Nightmartree wrote:its a secret project to release a metal eating bio plague to counter the nano plague, of course it won't let them use metal (cause its being eaten) but it will slowly degrade all metal world wide, essentially doing to the machine what it did to humanity except the machine itself is metal.
The reason the houses haven't released it? They're afraid of the machines retaliation and madness as its systems degrade to the bio plague. And the machine wouldn't just sit quietly, non-degradable plastics, energy fields and other forms of containment could slow or even stop the plague for a time...
Here as someone pointed out this should probably be a separate thing from where I mentioned it. Thank Razur for that. So i'm copying it over here and asking, what do you splicers think? Maybe a small "test" version to bomb machine machines facilities allowing your teams to really make a difference, and possibly provoke major heat from the machine once it realizes what they just deployed (if all assets there are going to degrade and fall apart in a few weeks...why not use them?). Of course this versions lifespan is too limited to last, you'd likely need to make some excursions to the gardens and other locations to acquire samples that will allow this doomsday device to be completed.
In the end though the question will remain, does humanity dare to strike a fatal blow against the machine? Provoke it to possibly finish the job it began so long ago....
And of course a certain subset of humanity may oppose this due to the loss of technology...
i would add that there is also some concerns with the potential of this thing backfiring in a big way. what you are essentially describing is a virus that infects metal. if it mutates, it may not distinguish between the metal of the machine and the metals contained in the human body... now of course, splicers are very good at bioengineering, and they're sure to have tried to make that impossible, but it does mean that this thing can't be self-sustaining. it would basically be a large area version of spore dischargers.
also, it stands to reason the process could be reversed, depending on what exactly your crazy virus is doing... it can't be literally destroying the metal, that would mean it's creating antimatter which would blow up everything in a rather spectacular fashion and also spraying dangerous radiation all over the place, so it is probably just chemically bonding the metal into some molecule that is a real pain to split up... but there's a big difference between really hard to split, and impossible to split. especially given the machine has nanoweapons as well.
truthfully though, it really is quite baffling that the resistance hadn't already attempted counter-nanowarfare against the machine. i would say that to retain plausibility, you're going to need to come up with some background reason why the resistance hasn't already killed off the nanoplague. though, truth be told... the default setting kinda needs that too.
Shark_Force wrote:truthfully though, it really is quite baffling that the resistance hadn't already attempted counter-nanowarfare against the machine. i would say that to retain plausibility, you're going to need to come up with some background reason why the resistance hasn't already killed off the nanoplague. though, truth be told... the default setting kinda needs that too.
I'd run it as they couldn't manipulate it presicely enough to avoid the exact issues you were bringing up. This is new cutting edge Bio-tech, but they're still not 100% on it. Also i'd bet the nano plague has defenses too, it'd be massive warfare on a nano level between bio plague and nano plague and so far the bio plagues have always lost. Also i bet the nano plague is hard to differentiate between it and other metals and the resistance doesn't really want to destroy all metal on the planet (or is even sure if they can) but if they have too....
Also who's to say that the nano plague hasn't been destroyed before? and then the machine just launched a new one...
The old Mutants Down Under book for TMNT has this exact thing. A Metal Eating virus (AMV) that corrodes all metal nigh instantly. As a result machinery is rare and scarce. Might be a good book to take a look at for that reason
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If the Resistance doesn't want to lose *all* metal, the virus could be engineered with a limited lifespan & used as a 'last-resort' weapon. This way they don't lose most or all metals and still show the Machine they mean business. Also, with the advent of Legion, having a card like that in the deck would be a good/bad thing.
Thirdly, how would such a virus react to Techno-jackers? How would they react?
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Why would the Resistance care about "saving" metal? Maybe they would want to try and save knowledge from the old world, but they have almost no use of it currently.
The Resistance has basically replaced metal in their world already. They don't use metal nails, or metal shovels. The Technojackers are a small, and somewhat distrusted, or at least scary group to most of the Resistance.
RockJock wrote:Why would the Resistance care about "saving" metal? Maybe they would want to try and save knowledge from the old world, but they have almost no use of it currently.
The Resistance has basically replaced metal in their world already. They don't use metal nails, or metal shovels. The Technojackers are a small, and somewhat distrusted, or at least scary group to most of the Resistance.
Just my two cents.
The tricky thing with such creations is game balance and setting preservation. The very introduction of an All Metal Eating Virus (AMEV) can potentially create some major issues for long term campaigns.
1. Currency in the Splicers world is mico-disc, precious metals and the legendary Black Disc that are believed to be able to shut down N.E.X.U.S. forever. What good are any of the micro disc if there aren't any functional computers that can work the micro-disc if all the metal inside the computers is devoured or contaminated and compromised.
2. How is such a virus controlled? This could literally spell the end of the Technojacker O.C.C. There armored form, their weapons and equipment would all be compromised the minute they were exposed, making the character class far less useful.
3. Once you introduce new nano-plagues/viruses/ biological/chemical warfare of any sort by the Resistance, then you delve into a whole new level of game mechanics and game balancing. Why would the darkest of Great Houses stop with such microscopic warfare against the machines when such houses could also compromise their rivals with such crude inventions? This could make warfare much harder, nearly impossible to stop or counter and devoid of giving player characters an honest chance at being strong impacts in the campaign they are playing.
