Martian Mode

[APARTHEID]

I just want backpacks and satchels to not look extremely dumb on Martian mobs. That is all!

[misto]

give martian fannypack

[ZeWaka]

did you know that the martians are not from mars

[Cirrial]

Well, the humans on Mars aren't from Mars either.

I imagine that doesn't stop there being some sort of cold war fought between human and alien through proxy battles and subterfuge across known space, though.

[Vitatroll]

You're right; they're from metal slug!

[Wraithcraft]

is starting to get kind of rediculous

I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE!

[poland spring]

what did I do

[Cirrial]

Backpacks will always look dumb on martians.

[Cirrial]

Double post because I'm awful:

Hey Sundance, did you ever have any thoughts regarding skillsets for the different breeds? I'll post some dumb ideas I had that will only further serve to complicate everything. I'm just throwing these here for input/discussion while I continue to sit on my butt and code things that aren't martian mode.

Martian Death/Ghost Involvement

• When martians die, they gib into organs such as their limbs (tentacles), heart, skull and brain. Perhaps weird martian blood and viscerite/martian tissues too. The martian brain is completely irrelevant, though, as the martian's psychic pattern is returned to some sort of pattern buffer onboard the mothership, thus meaning the martian ghost can only forlornly wander around the mothership's interior.
  
• Any attempts to borg the martian brain will cause it to dissolve. Put it to better use in burgers or something, jeez. You should know by now that if you eat the brains of your enemy you get their courage! Serve with martian calimari.
  
• The birthing polyp/perhaps some larger structure can produce single mini martians that require time and biomass (eat some meat slices and/or viscerite) to rapidly develop into a breed, with one of these psychic patterns transferred into it. With more biomatter, this partial delayed resurrect can be skipped and a martian respawned as normally expected.
  
• With sufficient psimatter levels recovered, the option will become available for ghosts to enter the psychic pattern holder, but they can only spawn as mini martians that do not mature, and must be spawned by one of the martians choosing to spend precious biomatter on doing so. They also have to sit and wait in the psychic pattern buffer until a martian decides to produce them. Martians will get a telepathic message from the ship brain that a pattern exists for implantation.
  
• Mini martians have one hand slot, are fast, fragile, and are effectively the same sort of nuisance a handspider is. Regular, maturable mini martians can speak, while ghost-based ones can't.
  
• It should probably go without saying that ghost mini martians absolutely do not retain any memory of their previous round RP wise, although they're intended to cause havoc and destruction before they get squished underfoot, so whatever, grudge away.
  

Martian Mode Objectives

• One of the key features of nuke mode is that the objective is invariant. Everyone knows exactly how a nuke round will go down; the nuke will be planted in an area and the nuke will be set to detonate. The operatives start off as full powered as they will ever be. Martians, however, will not, as they will start with some capacity for upgrades but won't have all the fun toys until they start gathering biomatter.
  
• Martian high command (or equivalent, help, help, I need a lore expert) will task the crew of the mothership with a set of randomly selected objectives, such that the requirements for the aliens never remain quite the same, thus making their motivations less easy to predict.
  
• The current plan is for the objectives to be along the following:
  • Collect psimatter from the crew by dipping them into the biomass vat. Higher ranking provides more psimatter from the access to and knowledge of higher amounts of classified information. Clowns and mimes are too foreign a concept for these generally humourless aliens to understand, though, and as such are worth less, even though we all know they know the true secrets of space. Use this psimatter to terraform the station into a state worth colonising. This will require both amassing the psimatter and then defending the mothership for the time it takes to begin the process.
    • This is sufficiently complex enough to be the sole objective for a round.
      
  • Harvest the DNA of individuals with unique signatures (either randomly chosen or perhaps individuals with complex DNA/booster genes latent in them, depending on how that works out) for further study and analysis of human weaknesses. Either claim them completely in the biomass vat or extract a blood sample from them depending on how loud the team wants to go.
    
  • Steal important human secrets. Martians are not 100% sure on what humans consider important secrets. This can be something like "steal 6 shoes, as these probably contain encoded information in sweat traces", "steal 2 bees (unharmed)", "steal 7 bedsheets as the fabric obviously has messages encoded into the weave", "steal at least one of the green pointy leafed plants the humans are fixated on growing to understand their power", "steal 3 brains because we need specimens to test our new interrogation techniques", etc.
    
  • Spread martian vines in a specific area of the station to disrupt its performance, and make sure that specific area is 70% covered by vines by round end.
    
  • Ensure that 5 or more mini martians are running around the station causing havoc by round end.
    
  • Arrange a set of warp signallers in 3 different areas, to allow for a larger fleet to visit some day, and make sure they're intact by round end.
    
