Better Invid

[Zer0 Kay]

Science itself is indeed the polar opposite of religion. It is a process used in order toprove assumptions. While religion is a system of belief based on assumptions.

Not quite. Science is a systematic process for building and organizing knowledge based upon testable hypotheses, the empirical evidence gathered while testing those hypotheses, and any predictions formed based upon that empirical evidence.

Not quite? So your saying it isn't a "Process" used to "prove" "assumptions"?

Belief without proof is not a part of the scientific method.

Didn't say it was. I said that people, in this case meaning political people and education people and not scientists, want to take theories, otherwise referred to by me as unproven assumptions, and refer to the theories as proven science often stating it as "science".

What you’ve posited here is a fairly common fallacious argument that attempts to misrepresent science as a belief system by falsely asserting that science claims to have all the answers, and really it never has. There’s always something more to know.

No I didn't. I claimed people claim science has already answered things that it has not and teachers teach things that aren't proven science as the only theory and that people keep using bad models calling it science even though the early models have already been proven wrong and the doomsday politicians should look as foolish as Harold Camping but for some reason because they label it science and not religion they are never held up to their shenanigans. Science is supposed to be a tool to produce answers through testable, repeatable means and those who stick to a theory and the only thing they keep changing is the date and then have to change their theories name because the trend they were expecting reverses... they're doing science wrong and they need to admit that their theory was wrong and stop trying to use it to advance their own political agendas. It isn't the science that becomes a religion it is the belief in a theory as proven truth and the only truth that becomes religion.

[Zer0 Kay]

I thought the pollinators were the Invid. Plus your introducing non-robotech canon.

If that was for me; I never said I was sticking to current canon... but the RNU were very much Robotech and still can be for an RPG game searching answers to the forever elusive "what were they thinking?" debate.
Though it might not be to the taste of some people, which is why I prefer to include the source when mentioning such details.
If the argument doesn't stick for you, have it your way. There's enough Robotech for everyone.
Point is... we are discussing a way to make the Invid better.
Which in itself is contrary to current canon.

Thank you, very respectful point of view.
But it didn't answer my other question. I thought the pollinators were the Invid. Where does it say otherwise? I'd like to know the other canon as well. Thank you.

[xunk16]

If the Regess can convert her ENTIRE civilization into energy and travel thousands or millions of light-years, what else can she do?

As far as we know, that’s her best trick… and it takes such gargantuan amounts of protoculture to pull off that she can’t do it casually. She can speak telepathically, glow like a cheap glowstick, and… I dunno… gesture grandly without moving any part of her body but her arms? Her entire civilization ain’t that big. Her influence over evolution is achieved technologically, so it isn’t part of her innate power set.

I might propose wildly changing from sizes to sizes, like if she were moving in otherwise imperceptible dimensions.
A living perspective trap.
Now the "entire civilization" part is certainly taking it's toll. But it's not all the protoculture of earth either. (If it did, they would have nothing left to feast on, once at the other end of whatever the continuity you choose.) So one has to ask... How much would it be for just her alone? I think there was a few shots where she appeared from a glowing blob of light. The Regess might be quantum tunnelling at a macroscopic scale way more often than previously thought. She just don't have to morph into a phoenix to do it.

With that said... what about a few shell ship instead of half a race?

Zentraedi insanity table, pg. 10.

That's from the Zentraedi Sourcebook, 1st ed.

Ah, there's that mystery solved... thank you. He's citing an obsolete book that was so inaccurate even Harmony Gold condemned it as "Robotech in name only".

EDIT: Deleted a few sections, since the reason Peacebringer is having so many issues is now apparent... it's not that he's trying to BS anyone, he's stuck on the wildly inaccurate and badly outdated RT1E while everyone else is on RT2E.

Well, I'm glad I finally was able to help.
Meanwhile though... I'm still empty on the "Xai-Zor" ship.
I know... I know... It probably is a wet pipe dream; but I had hopes for a rare apocrypha maybe half designed by a fan, half-stolen by temporary writers, never truly implemented in canon; new ship.

I thought the pollinators were the Invid. Plus your introducing non-robotech canon.

If that was for me; I never said I was sticking to current canon... but the RNU were very much Robotech and still can be for an RPG game searching answers to the forever elusive "what were they thinking?" debate.
Though it might not be to the taste of some people, which is why I prefer to include the source when mentioning such details.
If the argument doesn't stick for you, have it your way. There's enough Robotech for everyone.
Point is... we are discussing a way to make the Invid better.
Which in itself is contrary to current canon.

Thank you, very respectful point of view.
But it didn't answer my other question. I thought the pollinators were the Invid. Where does it say otherwise? I'd like to know the other canon as well. Thank you.

Bear with me for I have not necessarily the time right now to un-mix my lore from the old comics and Robotech Novel Universe today; and come with exact quotes and pages. (Which would be hard since this is mostly from the sequence of events and exposition, not per say "one dude said it is such".) So from memory if it's alright with you :

Also... SPOILER ALERT; if you haven't had the chance to go through this yourself.

