Martian Mode

[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.