Messages

1

Design / Re: More on the Storyline/Game mesh

« on: January 21, 2010, 07:28:11 am »

Mission like the following would be suitable:

"Military of [country] has contained alien situation. Aliens can't retreat, forces standing by. Requesting Phallanx to go in and root them out."

That is exactly what I am thinking of--we have here what is essentially a glorified Special Forces unit, one designed and trained to operate against an opponent with vastly superior armor and weapons, with little to no pre-planning possible.  This is an incredibly dangerous environment, and normal military forces would most likely be forced to call in heavy artillery to flatten any possible alien resistance...with rather unfortunate effects on any local civilians still caught in the area.

This is also why there are so few recruits available, relatively speaking.  The people PHALANX is recruiting are not only the absolute cream of the crop, they also have to undergo extensive tests to make sure that they are not infiltrators, and PHALANX likely must take steps to insure that the new recruits never do become infiltrators.  PHALANX is a truly elite organization, and, frankly, there just aren't that many people who are both able to serve as the tip of the spear, and who are capable of quietly disappearing without arousing suspicion.

2

Design / Re: CURRENT STORYLINE -- SPOILERS!

« on: January 21, 2010, 07:12:50 am »

Why do so many newcomers want to come along and ask us to throw out years of work and re-vamp everything?

If we constantly re-started to please every newcomer who came and did that we'd never make real progress.

At some point in a project's development, they really have to stop re-vamping things, pick a plot and stick with it so progress can be made.

We have to stick with what we have, even if it doesn't please everyone as being "perfect."  Reason being, its good enough to make most of the game mechanics work.

Edit:  If you really want a new plot, work on a mod or an alternate campaign, but for shit's sake I'd wish people would stop trying to re-do the main one!

I'm going to take a wild guess, and say that most of the newcomers keep trying to change the game's plot is basically because they're performing a rather crude form of market analysis for you.  Now, you can ignore that analysis if you want--it's your game, and you're the ones who would have to do all the work of re-writing the story for it--but honestly, I truly would not recommend it.

So far, you've developed a truly awesome set of game mechanics, a truly inspiring game engine, fairly decent graphics, good sound effects, and so on and so forth.  You've gotten all the minor little details perfected to such a degree that it's scary.

The problem (and apparently universal decree) is that your plot stands squarely in the way of making this one of the most awesome games that has ever been developed.  I have played game after game where the developers made the mistake of concentrating on getting the details right, and ignoring the plot--and I've seen all to many games where the details were really kind of iffy, but the plot carried the player through.  Total Annihilation's and Earth 2160 spring to mind most immediately as examples of the former, of games with great details, but crappy central plots.  TA: Kingdoms springs to mind as the foremost example of a game with only decent mechanics but a plot I really liked to keep me playing for a long, long time.  You marry a good--even a great--plot with a game like the one you've already got, and you're sitting on a gold mine, if you want to exploit it.  At the very least, you've secured a reputation as one of the best game-producing outfits in the world today (especially if you can repeat your success).  At most, you might find yourself able to obtain the financing to create your own game company, and to catapult all of you into wealth, fame, and riches.

As I've said, the choice is yours--but with a game like this, if you don't get it right on the first try, somebody else will.  And after all the work you folks have put into it, it would truly be a shame if somebody else ended up in taking all the credit for the success UFO: AI is almost certain to become.

3

Design / Re: CURRENT STORYLINE -- SPOILERS!

« on: December 10, 2009, 06:30:13 pm »

Ok, on to explanations, and hole-plugging, both in the game, and in my story proposal.

First of all, let me point out something that everybody on this forum appears to have missed.  Antares is currently six hundred light-years from Earth.  That is a long way, by almost any standard of measurement.  However, the problem with the current storyline is that the Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light years across, and 1,000 light years thick (to the best of my knowledge, this does not include the stellar clusters that basically sort of orbit the galaxy above or below the ecliptic.  I have been unable to find any sort of hard data for the amount of volume this includes but I have discovered roughly the number of stars we're talking about:  somewhere between 200 and 400 million.  No matter how much you stretch the Drake equation for discovering life-bearing planets, there is not enough time in a mere 1 million years for any alien race or even grouping of races to be able to strip-mine a galaxy the size of ours.  Nor is it likely that the aliens have never encountered a race advanced enough to defeat them (especially not if one as far behind as humanity can do it).  If humanity can win the face of the massive difference in numbers, it could only be because of total incompetence on the part of the aliens, incompetence which would be extremely hard to explain, especially once humans discovered the alien mothership.  Better by far, I feel, to make this a sort of high-tech repeat of the problems the British faced in the American Revolutionary War--simply put, too many troops were needed for the British to be able to transport them across the distances involved.
     All of this is ignoring another quite real issue:  there are other galaxies closer than the Andromeda galaxy.  The Magellanic Clouds are currently passing through the Milky Way (and may never escape, such is the gravitational difference between the two), and the Milky Way is currently in the process of eating at least two other galaxies that got too close:  the Virgo Stellar Stream, and the Sagitarrius Dwarf Galaxy.  There is no reason to use all of the aliens' resources to make the jump directly to the Andromeda Galaxy, when far fewer resources can be used to make the jump in stages.  Nor is there any reason why the aliens could not simply divert enough resources (remember--strip mining a galaxy is going to mean that you have a LOT of resources to play around with) to the conquest of Earth to crush us like ants immediately, and then add our resources to the pile.  In short, there is no aspect of the storyline behind the game as it is now that makes any kind of practical sense.
     Speaking from a literary point of view, the story of the plucky little guy beating the mean ol' giant is old, it resonates, and it is generally hard to beat--everybody wants to see either themselves, or somebody they know as the underdog.  But right now, right here, you've taken it too far.  The enemy you've put together to act as humanity's nemesis is literally unbeatable, and you would no more expect a common ant to be able to slay a hundred foot long dragon than you would expect humans to prevail in this game.  The aliens would have to totally ignore us for millennia for there to be enough of us to matter...and since they've already supposedly removed almost of the galaxy's life-bearing planets, even that would make no real difference.
     I may well have my numbers wrong in what I've presented...but the point remains unchanged.  You cannot stretch the numbers or logic far enough to make what is currently in place workable.  Period, end of statement, that's all there is to it.

