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« on: February 21, 2012, 02:50:10 AM »
Goddamn finally stopped playing and managed to register, i'll try to hold back.... i've been banned from making to many posts at once before haha.
As my first post i want to say mother of god you've created a *** addicting awesome game Alex.
Its a standard practice for all games to have the "infinite enemy", basically like rats in MMOs. The true challenge of this is to make an endless enemy that is believable and scalable, pirates currently occupy this and according to game lore they are not to believable and scalable. Like all games you want something to fight whenever the player wants to fight and while pirates are awesome its a *** to chase them down and unless you start handing them capitals like crazy a player with a massive fleet simply must start a war on the major factions and even then its extremely feasible that they will actually conquer a faction. This isent a problem in fact its an awesome feature but unless you have another enemy thats unbeatable or nearly so the game merely ends when you get your fleet o doom.
The goal is basically zombies, an enemy thats extremely scalable from beginning to endgame and has a plausible reason for being an unstoppable horde that fits well into the lore.
AI gone wild: The same old trust worthy AI gone wild, they want to fulfill the plot given to them and are endless. Its very flexible and reusable since they could use any ship and require no custom ships or weapons. You could have small fleets to entire worlds under their control--it also fits well into the lore with the resource problems.
Forge world gone wild: A variation of AI gone wild, a plot hole to explain the endless ships. A forge world that has perfected automated construction gone wild via sabotage and now produces and endless stream of ships into space for anyone to grab but beware! every single faction waits beyond the planetary defense grid waiting to snatch the next ship that tumbles off the production line.
Alien menace: Another golden oldie, ranging from tyranid like organic based aliens, ork like aliens that scavenge ships, mysterious tech filled aliens that want to destroy humanity! The orks are the easiest to do because once again they can use all of the old ships but they can take their originality a step further with custom weapons that only they can use adding a simple aesthetic that makes them nice to look at. The advanced aliens is perhaps the worst of the 3 but probably very easy to design by simply making them overpowered as hell. The organic based aliens is prolly the hardest to implement but pays off the most since they could have such a direct impact on the player by eating planets and forcing them to face the unstoppable horde. The organic ships would require their own unique ships and weapons which would not be easy to make--their weapons have alot of potential though with ramming and the ability to kill off crew.
The madness: Chaos, revers and just general crazies. The lore has a presented an excellent way to have these types of enemys come into play--you have a giant plot hole that can spew out wonders to terrorize the universe, THE GATE!
Imagine this, the gate sputters into life spewing fourth chewed up ships and resources. News spreads through out the region like wild fire and every faction hurrys to the gate hoping to either get through or grab the treasures spewing fourth, the gate becomes a war zone very quickly but no one seems to realize some of the ships that are tumbling through are still crewed and have begun indiscriminately attacking everyone. The gate shuts off and humanity asserts itself on everyone... or atleast everyone from the region as more of the mangled ships are repairing themselves and attacking everyone. The strongest factions manage to disable some of the ships but boarding partys dont return and some of the ships stop responding. Fearing a possible chemical weapon the ships are blown open to vent them to vacuum and the next ships are boarded via shuttles. No matter how many marines are sent and no matter how well armed they are none of the boarding partys are seen or heard from again.
The factions think that perhaps its their brothers shocked and scarred from whatever happened to stop the gates so instead of killing these sources of much needed news everyone with a sense of self preservation retreats to ponder the problem. What at first was mistook to be battle debris has begun to repair itself and now the space around the gate is filled with hostile ships tumbling around the gates gravity well. One of the factions amasses a small army of marines on troop transports and lures one of the smaller ships away from the growing crowd, it is quickly disabled and the troop transports dock alongside it. The marines number so many that not even a single troop transport can unload all of its marines and yet they disappear into the ship, the number of marines now allows the marines boarding to hear the screams and gunfire that echos from ahead of them. Every faction has its spies listening to the same recording of what happens to the marines, one of the troop transports disconnects with bodies streaming from the torn entry holes as the atmosphere is sucked out by the vacuum apparently what was inside has boarded it. The marines have succeeded in driving back what can only be described as living weapons unto the doomed troop transport.
Their bio mechanical and organic with reports ranging from human like bodys to complete mechanical monstrositys. They use anything around them to manufacture combat forms on the spot and have the ability to jam all forms of wireless communications and seem to have limited telepathic abilitys, enough to instill fear and read emotions well enough to track you down it seems. As everyone turns away from the spectacle of the boarding expedition they look towards the gate to see the burnt hulks multiplying at a horrifying rate, the wrecks around the gates are providing ample resources. The troop transport has been neglected while everyone was occupied and it is only noticed when the weapon forms that ripped threw its structure begin wildly firing at any ship in range. A destroyer puts itself between the hostile transport and the remaining transports, its shield flaring as it soaks up the strange energy fire that the weapon forms are hurtling in all directions. The shields quickly flare and fail and the fleet is stunned to see the transport plow into the destroyer with a newly formed beak and the doomed captain reports what his internal cameras capture, combat forms made from the mutilated bodys of the marines are tearing through pressure doors--a pistol in the captains mouth is all they see before the transmission ends. Both ships are turned to a cloud of debris while the sanity of every human who has seen the transmission reels.
The gate sputter could be a great event to single either hostile enemys arriving or just having resources become available, every faction could bee line to the gate having massive pile ups and providing players with something to do.
In the end whats the point of building an unstoppable fleet if i can test it against an unstoppable faction? I'd love it if the enemy went AI wars also so more often then not you'd be overrun by the infinite enemy rather then crush it.