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[10ebbor10]

You're now running on a ton of assumptions and conditions needed for your design to be usefull.

And even if all those are true, you still have a design that's mostly ineffective.

[Strongpoint]

Anyway, we're still stuck in a tie between a Siege Insect, a suicidal pencil and basic tactics.

Anyone want to be a tie breaker.

Actually siege insect is a solid leader ATM, I think we are waiting for the rolls.
Reposting the vote box because it may be lost in the flood

Queen Design:
"Anatress": (1) Shadowclaw
"Novico": (5) Flazeo25, Crazyabe, Puppyguard, strongpoint, Urist Mc Dwarf
"Forest Princess" N.S.C.: (2) RAM, Wolfchild
"Silvia": (0)
"Lamana": (0)
"Minerva". (1) kopout
ebbor's unnamed queen: (1) NUKE9.13

Designs:
Bombardier: (1) Shadowclaw
Revencher: (6) Flazeo25, Crazyabe, 10ebbor10, FallacyofUrist, strongpoint, Draignean
Vespa: (4) RAM, Wolfchild, Puppyguard, kopout
Lamprey bug: (1) andrea,
No Design
Mace tail
Advanced digging
Farming
Darter Caste: (1) Blood_Librarian
Bows ()
Tactics : Penetration of the center (3) 10ebbor10, NUKE9.13, Urist Mc Dwarf

And to save our GM from digging... Winning designs are

Revencher: A variant of soldier drone, the drone is close to the size of a elephant with large back and middle legs providing balance while it's forelimbs are now higher up on body to allow it to more easily swing it's heavily reinforced chitin pincered club like forelimbs with serrated edges, making it useful for cleaving and piercing many enemy's and for bludgeoning and smashing down walls and gates. Layers of heavy chitin cover the body of the drone leaving only lower limbs and parts of head exposed. It has four multi-faceted compound eyes forward facing. It's 6 limbs have move much far out from the body and become double segmented with new tissue type called cartilage to provide flexibility and support with it's intended role is as a siege weapon. It head has also move out further from the body has it has now spouted a small neck allowing for flexible head movement.

Genes Used: Compound Eyes, Antennae, Telepathy, Obligate Carnivorous Digestive System, Hexapod Limb Array, Heavy Carapace, Biological strings., Low-Power, Endurance Muscles,
New Genes: Double Segmented limbs, Cartilage, Neck Rotation.

and

Daughter"Novico V2"(Free):
Gross Physical Anatomy: About same height as our current queen with body similar to that of the soldier drones, she has her two thin and long serrated club like forelimbs higher up on the body with a short spinal tail to provide balance. Her body consists of few layers of mixed carapace to provide protection. When immobile her abdomen swells up produce a long egg sac for laying eggs from her rear. As for her head she has thickened ridges on top of her head with pairs of multi-faceted eyes along with dark IR spots surrounding each eye.

Nutrition: She has obligate carnivorous digestive system like the previous queen but through the use of managing the different strains of bacteria to reduce metabolically waste of food and egg laying.

Environmental Tolerance: While mobile she has same tolerance of that of average drone, but requires a stable temperature when she is in process of egg laying to maintain good egg qaulity or laying rate.

Defenses: She relies on few but highly trained honour guard of Soldiers and few spitters which both have IR than non honour guard brethren to provide her back up against intrusions.

Personality: She is warm towards her children and those of her kind, but has a cunning and outright cruel in dealing with outsiders she also possess a sort of free spirited thought process and has strong distaste for humanity.

[RAM]

From what little I know of the simulation, it seems like it would be fairly easy for one unit to apply a debuff to another in order to simulate casualties inflicted, but I don't know. As far as assumptions go that is pretty tame. I rather suspect that is is much less of an assumption that "It is impossible to have any effect at all by priority-targeting units in the last phase of a system that has been cited as subject to change." but who knows, maybe I AM making arbitrary and absolute statements about things that I don't actually know the specifics of and just haven't noticed.

And of COURSE it is an overwhelmingly blind assumption of mine that guided(and potentially reusable) spears might, against an army with a scattering of wizards and heroes, have the potential to exceed the lofty peaks of "mostly ineffective". Clearly my sanity just ran away to lay eggs in a forest...

Infant(Plural = infantry)