Now, on to other potential holes in the story, which can be filled.

PHALANX's existence, and the strange lack of resistance to alien incursions by local forces.
    The reason why the small-scale alien attacks are not being handled entirely by local forces is simple:  there are not enough local forces that can respond quickly enough, and with tactics and doctrine truly suited for the task at hand.  PHALANX units seem to me to be acting more as an excessively violent SWAT team than any actual army unit, which means that most local army units simply would not have the training, equipment, or tactics to answer most of the small-scale incursions from the aliens. 
     Because of this, the standard operating procedure over the course of the game would be for local police or military units to cordon off the area under threat of any alien attacks, and then wait for the specialists to arrive.  In all probability, that's how national governments are explaining to their citizens a) why the regular armed units are not openly fighting to the death to keep the aliens from ever landing, and b) where these strange squads of troops that don't show up on any formally recognized force structure are coming from.  Anonymous leaks tell the world's citizens that there is really a secret project run by each nation, with heavy inter-national co-operation under the auspices of the Excalibur project, to field what are essentially anti-alien SWAT teams.  See, folks, your national governments really are doing something about the problem...they're just reluctant to go blabbing to the press, because they don't know how thoroughly the enemy might have penetrated Earth's communications network.  And the citizens, as we have seen time and time again, would almost certainly respond by saying something along the lines of "Damned media idiots, reporting anything they find with no thought as to whether it should be reported, or what the consequences are.  Mark my words, if they don't start being careful, we're going to lose this war because some media right-wing/left-wing/tabloid reporter nut is going to put every secret global defense project in the world online, and the aliens are going to pull it straight off the Internet, and just run right over everything we can do."  Then the vast majority of the world's citizens will forget about it.  Of course, the vast majority of calls to each national capital for this extra-terrestrial combat command (let's just call it the national X-COM unit, because I cannot think of a name more apt than that) are always met with a response of "They're busy dealing with another incursion right now," or "They just got back, we expect them be combat-capable and back online in another twelve to thirty-six hours," and, just for the sake of the situation's importance, another X-COM unit from another nation which IS free (miraculously) is being sent over, courtesy of the Excalibur Project.  Considering that almost nobody can keep track of all the various uniforms, armies, and so on that we have, or will have, anyway, the fact that a top-secret unit on loan from another country would have unrecognizable uniforms would hardly be unexpected.

     The Excalibur project, meanwhile, would actually be the cover program for PHALANX's R&D and manufacturing divisions (not to mention the bulk of PHALANX's administrative and construction expenses), plus the actual purchasing agent for weaponry and equipment from the various arms manufacturers across the globe.  Project Excalibur is testing the various weapons, armor, etc. made and used all over the world, plus reviewing any and all combat footage that can be found, in an effort to determine what the aliens have, and what human weapons seem to be most effective against alien body armor, tactics, and so on.
     (Incidentally--it occurs to me that, if practical, it might be nice to code into the game that outside weapons improvements show up from time to time, as independent, privately funded organizations conduct their own R&D programs, with varying degrees of success.)
     Anyway, Excalibur is, as mentioned, the official cover for PHALANX, and, while technically classified Top-Secret, or whatever the UN equivalent is, has been repeatedly exposed by well-timed and well-planned leaks from both anonymous UN officials, and from national governments attempting to answer "snap questions" from the various media outlets.  Of course, these leaks are always "imperfectly" shushed...which just lends a further air of credibility to the whole theory that the PHALANX program goes no further than the Excalibur Project.


Lancaster tech difference explanation:
Humans, as has been mentioned before, are actually a century or more behind the aliens in terms of general technology, as the decision to colonize other worlds with sub-light colony ships has vastly slowed the aliens' technical development in most fields.  Ironically, or not, this slowing is particularly noticeable in the field of electronics...an area in which, to be honest, the aliens never really did put a whole lot of effort, as the aliens view electronics as something used to control a ship, or a machine, and nothing more.  Thanks to the aliens' advances in miniaturization and manufacturing technology, alien computers have become roughly equivalent in size and capability of those used by late twenty-first century humanity...but they should be so far beyond human computers that we cannot even grasp how they work.
     As an illustration of what I'm talking about, consider the particle beam--or, more specifically, the particle beam magazine used for the various hand versions of the particle beam.  We can understand the basic principles of physics behind the operation of the weapon, much like a man from the sixteenth or seventeenth century could understand the basic operating principles of, say, an M-16.  In much the same manner, we can recognize SOME of the parts...the more obvious ones, anyway.  But once you get beyond that...well, once humans get to the weapon's actual power source, we are completely lost.  At more than two hundred years ahead of the best human technical and scientific understanding, the aliens have made a power source that is mobile, powerful, and as far beyond our ability to understand and/or reproduce as an M-16's ammunition would be beyond the ability of a gunsmith from from the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries.  Like the Afghan tribes, whose blacksmiths can, using essentially seventeenth century techniques, make a virtually identical copy of the Soviet AKM from a few pieces of re-bar, we can replicate some of the alien technology...but also like the Afghan tribesmen, we have no hope of manufacturing our own ammunition for these weapons for some time to come.  We certainly have no hope of being able to design new weapons to use this technology for quite some time...again, much like the Afghan tribal blacksmith.