Having such a cool innovative weapon that can be deployed and implemented like the Viral Immobilizer is one thing, but making it a wide spread virus that can be produced and self sustained like the nanobot plague is a whole different ball game and requires some noteworthy attention.
Also the issue would be if you found an anti metal virus could its effects happen fast enough that the machine could not respond with space based weaponry. That humans survive at all is mostly the machine is broken and on the border of completing the genoicide went good enough and shelved its most potent weaponry. If the machine felt in actual peril of being destroyed you can bet all the city buster/bunker buster stuff would start getting applied again with wild abandon. It does help to provoke that kind of response when humanity is in no position to protect itself from it.
honestly, i kinda presume that orbital bombardment isn't used for 2 reasons:
1) anything beyond a certain size would violate the machine's other directives; it is supposed to protect infrastructure, nature, the remain human "zoos", etc. it should be possibly to cause massive destruction on a global scale, but to do so would go against the machine's programming, and inability to go against the programming (combined with conflicting programming) has caused the machine to go insane... but does not appear to have removed their inability to go against their programming. remember, their justification is that humans are "pests" and thus subject to pest control. wholesale planetary destruction would rather exceed the mandate of "pest control" by a significant margin.
2) anything not large enough to cause long-term damage to everything their insanity forces them to protect is unable to reach the resistance in their underground lairs.
that said, it hardly takes orbital bombardment for the machine to take down humanity. they've got warehouses full of combat drones. if they just fill every cave in existence (which they probably can), they will eventually find the resistance strongholds, and there won't really be much of anything the resistance can do about it. they just haven't done that for a few reasons:
1) they're insane, and are heavily committed to other things. 2) they lost interest, humanity is sufficiently "pest-controlled" to not need their highest level of attention. 3) they've become disunited, probably because of lillith (who has enough humans to toy with, and probably likes it that way). 4) eve isn't completely powerless, just less powerful.
give them a reason to work together and make "pest control" their top priority and i would expect some seriously bad things to happen. they still have a supergenius general, billions of combat robots, supergenius engineers, supergenius organizing power, and a massive numerical, logistical, and resource advantage, all of which combined to allow them to put humanity down before in short order. any strike against the machine that seriously poses them a threat had better take effect before the machine has time to respond to it, because the only thing keeping the machine from finishing off humanity is lack of interest.
this, i think, is why the resistance is so eager to find a shutdown program or something like that... without something that almost instantly defeats their enemy in a single blow, it really doesn't look good for humanity at all. house barren marsh may have taken back some territory... but let's face it, if the machine got serious and sent even 10% of their armies, well.... house barren marsh has only a couple hundred thousand people, even if every single one was a combatant (which is not the case) armed with the most effective weapons the resistance has (again, very much not the case), they would simply lose to a frontal assault by a few million heavy combat robots. if the best resistance soldiers can inflict casualties of 20:1, the machine can just send 40:1 and still win comfortably, then gather up the destroyed robots and turn them into new versions, probably with some new tweaks because the machine just got new performance data and anyways, these robots were 3-4 versions old having been sitting mothballed in a factory somewhere for decades or even centuries.
so yeah, if you're gonna try a super weapon... it had better be invisible until it's too late, and extremely fast-acting the instant it becomes visible, because every minute it takes to destroy the machine is going to cost humanity dearly.
Premier wrote:The tricky thing with such creations is game balance and setting preservation. The very introduction of an All Metal Eating Virus (AMEV) can potentially create some major issues for long term campaigns.
Having such a cool innovative weapon that can be deployed and implemented like the Viral Immobilizer is one thing, but making it a wide spread virus that can be produced and self sustained like the nanobot plague is a whole different ball game and requires some noteworthy attention.
Yep, and I acknowledge that it would cause issues for a long term campaign in the splicers world to have/do something like this. That's why I intended it as a campaigns end move, the final thing your going to allow your characters to do before they all retire deploy the bomb in position X.
Now this doesn't mean that humanity wins, I 100% support a flawed virus with limited range, but if you place a metal eating bomb in the middle of a machine factory...
And even if its not complete, not deployable and ineffective the research itself and testing could be adventures on their own, say a outpost was testing a new bio weapon for the librarians when the machine found them...now they've lost contact and you have to find them and the research. Maybe while you're there you encounter a machine personality who was studying the resistances "new" weapon and has seen the potential, and so deploys an army to stop you from escaping with it. A few sessions later your the ones with the new test gear...which fails. Sometime later you get a working one and it does great! but its limited...slowly building up over a campaign...finally the machine personality that you've been battling with originally come to you with a warning, its been keeping the other personalities in the dark about this new weapon...but if you go through with detonating the bomb in the middle of a factory the others will notice, when that happens the programming that has decided that the "pests" were controlled will re-evaluate the situation finding the damage dealt exceeds acceptable pest control levels and begin a new purge...what will you do splicer, strike a blow against the machine and doom thousands, or retreat, unable to complete your mission and possibly dooming your allies who have brought you here to death at the machines hands with nothing in return.......
