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Storyline suggestion

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TrashMan:
So, you use the cheesiet moveis, movies that are used as examples of everything that is wrong with Holywood (Transformers) as a example of what UFO:AI should aim at??
 :o

What's the point of putting so much trough and effort into the weapons and items and descirptins, to the point if re-workign the description of a storage facilti several times because it doens't sound relaistic enough?
What's the point of rejecting heavy pistols, miniguns nad other weapons because tey're "not realistic enough" if you're gonna ignore realism alltogether when it comes to aliens?

Hekc, I could come up with several more plausible storylines and alien backgrounds in 5 minutes.

How about the aliens being a loose colation of various Lords, all controling mini-empores of their own trough psi-dominance?
Any maybe, some aliens (like Taman) were more sucesfull at resisting htem than others, to the point of still having an active resistance? Mayb the lords occasionaly clashing between themselves?

As it is, the inteligence of aliens tied to numbers isn't in any way tied to game mechanics. So you can eaily drop that whole aspect. Or not. You can easily come up with alternate exxplanations.
Like the Psi Lords (TM) mental influence weakening with range, so they require other powerfull psi-users are sub-commadners/slaves to use them as amplifiers. In essence it boils down to the smae thing - the more enemies there are, the stronger the Psi Lords signal and hte better their control.
You could even have killing some of the sub-commanders trigger some other aliesn to go berserk (like synapse tyranids in WH40K)

geisthund:
Cough. "I12believe". Looks around at the other crazies in the room.

Heh. No but seriously - telepathy is only "magical" and slightly frightening because it's unknown. There's no science behind it, and we can't see how it works (unlike, say, gravity)

Faced with telepathic, mind controlling viruses the player's mind gets messed with. (pun intended)

When the hordes of humans under viral control start appearing armed with everything from machine guns to dinner forks... well I know I'd be affected. :)

But if you break it down - if telepathy turns out to be something mundane, say rapid pheremonal signals triggering some primal part of our brain to obey certain preset commands (a bit like stephen king's horror novel on cellphones hard-resetting the brain and turning people into killers) then it's a bit less scary and a lot more useful as a weapon to fight the enemy with, right?

Its the same effect psionics had on us when we played Xcom. It was scary (and then when we harnessed it for ourselves, kind of fun)

geisthund:
I remember the old X com games actually had that -- when you killed a "commander" ranked alien the others took a hit in fear, and some just cowered. Some, when they went berserk actually shot their own "friends"... (reducing their collective morale even more, and making for some giggly moments, especially when they were holding a blaster launcher...)

It might be interesting to try (if the mechanics allow) to implement something similar... when ranked enemy aliens die, others on the field go rogue (eg human converts) until morale in the alien sub commanders is restored enabling control to be re-established. (eg killing or maiming an x-com operative)

the psi lords idea sounds a bit like stargate's premise...

Also, as a complete aside - who says the humans have to win this game? The storyline doesn't look like it's been completed...

For instance, we could be playing through the game as a historical record of what happened in the last great battle for universal dominance of the alien confederation.

Or if this were a commercial venture, we'd fight tooth and claw to the climatic end game only to be overwhelmed by numbers, to be continued next episode...

If any of you remember homeworld (the game) - in some levels benign aliens appeared to trade tech or form alliances (the enemy of my enemy is your enemy)

I reckon that the "reality" of the storyline isn't actually as important as how well you execute it - provided it doesn't involve something completely implausible like super intelligent bikini blondes with katanas or something. :p

If as much thought and effort is put into crafting the backstory as into the game mechanics, physics and graphics, I reckon you'd have a huge winner here.

ShipIt:
The story behind the game is very good, imho. Thats why I have to agree with op, it could be used to bring more atmosphere into the game by using it for e.g. cutscenes in game.

However, talking ´s cheap.

geisthund:
It would seem I finished off the alien base without completing the tech tree - for some reason research options sprang up although I was just building my herakles transport (or is this a trigger?)

anyway I've now seen the entry about the virus. There is a problem with the credibility behind the science of this.

Just to point out - a large multicellular organism in the bloodstream is - as far as we know now with current science - a bacteria, and not a virus.

A virus would typically not appear as cellular, since outside cells they are generally just genetic material in a capsid. This would lend credibility to the scientists initially missing the diagnosis and calling the "extra" DNA a contaminant. Viruses only become active inside cells after introducing their genetic material - they then "hijack" the machinary of the bodys own cells to replicate their tiny particles, and burst the cell when they're done (generally), releasing their progeny into the blood. Hence little evidence of infection, unless someone was looking real hard for them.

If they (scientists) saw big huge bacterial looking things lurking around looking completely different to present, unicellular prokaryotic / eukaryotic bacteria they'd probably freak out and declare a state of emergency.

Alternatively another explanation that would fit would be the viruses having the appearance of normal human cells, but containing strange DNA using a different bit codon. That would be... pretty interesting, and hard to detect since we wouldn't be expecting it.

Another cool idea would be to have the aliens in the form of some new form of infective agent, eg a prion, that we couldn't detect for initially. Although sentient prions is really stretching the limits of rationality.

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