Why the Aliens have suddenly stopped retrieving their dead and their technology
    The answer is pretty simple:  the aliens themselves are present too small a number to handle the processing and/or memory needed for multiple units to conduct battlefield maneuvers, complex ground-side tasks, and all the various problems that can arise from flying space-craft around on a hostile and foreign planet.  This also explains why PHALANX can achieve what the regular armed forces cannot--PHALANX is stepping outside the operational parameters of the aliens' programming, and thus is short-circuiting almost all possible responses, all of which are based upon alien observations of the armed forces' response to earlier attacks.

4

Design / Re: CURRENT STORYLINE -- SPOILERS!

« on: December 10, 2009, 05:43:06 pm »

If you can find any contradictions within the story option I've presented, I'd welcome it.  My mind tends to work a little differently from other people's minds, and I often tend to forget to put down little details, or miss small gaps that make the whole thing unworkable.
     That, however, is for the next post.

     Humans do eventually win the war against the aliens, but not by destroying the alien mothership, or their central brain cage, or anything other magic bullet solution.  Destroying the central repository of the hive mind would achieve nothing unless it also managed to destroy the entirety of the alien race (and no race which has conquered an entire galaxy will be so easily destroyed).  Eventually, a new hive mind would form, and come after humanity again, this time with everything it had.  Much like in the X-COM series, the destruction of the first alien hive-mind didn't stop the aliens, just slowed them down.  Eventually, they recovered, and attacked again...and again...and again.
     Since the game makes a point that control over interstellar distances doesn't happen, however, this is un-necessary.  Humans may not be dealing with a single hive-mind...which makes the need to destroy a heavily protected mother-ship by means of some magic-wand miracle un-necessary.  Instead, allow us to examine something else:  the Avatar class space battleship.
     The Avatar is a tremendously tough vessel, and its hull is made of no less than six inches of alien alloy.  This alloy, along with heavy structural reinforcing throughout the ship, means that the Avatar is virtually impossible to destroy...but this supreme toughness is incidental, and largely accidental.  Despite batteries of lasers, particle beams, and/or Anti-matter missiles, the Avatar's main weapon is actually a development of the electromagnetic rifle technology from the beginning of the game:  the super-heavy EM bolt cannon.
     The super-heavy EM bolt cannon is capable of accelerating a solid metal projectile 16 meters long and 20 centimeters wide from 0 to 3000 kilometers per second over a distance of slightly less than 100 meters (anything larger will not easily fit inside a PHALANX base...but you may want to make it larger anyway, just because that seems awful short even to me).  The stress on the weapon is enormous, and without the extremely heavy structural support provided by the Avatar's hull and internal supports, the weapon would destroy itself the first time it was fired.  Immense amounts of research and engineering expertise are required for every aspect of this weapon, which ultimately does nothing more than fire a steel telephone pole at a planetary target.
     But at one percent of the speed of light, that's enough.  Even one of these impacts would likely be enough to duplicate the asteroid shot we're told wiped out the dinosaurs.  The Avatar carries fifty rounds of these lethal projectiles, each specifically engineered to punch through the planetary atmosphere with the minimum possible atmospheric resistance.  There is no stopping this weapon, no evading it, and most definitely no way to survive fifty rounds of extreme-velocity kinetic death raining from the skies.  Fifty rounds into the planet's surface would almost totally destroy the planet's crust, and render any further habitation impossible for at least the next thousand years.  The weapon itself is capable of being fired at extreme ranges, well beyond the practical reach of any defense, and, by using captured alien astrogation databases from the smattering of carriers destroyed or shot down, the Avatar will be fully capable of avoiding any chance for retaliation...or even detection...until its cargo of death has been unloaded, and the Avatar has fled to another safe location to observe the effects of its shots.