Spoiler:

In the RNU, the flower of life was first spotted in our universe on a fairly primitive Earth. It was then defoliated by Haydon which needed it for it's far-fetched plan, liberating him from the universe boundary into the multiverse. (I assume it / they wanted to be gods and that was the one elusive trick they couldn't do after transferring their whole race / Individual as a cybernetic planet / organism.)
In the much criticized "End of the Circle", that's eventually the end goal they / it achieve.

At that point in time then, we can assume the first symbiotic relationship built by the flower, in the linear universe, to have been with human beings or some other of our ancestors. (The novels seems to want and go the "Ancient Astronauts" way... but that wouldn't necessarily be needed as other species can and will fill that role at different times. However, there is one interesting coincidence with the IRL Mo Religion; which is found by this forum to be mostly unintended.)

Haydon then searched and found a new spot unto which transplant the flower. One which would be ready to be manipulated into a belief system pushing them toward the needed evolution provided by the flower. These were the yet slug-like Invids. (That part holds for the RNU, but also for the old sentinel comics.)
During centuries, the relationship of the flower with the Opteran flora and Fauna got gradually more intense. To the point were it became the only source of life for the invid, either culturally, religiously, nutritiously, etc...

That's where things get a little muddled.

Depending on how you interpret the bits of information from the Sentinel OVA, the Invids were either the first or second opterans to serve as pollinators.
The second being the chimeric dog / vermin thingy that Zor kept secret from the Masters, in order to limit their control over the expansion of their Protoculture based hegemony.
The novels expands on this. Simply called "Pollinators" (one does wonder how Cabell and Rem could even be puzzled about why Zor kept them in his lab), these quickly started to appear everywhere the flower did go. Either as a plant, or as protoculture. Making them the proverbial "rats" on Zentraedi ships.
One of which ended up being gifted to Dana, as a pet, by her three Zentraedi godfathers (Bron / Rico / Konda).
In this, the RNU simply tried to explain, at first, the weird critter Dana had in the original series.

However, as time passes, she notice the strange relation the beast has with the flower. (I think there was also a mention of the Pollinators' poluplation slowly growing on earth as well after the end of the Master's Saga.) Namely, being seemingly able to teleport to locations where the flower will be in bloom. Eventually Dana formulate the theory that pollinators have evolved a limited organic fold ability. In turn, this will eventually lead to the pollinators being exploited by Rem in order to restore some of the flower of life after the Regess has gone away.

Now coming back to Cabell and Rem apparent ignorance of simple botany.
You can of course put it in the "inconsistency box". But there are two rational explanations for this.

1. Cabell is well aware of what his pupil brought back and why he has kept it a secret. Hence, he doesn't want anyone knowing, especially not the naive Rem, on which he count to rebuild Tiresian society after the Master's fall. His silence insures that the true nature of the beast remains hidden, and since they can't be in contact (with witnesses) with the flower of life on Tirol; the Masters themselves remains fooled.
2. Cabell is unaware of the Pollinators' role in the order of things, because the plant has already its relation with the Invids. Even more, the plant seems to manage to survive by it's own, on different planets, and mutate to adapt in such a way as to become irrelevant to the pollinators or masters. It normally has two (apparently independents) reproductive mechanism in it's natural state; pollen, and seeds. Without normally passing by the "fruit" stage (the mutated plants does). By mutating, the flower usually loose one of these mechanism, which makes it able to propagate, but does not keep it's multidimensional capabilities intact. What Cabell may not know; is that it is very well possible that Zor would have genetically engineered the Pollinators himself, according to his plan to seed new worlds with the flower. However, the Invid attack the SDF-1 before its mission is over and a diplomatic settlement can be managed with the Regess... Leaving the experiment / planned release of the pollinators unfinished / undone.
   I speculate that if Zor indeed created the pollinators, he might have done so in prevention to the loss of reproductive mechanism the flower would go through.

The old comics and RNU both uphold these as possible scenario, while never truly revealing what was Zor's true goal / knowledge on the matter.
Simply put; because the guy is dead and the best they have is biologically half reconstructed / half messed up memories through a clone.
This relation of mutations limiting the reproductive capacity of the plant is also found in the way the Master's protoculture is achieved; namely by preventing a fertile and normally formed seed to blossom. (The Invids might have a softer way...) One of the many "flower power", "love change the world", traits of the original (no longer canon) Robotech.
The flower of life is at its strongest once pure, undiluted, in relation with a specie having a high potential for evolution (change) by reproductive sharing of genes (and most often able of sentience and cultural developments). In the presence of not so fertile worlds, the flower is diluted, it gives it's potential to the closest specie it can find so that once evolved, that spiece will help the flower pollinate new and more fertile grounds.

Most Sentinel races have deffects this way. The Karbarrans lives on a barren world in an ultra conservative society, hence the flower is in the start of the process to uplift them by giving them a somatic link with its new form : Sekiton.
The Perytonian are on a doomed world entrenched in their own apocalypse and prejudice.
The Spherian / Spherisians do not evolve... they are static as stone. They mostly reincarnate into their own "babies".
The Praxians are deliberately female supremacists, and come from a limited gene-pool religiously protected in "temples". This would mean that "half" the specie do not evolve. And despite the cloning facilities, they have reverted / were stuck in the viking (Viqueens?) phase of their development.
The Haydonites are quite stuck in their cybernetic forms... And their world isn't even alive in an organic sense.

