends itself to a suggestion that the threat is a horde of ravaging nanobots that bust out of a military lab.
And here's a halo-fanboy-esque piece of speculation: the first shot of the opening cinematic shows a Vasari military lab surrounded by debris. The text says: "Viturska Experimental Transport Lab / Vasari occupied 'Kron' / 10,000 Years ago." The voiceover says "We don't know who they are." <-- (I acknowledge this is explicitly talking about the Vasari but there could be a subtext.)
Is it possible that this shot is actually looking at the beginning of the Vasari Nanothreat? It makes sense that it would happen on a transport lab - some new way of moving nanotech is developed independent of the weaponized uses on Vasari ships. Nanobots just start spreading like crazy, desinegrating everything in its wake. We know that the Vasari are threatened by nanotech because, well, they use it exensively in cutting edge warfare.
i mean, you guys might be right about what the "mystery threat" really is, its a plausible theory. but how could you make a faction out of rogue nano-bots?
i'm curious as to why an organic ship would be problematic to implement though. its all fiction anyway. the mechanics wouldn't have to be noticeably different than the other ships, just the graphics. giant space monsters that look like squids/whales/evil-birds. i'd enjoy it. taste is one thing, and story plausibility is another, but saying that it can't be done doesn't make sense to me.
[shameless plug]
You mean something like this?
[/shameless plug]
Ok, mods aside, I am also very interested to see what new factions IC is going to come up with. Now, to tell the truth, I wasn't terribly impressed with the original three to begin with. Most of it we have seen before. You have your standard humans which a certain portion of the players can identify with. Then you've got your energy-wielding, elegance and style elves-in-space equivalents which appeal to yet another portion of the playerbase, and finally you cover all those misfits who are left - with a strange alien race with insect-like ships, menacing history and - lets face it, they're evil aliens everyone likes to play now and then, and some like to play all the time.
I would love to see a purely organic faction come into play. But something original on that note, like a race of beings which actually live in space, like space wasps or bugs. Maybe they eat planets. Another relatively original take on things could be a race of purely energistic beings. Let's just say that their ships would be quite shiny. Positively luminous even.
What I would NOT like to see is yet another "evil cyborg" or "terminator" race. I know red-eyed robots are scary, but enough is enough.
Okay, no Zerg, I agree....
But what about something like Wh40k's C'tan or B5's Shadows? Some monstrous ancient enemy that the other races actually feel the effects of without realising it?
Hmm, it could be a biological threat, Yuuzhan Vong anyone?
or perhaps something like the Harvesters from MOO3?
Fair enough - in light of the fact that many of the aspects of machine-based ships are waived in Sins (fuel for instance), you could prolly waive many of the limitations of organic beings. They'd have to be verydifferent from the other 3 factions tho (for instance, using transdimensions rather than phase space; they probably aren't animals with phase drives in their tummies!).
Not that that's a bad thing! I've always preferred the Command and Conquer style of balancing (totally different factions/units with comparable power) to the Sins style (comparable factions/units with subtle but powerful differences).
I strongly doubt we'll be seeing the threat until Sins of a Solar Empire II.
I'd love to see something along the lines of the Yuuzhan Vong. Not the fugly ships of course, but something with a whole different philosophy to it than the existing trio.
I'm strongly tending towards the "interdimensional aliens" version rather than "berserk nanobots" or similar. Primarily because it's pretty emphatically a "virtuska transport lab", ie. something to do with phase space, or perhaps another dimension they were trying out as a phase space alternative. I also like the idea of their primary theme coming to bite the Vasari in the rear. (Vasari are called "Phase" in the game files, like the TEC are "Tech" and Advent "Psi")
Design-wise I'd prefer glowy (or dark/light sucking) energy beings. Though I could live with organic ships/critters. (cliché, but clichés become that way because they're an idea that "works" for people) They do absolutely, positively have to be massively different from the current races in design though. Something that might legitimately drive a capital ship full of battle hardened troops insane.
If I remember the story line correctly, the Vasari simply started losing contact with those worlds. It was not a prolonged engagement, the worlds simply went quiet. That means they were taken out extremely fast as no one or no electronic transmission got out.
A faction with that much power would be difficult to properly balance in the game.