     The Avatar also carries the only FTL drive humanity has been able to capture intact.  This is important, because humanity cannot duplicate the FTL drive.  In point of fact, humans don't even understand the basic principles behind its operation.  The Avatar is made to conform to roughly the same dimensions as the alien carriers, and is sent off on the same trajectory as at least one departing carrier, with nothing more than a hope and a prayer.  The number of Avatars the humans can build is limited, and the aliens know this.  The number of strikes the Avatar can perform is limited (because the Avatar is anti-matter powered, and we can't make enough anti-matter to really matter yet), and the aliens know this too.  Ergo, the human threat to destroy the aliens completely is a hollow one--all the aliens have to do is leave the humans alone, and the humans cannot completely destroy them.  However, indestructible, and invulnerable are not the same thing--humanity has proven that we can hurt the hive minds, and hurt them quite badly.  Contrariwise, the aliens cannot completely destroy humanity, and they don't have the resources to simply overwhelm us with sheer numbers.  Remember earlier, when I was talking about the limited number of FTL carriers the aliens could produce?  Well, they've already tried to fight us on the largest scale they could feasibly try.  Even if they threw everything they had at us, it would not be likely to destroy human ability to fight back.  Both sides are indestructible...but that's not the same thing as invulnerable, and the aliens just learned this the hard way.  If the war goes on, who-ever wins will be so damaged that the victory is meaningless, and the aliens aren't in this for meaningless victories.
     Two weeks after the destruction of the first of the aliens' planets, and the Avatar's successful return, an alien Harvester does an extremely high-speed run past Earth.  No-one is ever sure how the message is transmitted, but six hours later, several dozen humans known to have been infected with the XVI virus place a call the General Secretary of the UN, and present the aliens' formal proposal for an extended armistice in hopes of leading to a negotiated peace.  That the aliens can end this war at any time by simply going away is not in doubt...but the hive minds are clearly hoping for something more protracted, apparently having little doubt that humanity will make up their technical and scientific short-comings quickly enough.  The General Secretary, as aware of the imbalance of ability as the aliens, gives his conditional agreement.  Within six months, a peace treaty is signed.
     Neither side got anything out of the war, to be honest.  Any advantage the aliens might have gained from their obtaining a smattering of human hosts for the XVI virus was more than counter-balanced by the loss of a major colony world, and the humans, while able to destroy alien infrastructure and investment, do not have the ability to take it and use it.  As part of the price for agreeing not to attack the hive minds as soon as humans have developed the ability to do so at will, the hive minds are forced to agree to essentially surrendering all rights to the proto-hive mind that was begun on Earth, but no indemnity is given to either side--the aliens, as the aggressor, would have little moral claim to such an indemnity, and the humans, as the aliens cheerfully pointed out, are unable to enforce such demands.  The aliens, obviously, will continue to have access to the hive-mind on Earth, as there is little humanity can do to prevent that, and besides which, trade is important, and something several members of the UN were more than happy to encourage, even over inter-stellar distances...something which the aliens, had they been just a little less happy to keep that right, should have been suspicious of.
     By the time humanity was able to begin duplicating the alien techniques for the generation of anti-matter, almost fifty years had passed.  Although still only able to produce the alien alloys in the most primitive forms, human electronics technology was vastly superior to that still used by the alien hive minds.  As for the proto-mind on Earth, constant exposure to Earth, Earthlings, and the effects of the Earthlings' own version of a hive-mind (the Internet, in case you hadn't guessed) had forced the proto-mind to evolve, to adapt, and to overcome.  Members had begun to act as individuals once more--a regression by Tamani standards, for whom the hive-mind was originally simply a way to communicate thoughts, ideas, and information, but a progression by any other. 
     In point of fact, the hive mind developed on Earth proved to be substantially more compact, and more flexible, than that originally developed by the Taman.  Within another five to ten years of the founding of Earth's first extra-solar colony, in 2269, the Taman had begun their own experiments with smaller, and more compact versions of their own hive minds.  In a supreme act of irony, these experiments were conducted using Tamani medical sciences, with which humanity never had been able to catch up (Tamani doctors and medical equipment was generally still just as far ahead of human equivalents as it had been at the start of the Extra-Terrestrial War in 2187), supported by human-built computers and electronic equipment.
     Eventually, humanity and the hive minds would become close partners, much America and Japan are today.  Humans and the hive minds would never really understand each other, of course--the cultural mindsets, and social development pressures were simply too different for that to ever really be an option--but both groups found that the other had something to offer.  By the time the two groups began to encounter other intelligent space-faring races, the stage had already been set for the conflicts which inevitably followed.