Which leaves the Garudans... but their own environment is so weird (with the Hin and all), that it would be hard to see clearly how is the flower at work there. Most probably, Garuda itself is interfering as a macro-organism. Nonetheless, changes can be perceived. And the Garudans would most probably be the next in line if it weren't for the humans and the Regess.

I don't think the old comics goes so far as to give "fold" capabilities to the pollinators though. That's only character speculation from the RNU.
However, the comics goes one step further.

In clones (or was it Mordecai? I tend to see this whole thing as it's own new saga...), it's revealed that the flower of life doesn't originally comes from our linear universe, but from a non-linear one. (Meaning, people there do not perceive time and space as we do.) In fact, there is rather strong assumptions, by the "new aliens" in service; that the flower never was truly a flower, and that it isn't even a specie, but a single multi-dimmensional "godly" organism. (What is otherwise more known under the name "shapings", protoculture's will.)

We then proceed to learn that the flower incursion into linear space isn't the first invasion of that avatar.
Before it touched another universe, where it communed with the Monte Yarrow, reproducing the same cycle of creating a dependency and uplifting their way of life, to the point where the migration of the flower would be to their detriment. When it first pierced from their universe into our own, this begun a process of sending the energy of their universe into ours, creating a state of stagnation (their universe stopped expanding!), which the Monte Yarrow feared would eventually bring a big crunch. (Or the equivalent for their own form of universe.)
Deducing that the flower is attracted toward lifeforms evolving a certain way, they placed all their efforts into following it; in order to eradicate all sentient life from Andromeda, in the hope the flower would flow back home. In this attempt, they were stopped by the Gottruzello Merchant of Pain, an arachnid race; which brought their galactic genocide to an end, by pushing back the Monte Yarrow into their own universe, and leaving them in such a weakened state that they were more or less in stasis.

The same logic is found in "the end of the circle", where the flower uses the Regess to cross into another, yet to be formed, universe.
So, basically, that thing goes from dimensions to dimensions, "creating" the multiverse as it goes, using pollinators (not necessarily the dog vermin) along the way in order to create it's own "doorways". It reward evolution with peace and virtually unlimited energy, but anything limiting the chaos and giving it structure, a technological plateau around an empire for example, will quickly be influenced toward destruction, entropy, and it's own doom. From the living organism standpoint, the flower of life exist to perpetuate chaos and change. (And a mild obsession about inter-species breeding.)
If we were to mix both explanations, which we can, then Dana's theory would be false. The Pollinators (Dog vermin) do not fold, the shapings controlled by the flower do : trying to help the pollinators come into contact with it's mutated forms, detrimental to its own goal.

Which lead me to formulate the hypothesis that the flower itself might be searching, reaching, for a dismorphic partner.
Something more or less found in the analogy of the duality between Haydon and the Regess.
Max and Mirya.
Bowie and Musica.
Dana and Zor.
Bernard and Ariel.
Lancer and Sera.
And it expresses itself the only way it can... through the races it influences.

In that sense, pollinators aren't only there to help fertilize, but even more so to move the flower around in its search.
First of a compatible specie, second of an individual able to pierce the universal barrier.

Now... in case your question was less theoretical on the how and why, and more simply "what the hell is a Pollinator and what does it look like"...
https://robotech.fandom.com/wiki/Polly
https://robotech.fandom.com/wiki/Pollinator

And since both articles have the same picture... Here is some diversity.
https://robotech.fandom.com/wiki/Catego ... tor_images

It also came back to "canon" more recently in Robotech Remix :
https://twitter.com/Piklesuke/status/11 ... 64/photo/1

Though it hasn't done anything out of the extraordinary there yet.
And with HG apparently rejecting anything that made Robotech into - a complete and finished - Robotech for its reboot; opening problems where there was solutions and vice versa, and leaving the job unfinished as of yet... We will have to wait and see what will be this magnificent creature and its pollinators this time around.

[Zer0 Kay]

Daaaang. Thank you.

[Seto Kaiba]

I might propose wildly changing from sizes to sizes, like if she were moving in otherwise imperceptible dimensions.
A living perspective trap.

Can't say she's ever given me that impression... she hadn't quite crossed the line into being an eldritch abomination when we saw her in the series.

Now the "entire civilization" part is certainly taking it's toll. But it's not all the protoculture of earth either. (If it did, they would have nothing left to feast on, once at the other end of whatever the continuity you choose.) So one has to ask... How much would it be for just her alone? I think there was a few shots where she appeared from a glowing blob of light. The Regess might be quantum tunnelling at a macroscopic scale way more often than previously thought. She just don't have to morph into a phoenix to do it.

If Ariel's performance is any indication, she's probably capable of casual solo interstellar or intergalactic teleportation... depending on where the bloody hell the Invid's original homeworld was. Not Optera, the one the Haydonites trashed.

That said, can her troops even function without her around to micromanage them? They seem pretty damn dumb most of the time.

Well, I'm glad I finally was able to help.

It's greatly appreciated. He seemed so damn certain of what he was writing even though it clearly didn't line up with the books... it was quite a conundrum.

Meanwhile though... I'm still empty on the "Xai-Zor" ship.
I know... I know... It probably is a wet pipe dream; but I had hopes for a rare apocrypha maybe half designed by a fan, half-stolen by temporary writers, never truly implemented in canon; new ship.