A redesign of the worker into a dedicated damage sponge to take advantage of the damage distribution mechanics.
Under one tenth the size, to take advantage of numerical damage distribution. We are hoping for ten times as many as workers per unit food/manpower spent. Given the geometry, one tenth the size is only a little under half the length. Let's call it a third the length and see how that works after increasing the energy usage.
Acid for blood. Well, not really, but they have pressurised acid-pockets under their armour, for a chance to spray hot acid over anything that kills them. Obviously a spearman without a spear is not a spearman anymore, so is effectively dead...
Ridged armour. It has the downside of channelling hits into the armour, which is bad, but the armour is much thicker in the valleys and the flesh grows around it to better support it, so it works better than it would on a human, and the triangular geometries provide better weight holding. Besides, the fur would make smooth armour difficult.
Fur, narrow but dense fronds jutting out of the valleys of the armour like rigid hairs provide relatively light armour for a large volume, this tends to bounce attacks around priort to hitting the armour proper, thus acting as retarding armour against attacks and effectively extremely thick plating against arrows.
No neck. They don't really have a head, just armour all the way to the tip with a mouth hidden underneath and relying upon the hivemind and their memory to keep them moving in the correct direction.
Stubby leggies. Their legs are short, thick, heavily armoured, and close to their body, which is very nearly flush with the ground.
Low metabolism. They are only supposed to take part in the last phase of combat, so speed is not an issue because the model is too simple for any worse than that, this allows them to eat grass... This also allows them to be flush with the ground which would otherwise slow them down due to navigating around obstacles.
Mow weapons. They are just here to overwhelm the enemy targeting options, so they don't need to do any damage. They can inflict casualties by being attacked which is good enough to justify them given how cheap they are to produce. Meh, lets give them acid drool, they can crawl over people who fall over trying to stand on a sea of bugs...

there, there'll be thousands of them so they will be the only thing that ever gets hit, and they will each be as tough as a worker. Tougher even! Perfect unit to take advantage of the combat system...

[10ebbor10]

Cut down on the snark, please.

Anyway, there's no point in continuing this decision, as it's clear that you're absolutely rigidly set in your opinion. I'm mean, when you accept it as given that the entire game system will be rewritten just to make your design work ...

Spoiler: BTW (click to show/hide)

BTW, I'm pretty certain you're heavily overestimating the effect enemy mages have on melee. It's really not that significant. It's annoying certainly, but not worthy of a design that focusses on them and only them, and only partially and only if the system is rewritten to account for it.

You can see that if you look at the front reports.

When main battle is joined, they prove themselves worth the weight of a dozen trained spearmen each, as their spells of confusion weaken the attacking drones and they cast spells to make the company of spears around them strike hard and true.

The confusion spell tells us they're worth 12 Spearmen each. At that point, better to actually hire 20 Spearman, which is the equivalent cost of a mage.

Then there's the armor spell, which mostly defends the apprentice from threats that attack it. While this means that your dedicated attack insect (like the worker) is probably going to bounce of, it does not appear to have much effect on the battlefield.

After all, losses for Spearmen and slaves (the 2 units said to be reinforced) increased rather than decreasing.

[Iituem]

Design: Revancher  [Effectiveness: 4] [Cost: 1] [Bugs: 2]

The first element of the Revancher design is straightforward; scale up a Soldier.  More problems result from this than one might expect; elements of the soldier circulatory system aren't quite up to scratch, requiring significant work to strengthen the dorsal vessel that serves as their 'heart', pumping blood throughout the inner cavities of their bodies to required tissues.  Still, we do manage a larger soldier.  Double-segmenting the limbs proves unexpectedly complex as well, and we have to shorten the limb components for it to work; the actual increase in reach is underwhelming.  These prove difficult enough to implement that we don't even get to synthesising an entire new tissue type frankly at odds with our exoskeletal body design; no work gets done on cartilage.  Soldiers are deemed to have sufficient head rotation for the Revancher's needs.

The good news is that the Revancher does work for its intended role; the heavy clubbed forelimbs serve as powerful rams and siege aids.  The bad news is that the spawning process is complex and costly enough that it is a full National Effort for the Queen to birth these new drones.  The worse news is that the issues with the circulatory system mean that the finished Revancher is slow and sluggish by comparison to many other drones.

Revanchers      Cost: 25 Manpower.  National Effort.  Elephant-sized Soldier drones with extended, double-jointed clubbed and barbed forelimbs.  Lower half is heavily reinforced with extra heavy chitin and optimised for smashing down gates, palisades and structures.  Significant circulatory issues slowing performance.  Heavily armoured, especially in melee.  Competent melee combatant, but shines as a living siege weapon.


It is now the Revision Phase.  You have 2 dice remaining.

[Strongpoint]

Congratulations. We threw our design phase through the window. This thing is useless to produce. It doesn't even worth a revision to denat effort spitters.

I hope this will be a valuable lesson and next turn we won't get another new drone hype

[10ebbor10]

Okay, that things goes on the backburner for now.

I mean, there's only 1 siege currently going on (Front 1), and that is one we can't win even if we eliminate their entire siege bonus.

Revision : Symbiotic Digestive Organisms : Regurgitated food from our emetics often still contains partially digested gluten and other indigestible systems, which results in issues for unadapted creatures. In order to resolve that, we introduce beneficial organisms within the emetics stomachs. These help in digestion, and are also present within the regurgitated food, ensuring that partially digested fragments are no problem.

Revision : Reinforced Chitinous Armor : Early attempts for the Hunter's armor resulted in strange curls and other weirdness. A renewed attempt at this lightweight chitinous amor is made. The Chitin is grown pure in the initial phases of the insects growth, which results in a translucent, pliable yet though armor. Once growth of the armor is complete, chemical processes begin to induce hardening into a permanent plate, while the joints remain covered by ordinary chitin.

By seperating the two phases, we hope to create a metabolically cheap yet resilient armor, that provides better protection to joints.

