Patrick Riley
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My Plans Going Forward (Heavy Spoilers Ahead)
🕑 Added 2021-04-01 09:37:21 +0000 UTCSo, it turns out not a whole lot was broken by the SS update, and pushing out the next version should only take another couple of days.
As such, I believe I should write out what exactly my plans for modding are going forward, so that you all have at least some idea of what your gratuity is helping to create.
Warning, if you're the sort who dislikes spoilers, please stop reading here, because I'm about to unveil a good chunk of stuff that is merely hinted at in the darkest corners of the current release version.
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The Colony of Anarakaad
You may or may not have noticed some of the minor spoiler content I've included in the current release, but the next faction to be added to Legacy of Arkgneisis will seem...a fairly bold decision, but in the endless sea of megacorps, I'm fixing to add some actual aliens.
Now before you get too excited, I'm not talking about horrors from beyond the pale, or utterly incomprehensible mounds of flesh, if I'm being honest, I've never been too interested in such things beyond the horror aspect, and Alex seems to be handling that himself with the Omega.
No I'm looking for more classic scifi aliens, strange, sometimes bizzare, but rational, tractable, and interactable.
The Residents of Anarakaad:
They refer to themselves as Arkarans, and take the form of bipedal reptiles, averaging between 135-180cm tall. The settled Anarakaad, a cold terran eccentric world on the fringes of the sector with a small population many hundreds of years ago, and through much struggle, are just reaching back out into interstellar space at the beginning of the campaign.
See, I don't just want to toss some Xenos into the wider landscape of starsector and expect their existence to be largely mundane, I want to properly sell the experience of first contact with a culture who's only shared history with humanity was a short war almost entirely forgotten to time.
Anarakkad won't even start the campaign as an active faction, they will need to be discovered, either by the player, or by one of the existing factions. How this first contact goes will affect their disposition toward the core worlds going forward, so maybe make it a good one?
At the start of a campaign, their position won't be too strong, with only one major market, and a limited selection of ships to field. But they have one major advantage that the Persean's lack. They fully understand their tech, and can easily build more of it.
As the campaign advances, Anarakaad will grow their markets, expand their reach, they will unlock new ships, fortify their holdings, and what all this means for you? Will vary between campaigns.
If the sector at large reacts positively to their existence, they will largely mellow out, preferring to interact with humanity through trade. If they are met with hostility, they will return it in kind, in a worse case scenario, they might be convinced that genocide is the only viable route forward (though weather or not they have the means to carry it out will be another matter entirely)
Additonally, the Arkarans of Anarakaad aren't a monolithic people who can be so easily classified by a few personality traits, if you check the faction flag folder of the current release, you'll find a bunch of un-used flags. (most) of these belong to planned sub-factions that will live and operate in whatever star cluster I end up spawning these guys in (though at this point I think I'm going to re-do most of those flags.) At any rate, they don't all get along 100% of the time, and you can be sure that there will be things going on at the edge of known space that have absolutely nothing to do with Humanity.
Of course what is a faction without ships, in truth, you probably already know what their ships look like.
Wrecked versions of these can already be found in game, drifting lifelessly through space. They may not look as 'alien' as something like Omega, but thats because they are beholden to much the same laws of physics as Humanity is, their engineering is different, not unfathomably advanced.
Mechanically, they take many queues from low tech, possessing poor shields, heavy armor, and middling-at-best maneuverability. This is paired with an energy-exclusive weapons compliment backed up by missiles. The range issues suffered by energy weapons will be compensated for in a variety of ways, from ship systems, to built-in weapons, to anything else I can think of, I've got plenty of space in their roster to fill out, and I intend to make it as diverse as the above restrictions will allow me.
That's about all I'm willing to talk about at this stage. Do understand that these guys have been planned since the beginning, but it might take another age before they find their way into Starsector, I remain very busy as always, and an undertaking of this scale will require many, many manhours.
