Proliferation

A machine faction that builds. Inspired by the Replicators from Stargate, some features are strong hints of that.

The Replicators function differently from standard enemies. They land on a matter node, put a pumpjack on it, and run an actual factory: extractors, chemical plants, assemblers, labs, belts, power, walls and turrets, all of it working the way yours does. The threat is of a different kind than regular spawners, as they use an actual economy to produce both their bases and themselves.

The mod is still in Beta, mostly because it may need balancing. First two base stages are a decent challenge for a new player. But leave them to grow and they turn into an actual threat. The threat becomes even more deadly if you have Space Age. Art is still WIP, not my strong suit, but I'll get it sorted out eventually.

What a base does

It mines matter and turns it into alloy, then components, then its own science pack, and then it researches its own technology tree out of that pack. What that also implies is that if you let too many bases live, all of them will research at once, potentially getting the infinite research they have (in their separate tech tree) to a high level, that actually makes them a threat. I tried to avoid using timers and script-based things, so most things happen naturally, down to actually building the waves.

Each technology that gets finished (or at least most of them) unlocks a build stage. Construction robots inside the base stamp the new buildings and revive them, and repair whatever you (or the biters!) damaged on your last visit.

Four stages: a bare production line, then a real factory, then a defended one, then a walled compound that can take you out with its railguns before you even see it.

Once the base has the resources and the tech, it builds walking machines (aka the replicators, but please bear with me till I figure out the art) and holds them in a deployer until its garrison is full. The garrison cap is currently fixed per stage and grows alongside it. When it's full, the garrison marches. A wave picks an objective, and a wave that survives long enough lands on a matter node of its own and starts again. The objective is one of 3 things: build a new base, attack the nearest player structure, attack the nearest nest (Replicators are an enemy to all organic matter!)

The infinite techs that they have at their disposal are: turret damage, rate of fire and walker strength. Combine that with their 90% resistance to everything (with exceptions you have to find), they become real threats sooner than later.

What you do about it

Their buildings shrug off ninety percent of everything you have (with exceptions). Lasers and grenades are close to useless against them. Their turrets and their walkers deal Nano damage, which nothing in the world resists, except one smart engineer.

The bases are designed specifically with weaknesses. Whether you do a strategic strike and take out their roboport, then slowly whittle away at the defenses until they fail, or take out the pumpjack, or just go in guns blazing in a buffed out tank, there are many ways to take them out.

Bases appear as the map generates, at a distance from spawn, rather than arriving on a schedule. Explore and you find them. They are uncommon, with several spawning restrictions, such as never spawning near water or resource patches, and will clear their entire area of biters, trees and cliffs, which is totally done in order to get the matter to build the initial base, and not as a mechanism I actually needed in order to prevent some unforeseen scenarios during testing, #trustmebro.

What you get for it

All their buildings have a chance to drop loot. Most of it is a decent boost for a starting economy, but the labs contain their unique research, which you can use to get their tech for yourself. With Space Age, you also get some off-planet bonuses, nothing critical, but enough to get you a head start on resources that you can't get on Nauvis normally. And you can farm them, since the bots will repair what you destroy... eventually...

But that's not all, you also get the matter node, where you can put your own pumpjack and get matter for yourself... well, let's say your pumpjack is not as refined as theirs, but there are solutions for that! Never underestimate your engineering spirit!

Space Age

Space age is optional. With it installed the Replicators' last stage also stands railgun, rocket and tesla turrets and manufactures the ammunition for them, and five more techs open up, each costing a planet's own science as well as looted data:

• Vulcanus: the bond disruptor. If you watched Stargate, you know what this turret does.
• Fulgora: the disintegration ray, a tesla turret rebuilt around a Replicator emitter. It chains, and the ground it lands on burns.
• Gleba: a spidertron rebuilt in Replicator alloy. Five rocket launchers, more room inside, faster legs. I mean, this was to be expected, right?
• Aquilo: the chaos missile, which puts Replicators on the ground where it lands, on their own force, hostile to everyone including you. And nano artillery, which is the best shell in the game against a nest and one of the worst against a Replicator base. I dare you to clear a stage 4 base only with Nano shells!

Settings

Two startup settings, both off by default.

Layout authoring mode unlocks the faction's own buildings and recipes so their base blueprints can be built by hand. It is a tool for working on the mod, you can technically use it to tweak the base layout, or, technically, add more stages, but you need to know how the mod works first.

Diagnostic commands adds five admin-only console commands that report what the faction is doing: /proliferation-queue, /proliferation-drain, /proliferation-research, /proliferation-units and /proliferation-waves. Three of them can also make something that was going to happen happen sooner, and one of those can put a base on the map. Pretty neat if you want a status or to make your life harder.
Nothing else about the game changes.

Compatibility

Every prototype this mod defines carries the proliferation- prefix, so nothing here collides with an overhaul mod's own names, and the faction is its own force rather than a change to the biters. I tested with the mods I play with, some interesting interaction happened, some bugs were squashed, both literally and figuratively, but nothing truly serious. Since this is my 5th mod, I generally learned what to expect, but, if you find something that's not supposed to be there, or that doesn't work as intended, please let me know.

The only vanilla prototypes it edits are resistance lists, and only by appending. Armour gets the same resistance to Nano that it already had to fire, so a decision you made about heavy armour still counts against this faction. Biters, worms and spawners get a negative one, so Nano hurts them half again as much as it would anything else. And everything in the world that is not a Replicator is made immune to the disruptor beam, which is what keeps it a tool with one job.

Author

Cody T. Newman.