5

Design / Re: CURRENT STORYLINE -- SPOILERS!

« on: December 01, 2009, 06:16:01 am »

Before continuing on to part 2, I should point out a few things here:
First of all the official storyline is great for an unwinnable game.  Unfortunately, I cannot see any way in which humanity could destroy a hive mind that has been developing for a million plus years.  The tech gap would, quite simply be too great.  And, unless there were only four or five sentient races in the entire galaxy, I really cannot see humanity introducing any concepts to the aliens that they would not have encountered a thousand times before.  What we have here is another "plucky humans" story, and those work great the first time, okay the second time, and then they generally fall flat on their face.

You've got a great game engine, awesome gameplay, and pretty decent graphics.  Your story sucks.  If you want an all-time great game, you really need to make those story changes.  I've based my own proposals off of gameplay and story that I've seen so far in the game, so for all that the story changes are pretty major, the changes to the actual game should be relatively minor.  If not, I apologize, but the story you've got is going to kill your game--it's just too contrived to really flow with your game.


Anyway--proposed story part 2

     From the aliens' perspective, the Mumbai raid was an unmitigated disaster.  Commonwealth troops responded too quickly, and in too much force to allow the aliens' six carriers to more than begin gathering the necessary samples.  While the initial troops were easily pushed back, more continued to arrive, and with increasingly heavy weapons and increasingly better tactical cohesion and over-all support.  Despite heavy casualties on the part of the Commonwealth troops, it was not long before a balance of forces was reached...and the alien carriers, secure from their sub-orbital position, could see even more Commonwealth units arriving, including what were eventually realized to be major warships.  Deciding discretion was the better part of valor, the aliens recovered their dead, and departed...with barely a third of the total samples they required to begin cultivation of the XVI virus for human biology.
     Driven by necessity, the aliens returned twice more, to Johannesburg and Bonn.  Both raids were even less successful than before--although the aliens, now warned of the potency of human weaponry and tactics, were able to prevent major casualties, they were unable to spare the time necessary to gather the specimens they needed.  Each raid had been under-taken with more ships, and each had faced stiffer resistance from the locals, with better response times overall.  While none of the following two raids had included the large-scale naval artillery bombardments that had forced the aliens out of the Mumbai harbor, the deployment of advanced tanks, aircraft, and extremely motivated troops were still enough to turn the tide.  Despite the immense damage done, the aliens were forced to retreat before anything more than local human forces could get involved.
     Bangkok was meant to be the final gambit.  It would include all fifty carriers relegated to the conquest of Earth, plus every Harvester ship they could carry.  Well over a division of aliens would be deployed, in local terms, and their technology, coupled with their ability to control the sky (Bonn's extensive air combat had taught them the hard way how crucial that was) would be enough to buy the gatherers time to grab the specimans needed.  They had reckoned without the truly awesome defenses established by the Chinese around Bangkok.
     Expected to be one of the few focal points for potential conflict left on the planet, Bangkok was heavily fortified.  Over twenty thousand AA weapons were scattered around the city and its environs, and enough airstrips were concealed nearby to service the entire Chinese air force.  Built before China's civil war, Bangkok had been fortified by the Chinese military, and then used as one of the few completely secure rebel strongholds for much of the war.  Although obsolete, and largely forgotten, the city's air defenses were still a tough nut to crack.  But crack it they did.  The Taman-built ships were simply too stealthy to lock, and too tough to kill easily.  By the time the battle was done, only the nearby UN base was still intact.  Protected by the latest in optically acquiring SAM batteries, the UN base was simply left alone--its missiles were too accurate to be worth the trouble.  Those covering the rest of the city were not so lucky...or perhaps they were, because it is believed that nearly two dozen Harvesters may have been shot down during the inital landing stages.  Although all were recovered, the hive minds felt the omen boded ill.  The harvesters were recovered, and the attackers withdrew, allowing humanity to begin to establish its own defenses.

     Current alien strategy is built around hit and run attacks--hit the humans in isolated locations, to procure enough biomass to adapt and propogate the XVI.  Then, as soon as practical, bring new ships in, designed to introduce XVI on a small scale and allow the aliens to establish regional support networks.  Finally, begin the large scale exposure of humanity by means of infected food and water supplies.  It's a good strategy...but humans have seen it all before, and worked out the answers long ago.  While humans do not have anything near the aliens' technology, they do have something the aliens don't know about:  the internet.  Functioning as an electronic version of the aliens' hive-mind, the aliens are now effectively fighting equals for the first time.  Humans are used to that kind of war.  The aliens are not.

6

Design / Re: CURRENT STORYLINE -- SPOILERS!

« on: December 01, 2009, 05:45:59 am »

Having read the proposed story lines, and having found major issues with all of them (chiefly in terms of the mothership, but I have to admit that all of them have major logic gaps), I have an alternative to propose.


First of all, my assumptions, based on in-game details: 
1. The aliens, while generally more advanced than we are, are still only one or two centuries ahead of humanity (probably closer to one century ahead, or less).  This is born out by both the sheer variety of concepts that the aliens appear to copy off of human designs, such as variable hard points, and by the fact that most alien technology can be unravelled and used by humans.  It is also probably something that can be inferred from the simple fact that the aliens did not simply take a few monkeys or whatever, and then just dump a crapload of class four pathogens to include us all in the XVI hive mind.

2. The aliens are not actually a single hive-mind, but many hive-minds--probably at least one per solar system, if not actually one per planet.  In short, there is no mother-ship.  There is no single target that will eliminate the alien menace for all time.  In point of fact, there is no one target that humanity can take out, and thus leave the entirety of the alien tech-base functional and just waiting for us or somebody else to swoop in and pick it up.  What this means is that if humanity is to win the war, we must scare the alien hive-minds.  We must prove to them that we can hurt them as they have never been hurt before.
On a story note, I have to admit that I feel that this was one of the X-COM games' major weaknesses--that the aliens, despite hugely advanced technology, were still extremely vulnerable to a decapitating strike.  If we are looking at any kind of true hive-mind, that is simply unlikely to be true.  This view is supported in UFO:AI by the simple fact that the aliens do not become sentient until there are a certain number in close proximity...and once they become sentient, they do not become able to instantly transmit data to every UFO in the system.  Clearly, there is a limited range of telepathy, which means that telepathy across inter-stellar distances is improbable.

3.  The aliens want humanity to join their hive-mind.  My own favorite reason for this, by the way, is the sugar-protein combination theory.  Basically, there are two possible combinations of atoms for every sugar or amino acid molecule in existence, and they are mirror-images of each other.  Because of the way they interact, the reality is that a race such as humans, who have a left-left combination of proteins and sugars, can only colonize 1/4 of the available planets in the galaxy.
The aliens, as seen so far, have three races.  Ah-ha, I see you saying--that means that one out of every four habitable planets the aliens find, they cannot use.  So, the aliens, knowing as they do that they are the only truly advanced race in the galactic neighborhood, go looking for a race that does have that particular sugar and protein combination.  Humans are it.



Ok, on to the story, as I see it.