I agree I would also like to see it be something completely different as far as the race and design.
well, the Vasari in the game are the exile fleet. all we know is what what they observed. from the perspectives of the exiles what happened is all of a sudden phasic transmissions stopped and alot of phase lanes back to the core worlds of the empire got cut off. they never actually found out exactly what did it, they just got spooked and ran away before it caught them too.
the "vasari menace" doesn't necessarily move all that quickly. the exiles are able to set-up shop in a new sector and live their for about a full century before they have to move on to stay ahead of the threat. what it does quickly is "black out" phase space. whatever it is, it has a severely disruptive effect on Phasic communications and travel. this is the origin of my extra-dimensional aliens theory. that and i think C'Thulu stuff is really frickin cool.
Here's an interesting tangent: is the Threat chasing the Vasari, or just expanding in all directions? The latter would explain why the Vasari have so much time to flee and would also jive with the apparent "all-consuming omnidestructive force" kind of feel.
As far as balancing: a force that's insanely slow to expand but devastating when it can finally get everything to bear would feel right in terms of storyline while still being balanceable.
Just give them Marza.
yes, i aggree with athena
but maybe its so slow because it only moves at stl speeds. this would account for time factors, plus anything that moves a stl speed would have plenty of time to devistate races it encouners (if it expanding in all directions). phasic transmissions have to be supplied through something, right?
so when race A(race we r debating on) goes through a system, who says it has to kill everyone? maybe it just takes out all structures supporting phasic transmissions and enslaves the vasari, like the vasari did to lesser rasces.
fear factor.... not quite sure how to fit this in...
Giant planet/system-wide ambushes that kill everything in sight, cept for planets? letting one ship escape to incite fear and eaiser takover??
the other thing that comes into play is phase jumping, with a stl mover it would have no chance to catch any ship that manages to phase jump. this brings us to the origions of the pji. afterall these things did "litter" known space for all species and may have prevented phase jumping. The current pjis only slowdown phase jumping, but these are copies afterall. the real pji may be one that prevents phase jumps and is the more advanced version of the pji.
nanobots? eventually growth becomes exponential. the chasing theory will not work with nanobots. they would have to be expanding in all directions, maybe going in a totally different direction and chasing the vasari is just a side "projectsince vol and surface area have a 3:1 ratio(or sumthin like that) the volume grows much faster than surface area and nanobots would have to fill up the space, if they would colonize space itself and not just the planets.
whos to say the "threat" isent their own empire?
suppose that they lost the big battle, but they damaged the threat so badly that the remnents of their empire managed to subdue it. I know if I won such a fight i would rip their jamming tech the first chance I get! even if you couldent, the Visari we know are decendents of one capitol ship and one colony's population that never even tryed to find out what happend.
the Visari Empire could be chasing after their wayward kin, trying to ceatch up to them to tell them that the war is over, and "the good duys" won.
alteritivly, the Visari empire might have run into a empire that could match them for the first time. after such a devistating battle, both sides, their navy's crippled beyond repair, called a truce, and eventually amalgimated into a New Visari Empire. finding the Com beacons, they went to reclaim them, only for the diffrences in ship signature to cause the beacons self destructs to go off. so now this new powerful empire, likely totaly unrecognisable (its been 10k years, and the population of the Visari we know was small, so it would be like an ethnic group by now) in apprence, if not Culture.
Given the Old Visari Empire's policy of "Enslave them!" of anyone outside their own culture, and this misunderstanding, the NVE would treat the Visari like anyone else, fresh slaves.
Now that would be truly anti-climatic.
In the intro, the first text says that the Vasari occupied Kron 10 000 years ago. I think that this is very important as it implies that something MAJOR occured here.
I don't think the threat to the Vasari will ever be added as a race. I think that it may be hinted at more so then now, but I doubt that we will see as much as we want.
It is the mystery that is appealing.
Letting us fans speculate and using the "less is more" philosophy is probobly the best solution.
I don't really want more races. More races means less uniqueness. I want quality rather then quantity. Thats what I like about Entrenchment, it emphasises the differences between the races and I think the next expansion will do so even more.
Agreed
although i just had a thought, maybe their enemy is pure energy or something, maybe half-ascended.
A la Anubis anyone?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Races_in_Revelation_Space#Inhibitors_.2F_Wolves
(SPOILERS) provides a quick summary of the Inhibitors I referred to. Interesting foe with a multi-billion-year mission, high technology, and purpose that isn't exactly evil in a certain larger view, but perhaps unsympathetic. RS is worth reading if you're into "hard" science fiction instead of fluffy space opera.
The 'blight' ala Vinge's 'A Fire Upon the Deep' would also be fitting for an "oh bugger, research gone badly" scenario, but is somewhat dubious considering that defeating it not only pretty much required a deus ex machina, but also triggering a catastrophe wrecking civilizations across an entire galaxy.
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