Endless Void - Factions and ships

[Peter]

This thread is mainly for discussions of ships and ideas for new options, ship classes and so on.

As soon as I get the updated rules together, I'm going to have to write a few ships up so that the whole thing can see a mechanics playtest in the near future.

Considering how nightmarish this week was in terms of tutorials and preparation work, I don't think I'll be able to get much of this done for Sunday, however.

The first faction to get mechanics, ships and rules will probably be either the Enclaves - the shiny faction - or the Traders - the faction with the junky ships and sludge armour.

Those are about comparable in terms of technological effectiveness - the Enclaves are shinier, use nanomachines rather than sludge, and also have smaller, lighter and more manoeuvrable ships. With MORE DAKKA (or less, if you have to be pedantic and point out that no-one can hear said dakka...)

On the other hand, the Traders have a greater selection of military hardware, and will probably have ships that can break up and recombine (a critical hit to the mass destroys one of its constituent modules). Combined, the ships will hit harder, and have more armour. Separated, the ships will be harder to target.

I'm not sure what general characteristics to ascribe to the Emissaries or the ships they use. I've decided to have the Emissaries as large, but essentially humanoid, rather than being Great Old Ones, however. Great Cthulhu has enough appearances in fiction, thankyou very much (plus d4 investigators per round...).

Does anyone have any suggestions for which one of these to create first?

[Adam]

Humanoids and Cthulhu aren't the only options for a godly being... how about indistinct entities several metres in legspan, with a centaurish body shape, spidery bit instead of horse bit, and no neck - instead the head, a smooth ovoid with three dark holes for eyes, floats above the shoulders leaving a slight gap? Their entire bodies are glowing brightly white, haloed by some fallout from their respiration processes, the equivalent of human sweat but a lot more... godly.

There, that's a random idea for you (and would look completely badass as a unit in Supreme Commander).

[dragonlord]

From your description it sounds like it might be easier to do the Enclaves first. Modular ships might be a bit of a pain if they're the first fleet you do.

Somehow I imagine the Emissaries using ships like the Asgard or the Ori in Stargate, not sure whether that would match up with any of your ideas. Streamlined-ness is a common way of illustrating a race's advancement in comparison to others.

[Peter]

Well my plan was for the Enclaves to use the sleek, shiny and streamlined ships - it also goes against the recent 'dull grey' look assigned to pretty much every human spaceship these days.

There will also be a strong Siren contingent in any Enclave fleet. I haven't really settled on a visual style for their ships, but they will probably be sleek, elegant and graceful - human ships will basically have the same qualities, so I'm trying to think of ways to make the two mechanically and visually distinct.

For playtesting, I'm going to assume that every ship is accessible to every faction - in the actual game, I suspect that each faction will have its own 'common ships' and all others will be rare and difficult to obtain.

There will be ships that split up and join together, which will almost certainly belong to the Traders, although it won't be the main element of their fleets.

[Peter]

OK, I've managed a little more thinking about this, and I think I'm going to start with:

• Human ships: Streamlined, sleek, generally pretty shiny. Curved outline, but broken by sharp edges, weapons emplacements and the like.
  
• Medusa ships: Colourful. Medusa use all of the bioslime/biotech stuff, so most of their ships appear to have carapaces or vegetable matter growing on the outside. Probably present the most broken profile of all the races.
  
• Sirens: ships often appear to have many 'sails'/wings, although these are actually sophisticated storage cells and collectors, used to harvest fuel and useful materials from atmospheres. These sails also provide the Sirens with advanced defensive options. For siren ships, the curved sillouhette is otherwise unbroken - there are few or no harsh edges on their craft. Siren ships are typically utility craft and lightly armed.
  
• Wraiths: the most warlike faction, their ships are based on similar tech to the Medusa. They look visually distinct, in the same way as the Chaos ships in BFG look awesome while the Imperial ones look about as sophisticated, but less awesome.