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Released Mods / Re: UFOpaedia-friendly Celatid [UNIT] [OXCE]
« on: July 29, 2024, 08:17:20 pm »
Cool! But let me point at the elephant in this room. That is, implications.
The floating system of Celatids is said to be a “naturally” grown anti-grav, rather than lighter-than-air. So it looks like they are mostly a bio-technological way to produce small antigrav units, moonlighting as a hunter-killer (as a side effect or with divergence from purely “industrial” breed). If captured alive, breeding and harvesting Celatids looks like a good way to churn out small (i.e. useful for hardware smaller than aircraft) antigrav modules without taxing your workshop and engineers. Perhaps setting up a Celatid farm would require something like a small-scale version of Mind Shield. Or maybe just use telepath minders.
Also, there are two possibilities:
Either way, if they tend to spawn soon after picking up objects, it will happen more often where the player can see their reproduction by fission (near broken stuff or downed armed aliens respectively).
But… if their actual (acid spit) weapon has limited ammunition (but gradually recharged on its own), they are going to run ahead less and hide more, right?
Also, the part with sack going down without green “blood” would look less weird for spawning than spitting animation. Is this k/o animation? Maybe just stun it in script (barely, so it recovers on the next round). So it’s given the “armed” spawning item, then knocked out, so it drops the item, which “goes off” and spawns?
The floating system of Celatids is said to be a “naturally” grown anti-grav, rather than lighter-than-air. So it looks like they are mostly a bio-technological way to produce small antigrav units, moonlighting as a hunter-killer (as a side effect or with divergence from purely “industrial” breed). If captured alive, breeding and harvesting Celatids looks like a good way to churn out small (i.e. useful for hardware smaller than aircraft) antigrav modules without taxing your workshop and engineers. Perhaps setting up a Celatid farm would require something like a small-scale version of Mind Shield. Or maybe just use telepath minders.
Also, there are two possibilities:
- Celatids use Elerium.
So it’s the “usual” Elerium-based antigrav, just biologically produced. In this case beside all other materials its reproduction is limited by having enough of Elerium to “refuel” the young. Mechanically perhaps Elerium would be “ammunition” for the spawning pseudo-weapon. Also, Elerium could be extracted from the Celatid corpses (or maybe from Elerium bladders dropped as “ammunition”). - Celatids don’t use Elerium.
Then their reproduction is not necessarily limited by exotic materials… but of course as a source of antigravity systems not dependent on Elerium they would become the second most important resource.
- If there is a way to customize item attraction (maybe with scripts?) make raw Elerium attractive for them, so in those rare cases when a Celatids is near Power Source broken by a shot (including its own), you either put it down very quickly or will be ears-deep in Celatids in a few turns.
- And/or just allow them to pick up the usual stuff per “Aliens Pick Up Weapons” standard mod, but have on-turn script to handle extraction of Elerium contents from the picked items that require it for production (such as plasma weapon magazines). That is, destroy the source item and “reload” the spawning pseudo-weapon or increase the reproduction readiness variable.
Either way, if they tend to spawn soon after picking up objects, it will happen more often where the player can see their reproduction by fission (near broken stuff or downed armed aliens respectively).
Besides, now they attack not so often as before, because, as I mentioned in the description, I thought that cloning should take some time, so on the cloning turn they have 50% TUs.
However, I think the primary Celatids should act more like rear commanders. This means removing psiVision from the primaries and giving it to the clones instead. This prevents the primaries from charging towards possible targets and thus increases the possibility that they'll survive to create more clones.That may be going too far. Just reducing the value (range) would make them less feisty.
But… if their actual (acid spit) weapon has limited ammunition (but gradually recharged on its own), they are going to run ahead less and hide more, right?
Also, the part with sack going down without green “blood” would look less weird for spawning than spitting animation. Is this k/o animation? Maybe just stun it in script (barely, so it recovers on the next round). So it’s given the “armed” spawning item, then knocked out, so it drops the item, which “goes off” and spawns?
They also had dynamic background, however, so just pass the route to transport activity tracker and boom, it’s a fully modeled process.
Surely it’s not an effect of faceless and omnipresent gravity. I have seen mockery of the term «assault weapon» as such from “gun nut” crowd, for that matter, and inclined to agree that it’s an anti-concept, given lack of straightforward definitions.