It's gotta be something fan-designed or appropriated from another series as part of someone's fic, like the Macross, Megazone, etc. designs appropriated by the Mecha Journal and uRRG.

I can't imagine the Invid would name something after the guy they hate most in all of existence (Zor), and it wouldn't have made sense in the OSM since the Inbit ships and mecha are all thinly veiled punny names (in a similar vein to the enemy mobile suits in the original Gundam). "Zor" would, in an OSM context, refer to Southern Cross rather than MOSPEADA... that being what the original not!alien inhabitants of Glorie were called in Southern Cross.

We've seen pretty much every piece of significant unused concept art for MOSPEADA between the official artbooks in Japan, the "Imai Files" turned up by Roger Harkavy, and that content winding up in the UEEF Marines book for want of any further official RTSC material after Parts II-IV were cancelled by HG.

And with HG apparently rejecting anything that made Robotech into - a complete and finished - Robotech for its reboot; opening problems where there was solutions and vice versa, and leaving the job unfinished as of yet... We will have to wait and see what will be this magnificent creature and its pollinators this time around.

That's not so much a narrative problem as a legal and quality one... there was a lot of bad, literally criminally derivative material in that old stuff.

[Peacebringer]

Good job xunk16! Remember, I am not arguing or even debating Seto; I am educating and part of education is self-discovery. As for the "Xai-Zor" ship, I had to pulled that off of a old HD I had in a box from a Compaq I had; I saved it circa, 2000-2001 in an MOSPEADA file. Back then, I saved EVERYTHING.

Seta, if you could post articles, video or audio of Palladium quoting they had to follow HG and certain shows produced are non-cannon, that'd be great.

Didn't you say they Zentraedi are on drugs? Not too professional. Sure, the Zentraedi are clever, well, in the Robotech show they fought just like the Invid (massive numbers and fire-power), but if an Invid genetic-virus gets on board their command his, think, "Akira".

Being able to convert your ENTIRE civilization into energy is D*MN impressive. Can the Zentraedi do that?

Somewhere in the first Robotech-book, Kevin Siembieda state he watched thousands of hours of Robotech to get his MDC and weapon damage accurate. Did he watch the same episodes thousands of time again and produced a revision? Palladium's a business and like any business they need to generate revenue; surprise! 2nd edition! I have the first-edition and guess what? It works just fine if I want to play a Robotech game; you can quote your, over-edited, inaccurate RT2e all you want, but if I had an RT2e book, I would use it to balance out the table in my parent's base while my friends and I play RT1e and have fun!

And I hate to tell you this, but pen and paper RPG games ARE obsolete.

You do have a fallacious argument when you state, "Well, um, I know this is about an RPG game, but the game, um, is suppose to be based off of a children's TV show and um, therefor, is incorrect". You might have a few more fallacies, but I've got worlds to create.

If you want to believe the Invid are, "Rubbish", well, if you have a creative and enterprising GM, and you play a Zentraedi-officer fighting the Invid, get used to rolling up new characters because you WILL be surprised. What's the point of playing a game if you've done the math and think you're going to win? This isn't Las Vegas.

Warning: Warning for Trolling, and Flaming/Flamebaiting. -B

[Seto Kaiba]

Remember, I am not arguing or even debating Seto; I am educating and part of education is self-discovery.

Alas, no… you are not educating anyone. What’s going on here is that others, myself included, are attempting to educate YOU because of the various misconceptions and outright falsehoods you’ve been spouting. We had assumed a certain base level of familiarity with the material and that you’d been using such a poor quality, wildly inaccurate, and hopelessly obsolete source did come as a bit of a surprise. I’d assumed everyone knew by now that RT1E was so wide of the mark that even Harmony Gold considers it Robotech in name only.

As for the "Xai-Zor" ship, I had to pulled that off of a old HD I had in a box from a Compaq I had; I saved it circa, 2000-2001 in an MOSPEADA file. Back then, I saved EVERYTHING.

Translation: it’s BS, with an extremely high probability of mistaken identity.

Seto, if you could post articles, video or audio of Palladium quoting they had to follow HG and certain shows produced are non-cannon, that'd be great.

HG’s position on the failed sequels is right there on the official site’s FAQ… has been for like 19 years now.

Didn't you say they Zentraedi are on drugs? Not too professional.

Indeed I did… please refer to pages 223 and 224 of the RT2E Macross Saga sourcebook for the full details. The gist of it is that the RPG alleges that the rank-and-file Zentradi soldiers are kept in cryogenic stasis between battles, and are injected with combat drugs during defrosting to help them overcome the effects of the sedatives used to prep them for cold sleep and get them shake off any tiredness from the stasis process, helping them focus and heightening their senses. All in all, they’re basically pounding 5 Hour Energy or strong coffee to get moving after cryosleep.

As to the professional-ness of using drugs to improve the combat abilities of soldiers… it seems like it’d probably be news to you that real-world militaries ABSOLUTELY DO THIS. The US Air Force and other branches were issuing pilots with amphetamines as stimulants for flights which required high endurance and to improve focus on critical missions through at least 2017. The US and other nations incl. France and India use modafinil (a stimulant used to treat narcolepsy) as a “go pill” to counter fatigue in their armed forces. In World War II, practically every serious player in the war was issuing methamphetamine to their troops to counter fatigue and help their wounded troops continue fighting. There are some amusing and frankly terrifying stories about troops who popped a bit too much meth in extremis and did frankly insane things like cross country skiing through enemy lines in the dead of winter to get home.