• Some of these objectives are shit, some are less shit. Please help
  

Other Dumb Stuff

• Mancer Visor: Like the visor proposed by Sundance, except a monocle, and provides advanced health output and/or reagent scans instead of just health scans, making it a potent combination of ProDocs and spectroscopic goggles, with the downside that flash protection is no longer provided. Mancers spawn with these and they cannot be grown.
  
• Mothership Things: The mothership needs a power source of some kind (probably simple, but should exist so it can be damaged by boarders), a ship control pod for the pilot, and a teleport system, both external (warp the mothership somewhere) and internal (use to teleport to parts of the station). Also needs some sort of ability to be repaired (although that probably could be achieved by waiting for regeneration), and for there to be interesting effects on the interior and its subsystems when damaged.
  
• Pet/Guard Creature: Modelled after a velvet worm, this creature lives in the mothership and is everything that a humble space bee is not - violent, aggressive, but mostly harmless, more or less. It sprays sticky slime at anything it considers either prey or a threat, which happens to be more or less anything not a martian. This slime temporarily immobilizes anything it touches, until they either resist out of it or wait for it to dry out and become less clingy. This creature also hates bees with an unexplained passion, far greater than its hatred for humans and robots, and will chase and hiss at them and launch slime at them at any opportunity. Despite this intense hatred for anything alien, it never seems to actually attack anything. It also cannot survive outside of the exact internal conditions provided by the mothership, so no, no cheap stun cannon outside the ship.
  

[Sundance]

Martian Stats:
Cirrial, basically this works similar to how people build your DnD team, you will have your melee units, support, spellcasters and the like. Which for the most part distinguishes this mode from others in that each team could be made up of a variety of different martians.

Martian Trooper: Hardened Foot-soldiers.

HP: 90 (Weaker than a human)
BP: High (relative)
Skillsets/Attributes:
None. Spawns with light armor, some martian brew and its own IMP (1x1 pod).
Armor class: Heavy. (can use all armor)
Weapon class: Heavy (can use all weapons)

Martian Mutant: Psychics with a turgid cranium.

HP: 65 (quite feeble)
BP: Medium
Skillsets/Attributes:
-Warp: Can warp away instantly, but has a longer cooldown than the wizard equivilant.
-Clairevoyance: Same as above, longer cooldown.
-Intense Stare: Targets an individual, if target stays in area, will knock the target unconcious.
-Profound Stare: Same as above, but will freeze the target in the area, causing him to scream and writhe. Will detonate the targets head, at the cost of your own life. Use as last ditch measure/revenge.
-Telepathy: Can communicate with Humans
-Cerebral Combusiton: AoE spell, will slow and cause minor brain damage to all those in target area.
-Psychotic Break: Melee range. Inflicts 15 units of Rajajajah in system.
-Mental Distortion: Targets an individual, causing them to hallucinate and see humans as martians (and their speech too), and visa versa. Lasts for 5 minutes.
-Subconcious shield: AoE spell. Will buff targets by providing them +30% damage reduction from all sources for (x) period (err i forget)
-Mind Arc: Shoots a beam of purple lightning, if hits target and if there are others nearby, it will arc like lightning to another target, up to 3 times. Mild burn damage, does not stun.
Armor class: None (cannot wear armor)
Weapon class: Light

Martian Beserker: Pale warriors with gold warpaint. (varied facepaint, aesthetic)

HP: 130 (Buff as fuck)
BP: Low
Skillsets/Attributes:
-Leap: Exactly the same as the mutation. Jump headfirst into combat.
-Battle Stance: Beserkers punches deal x2 more damage. Is modal (lasts indefinetely, only stops when switched with a different stance).
-Defense Stance: Has a 50% chance of deflecting melee attacks (including armed), but halves damage done by punching. Is modal.
-Blind Rage: Can only be activated if in RED health. Fully regains stamina, and ignores slowdown from damage.
-Body Slam: Exactly like the wrestling attack, can only be used if target is prone.
-Throat Whip: Slaps the target across the throat, stunning them briefly and preventing speech.
-Constrict: Binds the target, essentially cuffing them and causing the target to be pulled. However anyone can break this by pulling the target away.
-Agonizing Bind: Target must not move, similar to shocking grasp. Painfully pulls off a random limb. Works well with constrict.
-Pulverize: Strong brute attack, creates medium bleeding damage and stuns the target. Will also wreck borgs. Long cooldown.
-Can brute open doors, including bolted ones (passive)
Armor class: Light
Weapon class: None (cannot use weapons, but can use attire like barbed tubing)

