A couple deductions about our circumstances:
1) People were asking if we have native enemies on this planet, or ever did. The answer should clearly be YES, since we have evolved a warrior caste. A unanimous hive mind has no reason for warriors if it didn't have enemies. And they seem like pretty vicious and advanced warriors that take up a lot of our egg proportion, so probably we have or had quite ferocious and persistent enemies, at that. Therefore, I think it is reasonable to expect all manner of military strategy and technology-level-appropriate military gizmos, etc.
They probably are quite dangerous predators, considering the fact that there's barely 30 000 of us, in the nearby area, while we're shown to have a massive population growth. Strangely enough it's the casualties amongst workers that are the largest.
Following the ratio:
100 Queens means there must have been 200 000 eggs. Which means there should have originally been
50 000 warriors and
149900 workers
Now, this doesn't include life time, which would be a great explanation.
2) That being said, armor is almost definitely not amongst our knowledge base. For one, we have exoskeletons and chitin is almost as strong as bronze anyway, so it makes good sense that we haven't invented it. But more importantly, in the story, our soldiers didn't realize that the Xenos' armor was armor, we thought it was part of their bodies. If we had armor technology, we would never have made such a mistake.
So "make bronze armor" I don't think is an option, at least not without researching and learning the secrets of armor in general from Xeno artifacts brought back to the queens.
And bronze armor would be useless anyway. One Xeno's gun can apparently cut through a dozen soldiers merely in the time it takes us to run to him. They must be using some crazy machine railgun whatever. Bronze will be about as effective as butter. And we would KNOW this, too, having observed the carnage of our troops and thus understanding how powerful their weapons must be, if not how they work.
And the making of all that buttery useless armor would make smoke and give our positions away as well as signalling to the xenos that we are more technologically advanced than they might suspect.
Well yes. Actually, the only reason that I put the bronzeworking technology in is because it's the limit of our capabilities, and getting there should, perhaps, allow for some innovation.
Additionally, there was a reason that I specified the production system to be as far away from the Xenos, preferably on the other side of the planet.
Somethign like a giant rhino may be effective as a force multiplier. A skull thicker than God to absorb shots, redundant organ systems, and sixty tons of adrenaline to keep it going. It would act liek a shield and battering ram, with the ordinary warriors close behind: it would absorb the fire, allowing our warriors to get in close and slice'n'dice. The sheer mass of the creature would give it anti-vehicle capabilities, as it could ram and turn them over for warriors to break into.
This was actually in the composite suggestion. Not creating them ourselves, but finding them in the wild. Getting a herd of them that way is much easier than having to create them ourselves. And since we're going to use them for a semi suicidal charge anyway.
Rhino-form looks like it could have just been a royal guard-type that we're bringing out now. Spaceship-form is so limited as to be obviously engineered for the cause. We want the xenos to know as little about us as possible.
Again, horns == yes, +1.
But a less than optimal, less-shield-y design, is more controversial.
Underselling ourselves in the name of misinformation is wasteful, unless you think that in the future, we will have some reasonably plausible situation where we would derive major benefit to springing the full depth of our abilities on them, unawares. Much more of a benefit than now. I'm not sure what that future situation would be, but perhaps you are thinking of one.
If there's not some future key event in mind, then making a non-optimal design now simply causes wasteful loss of soldier lives, and then confers no extra special benefit later, yes? Rhinos don't protect a squad of accompanying soldiers. By analogy, tanks by themselves are much less effective than mobile infantry/tanks combined arms.
Do you have something in mind that we should be saving our obviously-on-demand-breeding abilities for?
Besides, we're playing against Bay12'ers. They know what we can do, and they know what forces we started with. They won't meta, but they will be very carefull.
Fair enough. A triceratops doesn't really sound very effective at all though.
Maybe stepping back to the drawing board a bit... are there other designs we could come up with that would look natural but also be much closer to optimal for a given strategy?
Acid spitters were suggested, which sounds like a solid option that is indeed fairly optimal sounding for sapping. But is a bit separate from the issue of fighting riflemen.
What about trench warfare? Subtly different than tunnels we already have... you can enter or leave at any point along a trench, but it still stops projectiles. It might not even require a separate caste at all depending how quickly our workers can build trenches -- can we actually dig them fast enough to almost use it as an on-the-fly offensive advance technique? Or at the very least, we could pre-build so many trenches that they can't set foot outside without being within 10 feet of a trench, that we could use to get in slashing range safely with?
Or if our collapsible tunnels (i.e. becomes a trench) are really-seriously-for-real collapsible ON DEMAND, then why aren't we just already using those to pop up 3 feet away from guys and slit their throats?
The point of our current strategy is to appear in close range as fast as possible. The long range battle is on we're probably never going to win.
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Topic: Colonization: Alien Thread (Read 11849 times)