Mind you, this has no actual basis in the show. In the animation, off-duty Zentradi soldiers were shown to live in perfectly ordinary-looking bunkrooms aboard ship and are never depicted using or implied to be using combat drugs.

Sure, the Zentraedi are clever, well, in the Robotech show they fought just like the Invid (massive numbers and fire-power), but if an Invid genetic-virus gets on board their command his, think, "Akira".

For one, the Invid don’t do germ warfare… they’re barely capable of regular warfare.

For two, how the hell do they get this “genetic virus” on a Zentradi ship? They’re not fast enough to reach a Zentradi ship and not capable of fighting Zentradi on an even footing to forcibly board one.

For three, the Zentradi standard approach to one of their ships being compromised in some way is to just blow it the hell up or kill the misbehaving troops. That’s established right in the show.

For four, what makes you assume they’d have the warning and opportunity to do something like that? SOP for them is to flatten the target from a light second away (e.g. Booby Trap), or to just glass a planet from orbit in a few seconds of sustained fire (e.g. Force of Arms).

Being able to convert your ENTIRE civilization into energy is D*MN impressive. Can the Zentraedi do that?

It’s impressive, but it’s not something she can do casually. The Zentradi have their own amazing ability that they CAN use casually… the ability to convert other people’s entire civilizations into vapor in a matter of seconds, which they demonstrated on Optera and Earth.

Somewhere in the first Robotech-book, Kevin Siembieda state he watched thousands of hours of Robotech to get his MDC and weapon damage accurate.

Oh, I know. Normally when a licensed game is being written, the owner of the IP provides some reference material for the game’s writers to use to ensure that they correctly represent the detail of the setting, story, etc. Harmony Gold never gave them anything like that (because they never had anything like that, having made Robotech up on the fly), so they had to import what few artbooks they could and resort to freeze-framing through VHS tapes of the series. Despite that laudable effort, they still got virtually every detail wrong and invented a lot of things that weren’t actually in the show to pad the game out.

This was why enforcing consistency with the official setting was the #1 bullet point for RT2E from Harmony Gold’s side… they wanted the new game to properly reflect the content of the rebooted Robotech and the then-recently established official setting.

Sadly, similar Critical Research Failures occurred on other Palladium licensed games including Macross II... where they similarly got virtually every detail wrong including the year the OVA was set in.

Did he watch the same episodes thousands of time again and produced a revision?

Nope… the second time around, Palladium got proper support from Harmony Gold in the form of official data on the setting, story, mecha, etc. that was in no small part derived from the original Japanese source material.

Palladium's a business and like any business they need to generate revenue; surprise! 2nd edition!

You’re not wrong that Palladium’s efforts to re-obtain the Robotech license after losing it in the Robotech 3000 fiasco were motivated by a desire for revenue, but RT2E’s existence is something HG essentially dictated as a condition for obtaining the license. They could have let Palladium just release new sourcebooks for RT1E, but they wanted something produced to a higher level of quality that properly reflected the content of the Robotech story.

you can quote your, over-edited, inaccurate RT2e all you want, but if I had an RT2e book, I would use it to balance out the table in my parent's base while my friends and I play RT1e and have fun!

To be brutally frank, nobody cares what book you use to run your personal games. You do you, as the saying goes.

That said, you’ll find pretty much everyone here is using and referring to RT2E for the purpose of discussion. If you enter a discussion like that making unsourced remarks based on the outdated and wildly inaccurate RT1E game, people are just going to wonder what you’re talking about like we saw here.

Furthermore, calling RT2E “inaccurate” is doing it a disservice. It’s not perfect (and no licensed game is), but it’s vastly more accurate to the source material than the original game was. RT1E was, frankly, a joke accuracy-wise.

And I hate to tell you this, but pen and paper RPG games ARE obsolete.

That rather depends on one’s point of view… other publishers seem to being pretty well with ‘em still, the ones that actually kept pace with the times. Palladium’s… “old school”... approach very definitely shows its age.

You do have a fallacious argument when you state, "Well, um, I know this is about an RPG game, but the game, um, is suppose to be based off of a children's TV show and um, therefor, is incorrect". You might have a few more fallacies, but I've got worlds to create.

It’s a licensed game. Literally the point of it is to reflect the content of the property it’s based on.

That’s not a fallacious argument, that’s a statement of the obvious. It’s literally the reason RT2E exists. You keep throwing around terms you don’t seem to actually know the meaning of… like earlier, when you were accusing everything of being a “strawman”.

If you want to believe the Invid are, "Rubbish", well, if you have a creative and enterprising GM, and you play a Zentraedi-officer fighting the Invid, get used to rolling up new characters because you WILL be surprised. What's the point of playing a game if you've done the math and think you're going to win? This isn't Las Vegas.