     About 300-500 years before UFO:AI begins, one of the various nations, corporations, or whatever on the Taman homeworld develops a biological equivalent of the internet:  a virus-like organism that forms a symbiotic bond with its host, allowing said host to share every thought, memory, and so on.  Now, the Taman, it must be understood, had never been cursed (blessed?) with any kind of world-spanning conflict just as electrical energy began to emerge as a wide-spread energy source.  Nor was there any kind of long-term conflict between two super-powers like the United States and the USSR.  Because of this lack, the Taman had never truly felt a need to develop electronic devices for the purpose of high-speed calculations.  Remember that--it's important.
     Anyway, about 200 years before the start of UFO:AI, a Taman research outfit managed to create an organism that would like two or more minds together to enable them to act as a single entity.  Whether this was done to prove that it was possible, or done as a rather cold-blooded attempt to make research faster, cheaper, and easier, is irrelevant--by performing this experiment, the Taman accidentally created their first actual computer.  On Earth, computers absolutely transformed science in every respect.  Perhaps not unexpectedly, they had the same effect on the Taman homeworld.  Companies and nations which were willing to sacrifice a few dozen (or more) citizens or employees to transform them into into these hive-mind computers had a major advantage.  Companies and nations which were not, didn't.  They spread like wildfire, and, as on Earth, it was not long before people were volunteering to become part of these psionic networks.  Within twenty-five years of the first discovery, the aliens had their own version of the world-wide web, one powered not by networks of computers, but by the actual brains of sentient beings.
     It honestly didn't take long before an entire generation started being born in places that had no notion of what it was like to not be part of this network--to be part of a communal network of entities from birth.  This new generation had no real concept of individuality--just like on Earth, the networks brought this new generation closer together than ever before, but unlike on Earth, the connection went much deeper, and was much more a part of each new Taman that humans could ever achieve.  Within seventy-five years, the Taman who remembered what it was like to be individuals began to die.  Within a hundred, the only Taman left had always been part of the group-mind, and could not imagine existing without it.  There were no poor regions of the Taman planet to impede this progress--the Taman had avoided the world wars we suffered through by the simple expedient of ensuring that all regions of the Taman homeworld had what they needed to grow from the earliest possibility.  By the time the last of the original creators died, the entire Taman home world was a single entity.
     Guess what?  It got lonely.  The eight billion Taman that were part of it might not think of themselves as individuals, and might not be individuals, but they still had the same psychological needs as individuals.  They needed somebody to talk to.
     So it set out to create a new hive-mind, someplace far enough away that the old hive-mind would not simply assimilate it from the beginning.  A space program was developed, relying not on electrons for control, but on actual hands and fingers on (often) mechanical buttons.  Probes were sent out, new worlds found, and finally one that could support them was found.  The Taman colonized it, and life was good.  But then both hive-minds got lonely...and so they decided to repeat the process.  It went faster this time, both from the previous experience, and because there were now two worlds to draw upon.
     By the time the Taman encountered the Orkinoids, which I would judge to be about seventy-five years ago, any thought that any race might not welcome them with open arms was long since gone.  The Taman, who by now had nearly a dozen worlds, landed, attempted to introduce the Orkinoids to teh XVI micro-organisms, and watched in horror as the orkinoids died slowly and painfully.  The orkonids, of course, reacted accordingly.  Although still not yet to the chemical age technology that would introduce gun-powder, they were able to resist somewhat effectively at first.  The Taman, not pausing to think and understand, reacted with vigor.  When Taman emissaries were killed, the race developed weapons to retaliate in kind.  The Kerrblade and the plasma pistol were first.  As the remnants of some long-ago military tech, pistols were something that the hive-minds could find a use for.  The kerrblade, adapted from a standard surgical scalpel (hence its shape, use, and size), was meant to let the Taman go toe to toe with the orkinoid warriors in melee.  The addition of carbon nano-tube armor completed the set.  Eventually, the problem with the orkinoid inclusion with the XVI micro-organism was discovered to be the sugar-amino combination, and it was corrected.  More orkinoids were harvested to provide initial cultures, and then the entire population was systematically forced to join the hive-mind.  To this day, the orkinoids are not trusted by the hive minds--not even the hive-mind present on the Orkinoid's own home-world.  This is why it is the Taman who are charged with acting as technicians, and Orkinoids are simple mindless grunts, despite both being equally intelligent overall.
     The Shevaar, who were encountered next, provided a slightly different problem.  Although the hive-minds learned from earlier examples, the Shevaar were equivalent to 17th century technology, and were fully capable of communcating...and resisting.  This was not helped by the fact that the Taman took the "safe" approach, and made sure to launch their campaign in military terms.  The Shevaar were, of course, doomed--but their valiant and unexpectedly effective resistance, and their ability to learn to use some of the Taman tech (after watching their brethren use it) earned them the middle-ground between Orkinoid and Taman--they are known to be smart enough to replicate the functions filled by the Taman, but they are still not entirely trusted to be as good as a Taman technician.  From this conflict, incidentally, the Taman learned the usefulness of plasma rifles, and grenades.

     Now, there are two things to keep in mind, thus far:  first, that the Taman had never yet encountered any sign of a fellow hive-mind, and thus they had no idea that such a hive-mind need not be biological; second, that all of these wars were fought at sub-light speeds, using truly enormous colony ships as the Tamans' base of operations.
     About fifty years or so ago, the hive minds developed the FTL drive.  It is enormously expensive and difficult to produce, and the physics are something that not even the hive minds really understand.  What they do know is that, following a previously unexplained anamoly in quantum physics, they've now got something that allows any ship equipeed with these drives to "jump" across large spaces almost at will.  Unfortunately, as I said, they are tremendously hard to produce, so the aliens don't have very many yet.  For this reason the drives are restricted to carrier ships (much like the one that you shoot down to get your first FTL drive).  Most of those are dedicated to exploration purposes, but about two hundred or so are being used for inter-stellar trade and transport.
     When the aliens found Earth with one of these ships, they knew what to do--one raid, to get the initial samples of tissue needed to cultivate the XVI virus.  After that, it's just a matter of dropping enough Harvester ships onto the planet's surface to infect enough of the natives to let them take over.  Because humans seemed a bit more advanced than either race, and because the hive-minds wanted to play with their new toy, about fifty of their new FTL carriers were set aside to carry out the invasion and conquest of Earth.  Since initial reports indicated that humans had the final sugar-protein combination to take advantage of all planets the aliens found, their conquest and development was fairly high priority.
     The site of that first raid:  a city the local humans called Mumbai.

