Sunday, August 26, 2012

And then there were the Scrin....

As always the scrin have come up with a way to make things difficult on us. Unlike last time which was a major overhauling of the Scrin design this time it's a bit easier to fix.  The Scrin are a bio-mechanical force, this we can all agree on. Doug has been talking about bioroids a lot in his last few Robotech Fan podcasts and has offered the idea of changing Scrin more into this type of design. At face value the Robotech Masters and the Scrin have little in common but upon closer inspection they actually share quite a bit.

To make this switch a few things have to change. First all of the scrin ground units that are not considered Bioroids need to be moved to the Portal. This is a very easy thing to do. That leaves everything considered a Bioroid in the Warp Sphere. What is considered a Bioroid? Well for the Scrin there is only one unit that would fit, the Annihilator Tripod.

 "But wait," I can hear you say. "There is only going to be 1 unit in the Warp Sphere? Thats lame."

Not so. We're currently working on 4 different Tripod designs! Each different Tripod will have a different task and roll on the battlefield much like the 4 different bioroid types that the Robotech Masters used. Of course this is tied into our ability to MAKE the Tripods look different and thats going to be the time consuming part.

The next part of this is what a Bioroid is. There are two parts to a Bioroid, it's exterior power armor and it's interior bio suit. When a Bioroid is destroid there is a good chance that the pilot survives and can continue to fight. Where the power armor portion doesn't have the greatest of structural force it does have amazing armor capabilities. The unit inside on the other hand is fine, with plenty of health but not the best armor. The problem is we don't really have a unit to go to and say "thats the 2nd form". To that end I'm experimenting with a few options to see if I can find something that will work. I have a few ideas in my head but I don't know how well they will work out until I get it in game. We could possibly do a form of the tripod where the 3 arms fall off and secondary arms come out on the side making it a more traditional walker type. Or perhaps take the Seeker and give it a single tripod arm allowing it to continue. There are a few options floating around in my head. The point in the end however is that whatever we do there will be a second form that the player will have to deal with once a Tripod is destroyed.

Doug also has some ideas for the Capitol Ships that he hasn't shared with me yet so it may take a bit longer than I am expecting, it all depends on what else needs to be done.

This hopefully won't take too long to do. Once it's done we'll have something for people to Release Canidate test and then it should be up on Mod DB. After this we will work on the SEED portion of the Earth Federation and work on converting the UC and AW forces to our new balancing system. Here is hoping that doesn't take too long.

2 comments:

UltraKiroXei said...

I did find that your old story map is too messy without the raster one. So i did to find a clean blank map and edit/make this for yours.

http://media.moddb.com/images/members/1/452/451009/xenoforcerebornfinalplot.png

azuza001 said...

Nice work. However I do want to point out the one thing I noticed that doesn't flow with our story. Earth Federation does not have control of the US/Canada. They have control of Iceland / California. GDI has the rest. The US Midwest on the eastern side of the Rocky Mountain Range is a heavily contested hotzone between EF and GDI.

Doug would have to go into more detail with any other discrepancies that are with the map, he did the original.

Still thats a very nice job. Thanks.