An innovative and creative GM can do practically anything… but on a purely stats/mathematical level what prompted this entire thread is the fact that the Invid do kind of objectively suck. They aren’t much of a threat to anyone and there are literal game-breaking stats exploits you can use to reduce them to a harmless shooting gallery.

Players will absolutely look for ways to break the game in order to win, and it’s the GM’s job to be aware of and work around those exploits. That’s what metagamers and munchkins are.

(That’s also why iconic adventure modules for other games like D&D’s infamous Tomb of Horrors are often updated by the publisher to work around the various ways players found to use various changes in rules to break them.)

[xunk16]

Didn't you say they Zentraedi are on drugs? Not too professional.

Indeed I did… please refer to pages 223 and 224 of the RT2E Macross Saga sourcebook for the full details. The gist of it is that the RPG alleges that the rank-and-file Zentradi soldiers are kept in cryogenic stasis between battles, and are injected with combat drugs during defrosting to help them overcome the effects of the sedatives used to prep them for cold sleep and get them shake off any tiredness from the stasis process, helping them focus and heightening their senses. All in all, they’re basically pounding 5 Hour Energy or strong coffee to get moving after cryosleep.

As to the professional-ness of using drugs to improve the combat abilities of soldiers… it seems like it’d probably be news to you that real-world militaries ABSOLUTELY DO THIS. The US Air Force and other branches were issuing pilots with amphetamines as stimulants for flights which required high endurance and to improve focus on critical missions through at least 2017. The US and other nations incl. France and India use modafinil (a stimulant used to treat narcolepsy) as a “go pill” to counter fatigue in their armed forces. In World War II, practically every serious player in the war was issuing methamphetamine to their troops to counter fatigue and help their wounded troops continue fighting. There are some amusing and frankly terrifying stories about troops who popped a bit too much meth in extremis and did frankly insane things like cross country skiing through enemy lines in the dead of winter to get home.

Mind you, this has no actual basis in the show. In the animation, off-duty Zentradi soldiers were shown to live in perfectly ordinary-looking bunkrooms aboard ship and are never depicted using or implied to be using combat drugs.

I can confirm this was the same for the RAF and the Canadian pilots of WWII. My great grandfather had an A-hole as partner who got him to take all his doses. Story goes, he never was the same when he got back. At least he did, the other did not. And that is in part why it's the only of my great grandparents I did not have the chance to meet while I was young. Point is, they still were experimenting with the stuff, some soldier didn't trusted it. (With reasons.)
It's probably much more balanced nowadays, but I don't see such a thing getting old.
Where'd you think the cliched "stimpacks" came from in all those video games?

Sure, the Zentraedi are clever, well, in the Robotech show they fought just like the Invid (massive numbers and fire-power), but if an Invid genetic-virus gets on board their command his, think, "Akira".

For one, the Invid don’t do germ warfare… they’re barely capable of regular warfare.

For two, how the hell do they get this “genetic virus” on a Zentradi ship? They’re not fast enough to reach a Zentradi ship and not capable of fighting Zentradi on an even footing to forcibly board one.

For three, the Zentradi standard approach to one of their ships being compromised in some way is to just blow it the hell up or kill the misbehaving troops. That’s established right in the show.

For four, what makes you assume they’d have the warning and opportunity to do something like that? SOP for them is to flatten the target from a light second away (e.g. Booby Trap), or to just glass a planet from orbit in a few seconds of sustained fire (e.g. Force of Arms).

Nothing prevents the Invid to experiment on germs and viruses in their Genesis pits.
Nothing prevents the invid to build a false distress signal, or any other kind of bait really, to get the Zentraedi into an atmosphere and the exposition zone.
(Especially since they must recon in case something could become a threat to the Master's empire.
Plus, the Invid could discover the virus by accident and leave for being affected themselves. Both the Invids and the Zentraedi are protoculture imbued. Which means they could be affected by something that targets their link?
Let's say the first time is a fluke... The Invids manage to spot the fighting before escaping and take the new organism with them.)
Then... watch out as your enemies fight amongst themselves and get on board as stealthily as you can.
Recuperate derelict ship as more bait.
Send the bait toward a new fleet.
Repeat until the Zentraedi are given the order by the masters to implement better quarantine and hygienic protocols.
Notice it won't work anymore.
Regess disinterests herself of it and the Regent gets mad and never tries it again.

Nice idea in fact.
Thanks.

Somewhere in the first Robotech-book, Kevin Siembieda state he watched thousands of hours of Robotech to get his MDC and weapon damage accurate.

Oh, I know. Normally when a licensed game is being written, the owner of the IP provides some reference material for the game’s writers to use to ensure that they correctly represent the detail of the setting, story, etc. Harmony Gold never gave them anything like that (because they never had anything like that, having made Robotech up on the fly), so they had to import what few artbooks they could and resort to freeze-framing through VHS tapes of the series. Despite that laudable effort, they still got virtually every detail wrong and invented a lot of things that weren’t actually in the show to pad the game out.

This was why enforcing consistency with the official setting was the #1 bullet point for RT2E from Harmony Gold’s side… they wanted the new game to properly reflect the content of the rebooted Robotech and the then-recently established official setting.

Sadly, similar Critical Research Failures occurred on other Palladium licensed games including Macross II... where they similarly got virtually every detail wrong including the year the OVA was set in.