7

Design / Re: More on the Storyline/Game mesh

« on: November 02, 2009, 10:08:32 pm »

Ok, I've been giving this some thought, and I've got a few ideas that might help fix a couple of conundrums in the game, both in terms of the game's beginning, and in terms of the game's ending.

"If an entire city is devastated then the world(probably at least 10 billion people right?) isn't going to just sit around watching it happen. Action would be immediate from every nation and they would all take some serious precautions."

Alright, here's what I got on this subject:
First of all, action is being taken by each specific nation, and not just in terms of simply mouthing platitudes and secretly funding PHALANX.  In point of fact, PHALANX is only part of Earth's efforts to fight back, but it is the only truly international component--every single armed service on the planet is put on notice of the threat, and efforts are being taken to expand each nation's armed forces and to update their training, their equipment, and their tactical doctrines so as to better combat the alien menace.  In short, this is what the Excalibur project is all about--it is the UN's public effort to make sure that all member nations are equipped with the very best weapons known to enable all of Earth's armed forces to effectively combat the alien menace.
In addition to all of this, however, PHALANX has been formed to provide Earth with a) a truly international force with the authority to cross any borders on the planet WITHOUT causing a diplomatic incident, and to provide an international force tasked with finding and neutralizing the alien menace at its source (more on this in a bit).

In short, the world governments aren't just mouthing platitudes--they're actually doing something.  This is why the terror strikes throughout the game are always such small-scale operations.  Because the local military forces are taking care of the larger scale incursions, PHALANX is able to concentrate on smaller attacks, thus hopefully giving humans the ability to engage the aliens on roughly equivalent terms, hopefully in a setting favorable to human weapons and tactics, where the aliens' superior technology and weaponry will act as much less of a force multiplier.  The world governments are, in essence, using PHALANX as a sort of international laboratory and response force, which means that each government is free to focus on finding the very best way to protect its own citizens, without having to worry as much about how their neighbors will be attempting this task.

Secondly, PHALANX's existence isn't being kept secret out of a desire to make sure that Earth's citizens can't sabotage the effort.  PHALANX is, eventually, intended to be mankind's offensive arm in humanity's first interplanetary/interstellar war, and experience has taught everybody on earth that striking a truly decisive blow in the face of this degree of technological superiority will require making sure that both the intention, and the ability to attack are kept secret until the aliens cannot possibly stop it (preferably because it has just blown up their planet).

This, in turn, leads to my recommendation for how to end UFO:  Alien Invasion--not with a single strike to one, localized brain pod unit like is seen in the X-COM games (which has always struck me as supremely unrealistic), but instead a potent demonstration that, if this war continues, humanity can and will annihilate the aliens once and for all.
The final mission, in the preliminary sketch I've come up with, is not "take out the alien brain creature" mission, but instead a mission against numerous, if disorient survivors guarding a significant store of alien anti-matter.  If the final mission can retrieve enough anti-matter, and display the ability to destroy entire planets (or, at least, their biosphere and/or surface) at will, then the aliens will have only two options:  destroy Earth outright, immediately, in hopes that the humans have not based their weapon outside the planet's orbit, or to sue for peace (preferably with the threat of mutual destruction to hold over humanity's head).
This will also fit in better with the group-mind tendencies displayed by the aliens throughout the game.  No group mind that requires a certain number of individuals to pass the threshold into awareness is going to be located in a single facility for PHALANX to take out with a surgical strike.  Instead, it is much more likely for a group-mind to be spread out over the surface of one or more entire planets, creating a massive, dispersed intelligence which is more than capable of surviving any single precision strike.  Humanity, being much less advanced than the aliens, cannot realistically use a precision strike to bring down any alien command center anyway--so PHALANX resorts to the brute-force deployment of WMDs (probably kinetic in nature) to simply destroy an entire planet, wiping out any trace of the alien hive mind, alien technology, or, by and large, any trace that life every existed or could have existed on the planet's surface.

I also would suspect that the aliens' initial attacks are not only not really repeatable, for several reasons, but also not really something the aliens ever had any intention of repeating.  Or, if they did plan to repeat the attacks, it was not until much, much later in their invasion timetable, after the XIV had made much of the world into the aliens' playthings, and softened up the remaining centers of resistance considerably.
I suspect the attacks to be unrepeatable (or at least not something that can be safely repeated) for several reasons.  First of all, after the aliens were able to achieve such success over the worlds' military organizations, the whole world would have begun to essentially fortify itself against the aliens...and, as the game itself points out, even if human SAMs can only get a 1% hit ratio against the alien craft, enough missile launchers can and will damage alien craft.  While not all, or even most damage alien ships will be beyond the ability of alien troops to recover, some would be, and if the aliens have put in as much effort as they have to make sure that they leave no trace of their advanced technology, then I doubt they'd be willing to risk humans simply shooting down an alien craft and getting that technology the easy way.  I would also, at this point, speculate as to whether the aliens CAN repeat that scale of attack at all, at least for the next several months.  If the frequency of the aliens' attacks is any indication, the aliens most likely have an extremely limited ability to transport attack ships into our solar system, possibly because the FTL drives the aliens use are beyond even their ability to make, or even understand, quickly and easily.  This would also explain why they would ever be willing to leave humans alone for any length of time--if they can be absolutely positive that humans cannot replicate their FTL drives at any time in the next hundred years at least, the game's end can be explained as the aliens simply either buying time, or just retreating beyond humanity's ability to follow.  Thus, if they were to mass their entire FTL carrier fleet for the initial quartet of attacks, they could land enough troops to engage in a major landing...but after that, the demands of an interstellar empire would like require that they pull carriers off of the attack, and dedicate them instead to more routine tasks.

