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[Blood_Librarian]

It's less about destroying the enemy as tainting the ground below them in such a way that it would not be livable for YOUR side, to begin with. The whole point of the war is to take the planet that they are living in and use it for the overwhelmingly bright and utopia-like future. That can't happen if more or less half the planet is glassed or unlivable.

[Aseaheru]

 Even in the worst case, they are more about keeping the enemy from recovering. Rather few groups think about fighting wars using chemical, biological or radiological weapons on the frontlines. Besides, then you need more of them to do the job over, say, contaminating a warehouse full of ammunition to the point where it cant be used anytime soon.

[Blood_Librarian]

That's not assuming there infrastructure is hardened and durable enough to survive anything less than the equivalent of the high yield nuclear ordinance.  At a certain point, it's far easier to enter into the structure and sabotage or otherwise disable it after you get past its structural reinforcements.

Essentially,  It's gonna be less about two military forces fighting eachother, and more two ant colonies fighting eachother. Yeah, there might be mortars and artillery, but the bigger something gets, the less effective that thing is gonna be.

[Blood_Librarian]

Im a little bit tempted to do a cross forum posting for this theoretical arms race to the Space Battles forum, is that kind of thing very viable?

[Madman198237]

Should be.

You could get the ICAR Cannalan crew to participate, I bet.

If you can manage that, go right ahead. Always better to get a bigger audience.

[Blood_Librarian]

I ah... I don't know who those people are.

Edit: I probably need to figure out a proper combat system before I do anything about this.

[Madman198237]

Yeah. Figure out your system, then drop it as a proposition in both forums (If you want to run a cross-forum AR. Otherwise, don't. Duh).

[Aseaheru]

 Well, it should atleast be balanced more than ICAR was if yer starting from scratch.

[Blood_Librarian]

I still dont know what that ICAR acronym means.

[NUKE9.13]

InterContinental Arms Race

[Blood_Librarian]

Neat. I was personally thinking of stealing the mechanics from the Hive V league game since it does not rely on RNG, but I'm still doing a small amount of research when I'm not writing up on my other projects.

The two factions I have in mind are essentially psionic based energy beings powered by genetically developed ecosystem and a Self-replicating machine civilization, I'll post up some unit descriptors and other things just for show in a little bit.

[Madman198237]

How do psionics and Von Neumann machines (Grey goo, LITERALLY) not get overpowered REALLY, REALLY fast?

Seriously, I'd take the machine side. All you've gotta do is get progressively smaller, and you'll win for certain. You replicate a single material-consuming machine capable of assembling copies of itself, and keep controlling it as it replicates. Then, you have it start making variants, and suddenly they can link together into a ten-foot armored humanoid with a fusion reactor and a plasma cannon, and the enemy can do nothing about it, because the robots are eating the planet out from under them.

[Chiefwaffles]

Psionics seems a bit less useful against robots too. Because it feels like 50% of typical psionic powers in fiction are only useful against organics.
I'd definitely appreciate an Arms Race with psionics, but it feels like putting them against robotics kind of misses the point.

[RAM]

But then someone goes and figures out that telepathy affects complex electrical patterns and suddenly you need to massively bulk up the bandwidth relative to the charge in order to stop your whole army from exploding due to an area-based *intense thoughts* burst. Or they bring in the telekinetics for a universal incoherence shield around hard armour, telekinetic sonar for universal mass detection, and the old randomiser for offence because it never takes much internal rearrangement to disable something. Meanwhile the hardcore nanotech is very basic, it is pretty much proteins, you gotta get lucky for it to do more than one thing, and control beyond a simple on/off switch is difficult, and even then typically requires physical exposure to a chemical. The more sophisticated stuff with multiple functions, such as both accumulating power and using that power to convert something simpler than itself into its own more-complex form, that, well, maybe if you had a really really good protein, but still, and then throwing in remote control, and coordination, and environmental tolerance(which is always difficult if you are too small for insulation...)... You are probably stuck with something visible. Honestly, grey goo is going to be crazy vulnerable to everything. You gotta be crazy thorough to get all of it, but if you have a target then destroying it is easy, just far too small to have any sort of shielding against anything. Now, sure, your giant robot made out of grey goo is going to be able to shield itself by converting goo into outer shielding layers, but a bomb going off in the middle of it is going to cost it a lot of mass and that level of sophistication is going to force your goo particles to be huge as far as grey goo goes. Of coursem you can get the whole "everything disintegrates on contact" thing with grey goo, but that is not going to remove the kinetic energy and it is going to be a massively insanely high-tech option, you would probably get F.T.L. relativistic projectiles first... At that point Team Psychic is going to have their premonition disciplines up so high that they can hit a thimble from orbit by hand with a single shot from an uzi...

[Madman198237]

My army is still literally eating the planets out from under the psionics, though.

It takes exactly ONE, ONE Von Neumann machine making landfall to completely decimate your entire planet. Literally, it will eat the whole thing bit by bit.

We're not talking biomechanical here, RAM. These are literal nanobots, measured in nanometers, but still plenty complex enough to do a variety of things. The real genius, of course, would be getting them to mimic OTHER materials in large-scale, allowing a swarm of nanos to act like a starship hull, or a concrete bunker, etc etc. However, in this case, merely possessing molecular-manipulation capability means that my army can build any material that it wants or needs, provided it can acquire the atoms and the energy. And it can, this is science FICTION.