And both edition forgot to check for consistency on the part of the material given in each books and the way it relate as causality to the events of the series.
Namely the 1st has some parts that are way out there, like Lancer's Rockers and the Regess coming back, a few ship missing, a few mechs missing, and miss-named stuff with poorer quality stats.
The second decided to re-include fusion from the OSM in parts that totally screw up the meaning of much of the series, right out lies to preserve the GM's leeway (as to the description of Heroic Leonard, pure propaganda; or the Regent that would never do a clone; or obfuscating the link between Sekiton and the flower of life), miss lot more ships and vehicles, still at least one mecha (for right issues), and is very unclear about timelines and what it consider canon.

Shapings did I search before I found out about Prelude to Shadow Chronicle!
It made way much more sense afterwards.
Basically, one could say the second was made for fans that already knew about robotech.
We opened the books here for the first time and soon understood we would have no other choice but to know the show and all its iterations to make it work.

At least the stats are more consistent, and the rules clearer... if somewhat lacking in some departments.
(No prices, no solidity given for common materials - like that building you are crashing into - no advances rules for aerial maneuvers.)
They are better illustrated, and most of the stuff given is better explained and easier to use.

you can quote your, over-edited, inaccurate RT2e all you want, but if I had an RT2e book, I would use it to balance out the table in my parent's base while my friends and I play RT1e and have fun!

To be brutally frank, nobody cares what book you use to run your personal games. You do you, as the saying goes.

That said, you’ll find pretty much everyone here is using and referring to RT2E for the purpose of discussion. If you enter a discussion like that making unsourced remarks based on the outdated and wildly inaccurate RT1E game, people are just going to wonder what you’re talking about like we saw here.

Furthermore, calling RT2E “inaccurate” is doing it a disservice. It’s not perfect (and no licensed game is), but it’s vastly more accurate to the source material than the original game was. RT1E was, frankly, a joke accuracy-wise.

Hem... I'm using both. AND some stuff I had to make to fill in the blanks. (Reconstruction era stuff, GCW stuff, etc.)
Mostly second (stats and balance re-done to upgrade first when necessary) complemented by a few rules here and here, missing vehicles and ships, prices, etc...
Plus the original setting developments, maps, all annotated and sent to my Gm to speed his creating process.
(So long... waiting... excited...)
And eventually mine.

So far it does work pretty good. Though it is still in the pre-production stage.
Though we are thinking of complementing aliens ships with Mechanoids and possibly a few other space Palladium product. (Would that be worth it?)
And he did manage to find a copy of palladium Fantasy to help with Magic.

And I hate to tell you this, but pen and paper RPG games ARE obsolete.

That rather depends on one’s point of view… other publishers seem to being pretty well with ‘em still, the ones that actually kept pace with the times. Palladium’s… “old school”... approach very definitely shows its age.

As a person working on his own RPG with his family, and having experienced the good tool these are for people needing to experiment life in general and find friends; I must disagree warmly that these games are obsolete. If only to stay sane.
Are actors doing a live Shakespeare play obsolete?
Are museums? Books? Chess?
RPG let's you improvise the story you want with the people you want and have fun doing it. A video game will never do this; there will always be invisible walls, indestructible terrain, objects you can't pick up, books you cannot read, or that precise PNJ you can't gloriously lift a finger to.
They [RPGs] are a virtual net of unlimited freedom.

If freedom and the search for oneself through fiction is obsolete... Then I am too. -_-'
Let's make the world great again. More RPGs, not less!

An innovative and creative GM can do practically anything… but on a purely stats/mathematical level what prompted this entire thread is the fact that the Invid do kind of objectively suck. They aren’t much of a threat to anyone and there are literal game-breaking stats exploits you can use to reduce them to a harmless shooting gallery.

Players will absolutely look for ways to break the game in order to win, and it’s the GM’s job to be aware of and work around those exploits. That’s what metagamers and munchkins are.

(That’s also why iconic adventure modules for other games like D&D’s infamous Tomb of Horrors are often updated by the publisher to work around the various ways players found to use various changes in rules to break them.)

That is sadly true. My own experience pushes me to believe these are bad players, but it all depends on each groups. Some RPGs manage to keep them corralled better than others, but really its above all a question of what the campaign is and how well a group is able to build a story together.
However, the flying backward maneuver isn't a problem with the player who would use it... It's a simple problem with the material itself presenting a situation which is an interesting puzzle but giving no hints as to how a Gm might want to solve it.
Point is, the Invid were made slower.
But also, the Invids aren't supposed to be so easily beaten.
The UEEF has a ton of ships encouraging the desire for space battles...
They are supposed to fight the races which are the less developed this way.
Reality check #1 = The Invids have no choice but to be played by a Gm who outsmarts his players strategically.
Reality check #2 = The Spaceship supplement was not only direly needed, it might have been the ultimate supplement to the franchise. Be it for the Sentinel races, the Haydonites, more Invids, more strategical and tactical use of formations and maneuvers, etc...

The Gm is given a weapon : Unlimited numbers, plus design your own creatures.
The Gm is solicited to : Infiltrate your enemies, evolve, make the Invid so alien that it isn't possible to know them until it is too late. A defeat might well bring more consequences to the force that dispatch you. The Invid also take hostage what you hold most dear.