Martian Mancer: Militant biologists of malicious intent. (with/without eyepiece. Again, aesthetic)

HP: 80 (quite feeble)
BP: Medium
Skillsets/Attributes:
Has no skillsets but has numerous tools and abilities, some unique only to Mancer's:
-Mancer visor: Acts as a health scan, chemical scan and nightvision combined (heck)
-Martian stim: Only available to Mancers. Heal a medium amount of damage, requires to be charged after 3 uses.
-Flamethrower: Despite mancers not being able to handle "heavy" rifles, mancers can handle/come equipped with the flamethrower by default.
-Chem resistance: Is completely resistant to poison damage (passive)
-Biobomb: A single sac, available only to mancers. Releases a small cloud unstable mutagen smoke (note this has NO effect on martians, see: martian brew), but they are not grenades, rather proxy assemblies, so can only be used as traps. Can be recharged.
-Fleshy Dynamo: Acts as a one use EMAG before being recharged. Available only to mancers.
Armor Class: None
Weapon Class: Light

Martian Sire: Egotistical aliens of royal bloodline.

HP: 100 (= to human)
BP: Medium
Skillsets/Attributes:
One martian is picked as the Sire, which are considerably stronger than its cohorts due to not being restricted. Spawns with cape (acts as light armor), tiara (acts as helmet), so is already pretty armored. Has some Mutant abilties, and some unique to its own:
-Telepathy: Can communicate with Humans
-Warp: Can warp away instantly, but has a longer cooldown than the wizard equivilant.
-Clairevoyance: Same as above, longer cooldown.
-Mind Arc: Shoots a beam of purple lightning, if hits target and if there are others nearby, it will arc like lightning to another target, up to 3 times. Mild burn damage, does not stun.
-Royal Command: Can only be used if in orange health or under. Removes stuns, heals minor damage and will notify all other martians of your location.
-Grevious Shriek: Will activate passively if any martians break from the hivemind (i.e: Die), screeching; causing dazing and stamina damage, AoE
-Zealous Rage: AoE, will cause all martians in area of effect to move quicker.
Armor class: Heavy
Weapon class: Heavy

---

Double-post, in response:
I like the idea of mini-martians and using bio-matter to respawn martians as weaker forms, it fits nicely and is probably better as mini-martians being mindless mobs like mini matcho menn.
There'd be very little room to abuse that RP wise, if you remove speech from them, and they have to adhere to the hivemind anyway.

I like the idea of a side quest to collect random unimportant junk. Remember that martians cannot use human stuff and can only "grip" it (i.e: Can pick up a gun, cannot fire it, can pick up a medical patch, cannot use it on themselves)

I'm not a fan of the idea of the vines, as it steps on the toes of blob a little too much, and with a full effective martian force attacking the crew, kudzu like creeping object will become just really annoying for the crew and martians alike.

I like the idea of the Mothership having a power source. Can just be modelled after an artifact, imo. The worm i'm not too sure of, while it seems like a good idea on paper, I feel like if a human manages to board the mothership, or manages to escape being dissolved (both of these situations would be extremely difficult without a proper force) that the only force that should stop him/her fucking up the ship is the martians. Otherwise they've got it too easy.

[Cirrial]

Yeah, the idea for the great jumpsuit heist of 2053 was based on the idea that martians can collect but absolutely never use human (or, more accurately, non-martian) items or devices.

The idea for the vines was that they'd be limited area denial/control, totally passable by all but slowing humans down. However, not great as an objective and probably best as some sort of area control grenade instead.

Yeah the worm might be too much, but every other set of antagonists gets a pet (wizard cat, Von Braun, a swarm of angry bats, okay that might be it). Then again, mini martians. Christ, this idea has enough to be done as it is.

Maybe if I still want to do it by the time everything else is done it could be considered as a more expensive ghost critter with similar limitations: zero hands but ranged slime spray, can't harm, if around bees too long involuntary rage causes them to chase and hiss at bee for a few seconds. I am just apparently a fan of incredibly specific weaknesses (hi, wraith).

Bottom priority though.

[ferriswheel1]

LIVE!

[Mageziya]

Well, I made this sprite for if cruisers ever get implemented.


Cruisers would probably go very well with a Martian Mode, and would also probably be a way to justify their use in normal gameplay.

[BBEG]

just a suggestion but could the martians be able to preform horrible experiments on the crew to turn them into subservient abominations, or to just inflict some body horror, or just anal probing because that what martians do. because every antagonist should be both hilarious and terrifying

[Roomba]

I think Butt Stuff is, if you'll pardon the phrasing, a well that has been thoroughly explored to the point of exhaustion by now.