The second reason, of course, is that the aliens do not want to carry out such large scale attacks--it is not part of their strategy, to put it bluntly.  The aliens' initial attack, against Mumbai, was in fact a massive harvesting operation.  The aliens' plan was to use the attack to gather enough humans, both dead and alive, so as to be able to first adapt the XIV to humans, and then to provide sufficient culture mediums to allow the virus to grow (this is where the blood in the first Corrupter ships comes from, if you were wondering).  Unfortunately, the Commonwealth's forces were quite simply too well armed, too well trained, and too prompt in their response.  The mission was a failure, and the aliens could not gather sufficient human material despite their best efforts.  Indeed, so ferocious was the Commonwealth resistance that the aliens were forced to dump many of the human bodies and organic components to make room for their own dead (many of whom were probably later revived, or simply salvaged for parts), and their own lost equipment.  I would not, by the way, make the initial alien incursions the product of "small" UFOs, as six small UFOs, no matter how well-armed and armored their inhabitants, or even how well coordinated their troops, would not be able to take out upwards of three thousand well-trained and well-armed soldiers...particularly not in light of the fact that the Commonwealth's weapons are, by and large, the most effective against the aliens.
If y'all go for this, then this is probably how the results of those attacks looked from the alien perspective:
The Mumbai attack, which the humans saw as absolutely devastating, was in fact a failure--not only did the aliens not obtain sufficient specimens (and organic material) to carry out the next phase in their invasion plans, but they also expended considerable resources in the process and managed to alert what was clearly a powerful and well-organized foe as to their existence and their eventual designs on Earth.  Later attacks, carried out against Bonn and Johannesburg, were similarly unsuccessful--not only did they inflict far too much damage on what was increasingly clearly an infrastructure the aliens would want to preserve, but they also failed to gather the necessary materials for the adaptation of the XIV to the human species.  Despite increasingly large forces, with increasingly large casualties planned for, the aliens were, each time, forced to retreat with their holds mainly full of their own dead in an effort to deny humanity any kind of forensic evidence of the aliens, their intentions, or their technology.  For all the damage done, and all the casualties suffered by human forces, the aliens regard these two missions as at least partial failures, and with good reason.
The attack on Bangkok, however, was an entirely different kettle of fish.  Previous attacks had been made against enemies which were either totally unprepared, or at the very least tactically unprepared for the speed, ferocity, or general technology displayed by their opponents.  Bangkok, however, had already seen one strike landed nearby, and, with the Excalibur project already beginning, had begun to seriously upgrade nearby military units...including its anti-aircraft abilities.  When the aliens attacked, they intended to head directly for the city center, home to the largest concentration of humanity in the area.  The terror provoked would, it was hoped, cause the nearby humans to flee, thereby delaying any significant military response as hysterical civilians simply trampled everything in their path (a baffling human tendency which the aliens had noted on their previous attacks).  Unfortunately, heavy local anti-aircraft fire prevented this, forcing the aliens to land even farther out in the city's suburbs than had previously been the case.  Here the aliens ran into not only local military units, but armed civilians, who, though unorganized, were nonetheless able to slow reclamation efforts immensely.  This, combined with a vigorous and immediate response from local forces, was able to force the aliens to retreat, allowing virtually no time for specimen retrieval, and nearly forcing the aliens to abandon some of their dead.  Despite heavy damage and severe casualties, the aliens accomplished none of their objectives in the Bangkok attack.  Hence the decision to rely upon smaller, more isolated attacks--it is a deliberate effort to isolate one or two humans at a time, rather than slamming headlong into hundreds of thousands of humans at a time.

Now, as for the aliens suddenly becoming stupid...don't change that.  Remember that the aliens get smarter as there are more and more of them.  They recognize changing situations better, they can come up with better solutions, and so forth and so on.  So far, we're seeing attacks of between three and seven aliens.  In other words, if PHALANX operatives can hit them fast enough, hard enough, the aliens have no time to react, and are essentially caught outside of their pre-programmed response set.  Most of the existing response set is taken up with actually manipulating the aliens in their various tactical evolutions, so there's literally no room for an entire set of "retreat if" commands to be implanted.  Once the player starts running into larger raids, this can become more of an issue, but even then, PHANLANX is still operating with an enormous advantage in terms of both general experience, and in terms of over-all coordination.  In essence, the distance from the aliens' home world(s) means that each new attack is conducted using essentially green troops.  The local hive minds in the larger raids was capable of learning, and learning quickly, and data from any fleeing aliens can rapidly be shared among the aliens' main hive minds, but on Earth, PHALANX operatives have the advantage in terms of both general experience, and training.