[Blood_Librarian]

Spitter Revision:Plan A

We should make the Spitter cheaper to produce, and not a national effort. This is not so we can get our Dear Revauncher, but it is so we can deploy our Spitters on every field.
My plan involves three simple part changes.

• Externalized Acid Sacks: By trading a smaller, more efficient frame by placing the acid sacks on external reservoirs that look like large, yellow green sacks, we can make the storage of acid easier,  at the expense of making it more fragile.
• Redone Metabolic System: A special, one time metabolism system redesign for the Spitter ensures that it efficiently produces Acid with maximum possible results, possibly using additives from sources such as sea salt, cave rocks, etc to ease acidic production.
• Size decrease: By using externalized Acid sacks, we can decrease the size of their abdomen, and redistribute the weight of the acid and acid production over the spitters entire body, although ideally this should help mobility, it is not a primary goal. The goal is to shrink the metabolic weight of sustaining it so that it is roughly similar to that of a Soldier. Ideally, if the spitter is completely out of acid, it should be able to move with some amount of speed.

Overall, this makes the spitter into more of a Glass Cannon then a ranged unit. This should be perfectly fine, because they aren't using bowmen as much anymore.

Dice 1
Don't Spend (0)
 Symbiotic Digestive Organisms (1) 10ebbor10
Spitter Revision plan A (1) Blood_Librarian

Dice 2
Don't Spend (0)
Reinforced Chitinous Armor (2) 10ebbor10, Blood_Librarian

Edit: Added more tactical strateguffins to the proposal.

[10ebbor10]

That seems like it would make the Spitters terrifyingly vulnerable to any threat though.

[Blood_Librarian]

We're not gonna deploy them with significant numbers, they are probably going to be deployed with other mass forces, and should only be deployed on fronts where its not likely that we are not gonna be stormed, although I doubt we would have the foresight to do such. But if we can reduce the amount of manpower cost by, say 50%, we can have two fronts worth of spitters for the 5% investment, even if that means they are slightly fragile. We lost 3 out of our 13 spitters last turn in the melee, but they lost one thousand slaves in the ranged affair. With that in mind, I think making spitters more prevalant would be our best option.

[10ebbor10]

Unless you want to spend a dice each turn to micromanage Spitter deployement, they will be deployed to every front in equal measure. So, yeah, they're going to end up being attacked.

In addition, your design goes from one that is mostly immune to everything but charging and melee to one that is weak to everything pointy in it's vicinity. Making Spitters more prevalent is an excellent idea, but we don't do that by getting them all killed of.

Edit: Also, I'm getting worried about the extent of the changes. I mean, it's almost a complete redesign instead of a revision.

[Detoxicated]

Spitter Revision: Plan B

By changing the growth rate of the Spitters we have accumulated the effect of younger born spitters that still need some time to grow into the full sized version of itself. By having he spitter larvae birthing in an earlier body state the cost to produce them is radically changed to our benefit as much less resources are required to produce a spitter baby. The spitter babies grow up to become full spitters in a period of one to two months.

[NUKE9.13]

We don't need to make Spitters cheaper, just less complex.
...
Sorry, I meant """just""" less complex.

But okay, we can probably do that.

Spitter Revision: Plan C: This plan involves making Spitters slightly more expensive, slightly less accurate, and thereby make them (hopefully a lot) less complex.
What is it that makes a Spitter so complex to produce?
Acid production- already solved, thanks to our acid-producing symbionts. We can put a bit of effort into further integrating the symbionts into the acid production, but it isn't a priority.
Spitting power- potential exists here to swap out some of the complex musculature with our new, more explosive muscles, which consume more energy, but should provide the same amount of power with a less complicated setup. 
Eyesight- the Spitter has the most advanced eyes in the Hive (which still aren't very good). This is a source of complexity. We can reduce the quality of the eyes slightly to reduce the burden on our Queen.
Size- the Spitter's great bulk requires a lot of effort to keep it running efficiently. Efficiently is the key word here- by reducing the efficiency slightly, and using more of an energy-hungry brute-force approach, the Spitter becomes slightly more hungry and slightly less complex.
Generally inefficient design- the Spitter is an ancient design, better suited to ancient environments. We can update it for the modern age- that is to say, where our ancestors could afford to produce a less efficient design in great numbers, we have no choice but to put in the time and effort to streamline it.
These small changes combined will hopefully add up to a Spitter that is no longer a National Effort, with our beloved Queen able to produce as many as she wishes.

[Blood_Librarian]

Yes, but that was the only way I thought it would make sense to make them a non-national effort. I should'e clarified that.

I am completely open to ideas of improving the Spitter so that they could be deployed as a non-national effort, simply because they are too effective for their own good, and the League is doubtless in toiling to change that, so I want to see it used as fast and hard as possible before its useless, preferably so that we can get a source of ore for more powerful units.

@Nuke9.12 Woudlnt that increase its metabolic manpower cost?

[NUKE9.13]

@Nuke9.12 Woudlnt that increase its metabolic manpower cost?

Yes, but lower its complexity, which is what is keeping us from deploying more.