The players have : Speed, more damage, a lot of MDCs, and more than one head to come up with a solution.

But to find the right balance while adapting the source material though... that is the real challenge.

I have seen some here speaking of an Invid booster for space flight...
Do we have anything on it's capacity and MDC somewhere?

[Seto Kaiba]

Where'd you think the cliched "stimpacks" came from in all those video games?

Or the original archetype for them... Doom's Berserk Pack. Methed-up soldiers were capable of some truly staggering feats of individual destruction.

Nothing prevents the Invid to experiment on germs and viruses in their Genesis pits.

Genesis pits don't work that way... they don't manipulate the evolution of a single thing, they're a pocket biome that replicates the natural world's evolution at an accelerated rate. With containment in the genesis pits we've seen practically being on the honor system, they'd be facing near-immediate contamination of the entire area if they accidentally or intentionally created something airborne. So, in short, the lack of the means to do so safely generally prevents them from doing it... and that's assuming they even understand that such a thing is possible, or that the Regess wouldn't find it hugely distasteful as she did the Regent's... excesses.

Nothing prevents the invid to build a false distress signal, or any other kind of bait really, to get the Zentraedi into an atmosphere and the exposition zone.

... wouldn't the lack of things like hands generally prevent them from doing that? Or their lack of understanding of other species technology? Or the low intelligence of the average Invid? Or the fact that the Zentradi sensors are so good they don't need to get closer than a light second to get a decent read on what they're dealing with?

Moreover, the Zentradi attitude that everything from equipment to manpower being eminently disposable would tend to make them rather indifferent to the whole idea of answering distress calls and they're no strangers to the idea of booby traps and ambushes. Even if they did board such a ship, their body armor is a hermetically sealed spacesuit. Zero chance for them to pick up any infections.

And both edition forgot to check for consistency on the part of the material given in each books and the way it relate as causality to the events of the series.

It's not that they forgot to check for consistency in 2E... it's that a lot of the stuff you're thinking of just isn't a thing anymore in Robotech. They were literally told it was Out of Bounds.

Basically, one could say the second was made for fans that already knew about robotech.
We opened the books here for the first time and soon understood we would have no other choice but to know the show and all its iterations to make it work.

1st Edition was more a "best guess" made at a time when Robotech itself was a nebulous, ill-defined thing that wasn't really properly thought-out. There was no canon, no official setting, and no real definition of how anything worked in the setting. The show had been made on the fly as a show aimed at little kids, with no real expectation it'd be subjected to serious examination. That's why it had so little coordination between licensed works.

2nd Edition was a proper effort started after Harmony Gold decided to try relaunching and reinventing Robotech as a serious sci-fi/mecha anime entry with a properly managed continuity, setting, and creative oversight of new independent developments like any major anime franchise (e.g. Gundam, Macross).

That is sadly true. My own experience pushes me to believe these are bad players, but it all depends on each groups. Some RPGs manage to keep them corralled better than others, but really its above all a question of what the campaign is and how well a group is able to build a story together.

There is a certain entertainment value to be had from messing with them, though...

But also, the Invids aren't supposed to be so easily beaten.

Well, that's not exactly true... the Invid WERE easily beaten by every other major faction in the setting except humanity, the Johnny-Come-Latelys of interstellar affairs.

Humans, of course, offer ways to gently steer players away from exploits like fly-backwards.

The UEEF has a ton of ships encouraging the desire for space battles...
They are supposed to fight the races which are the less developed this way.
Reality check #1 = The Invids have no choice but to be played by a Gm who outsmarts his players strategically.
Reality check #2 = The Spaceship supplement was not only direly needed, it might have been the ultimate supplement to the franchise. Be it for the Sentinel races, the Haydonites, more Invids, more strategical and tactical use of formations and maneuvers, etc...

The Gm is given a weapon : Unlimited numbers, plus design your own creatures.
The Gm is solicited to : Infiltrate your enemies, evolve, make the Invid so alien that it isn't possible to know them until it is too late. A defeat might well bring more consequences to the force that dispatch you. The Invid also take hostage what you hold most dear.

Well, yes and no... the UEEF ship designs are pretty terrible in an actual fight. They're not so much "space warships" as "space landing ships" made to ferry a lot of troops from a staging area to orbit over some planet where a landing op is planned. That makes them pretty vulnerable, and therefore makes it a lot easier to manage them and the UEEF vs. the Invid. The GM doesn't actually need to outsmart the players strategically to make the Invid a threat there or even think outside the box, he just has to leverage the UEEF's mission profile against the UEEF players. The Invid have a built-in defensive choke point called reentry you can batter players to death against.

On a level playing field, yeah... the Invid absolutely suck and they're kind of supposed to. That's why they got curbstomped by the Haydonites, the Masters, and the Zentradi. But the humans don't get to fight the Invid on a level playing field. They're contesting Invid occupations, trying to run Invid blockades to land troops on Invid-controlled worlds. If they're not fighting outnumbered and cornered, the GM is probably Doing It Wrong. They're an antagonist that really needs a GM that thrives on the suffering of the player characters to be effective.

I have seen some here speaking of an Invid booster for space flight...
Do we have anything on it's capacity and MDC somewhere?

That'd be the space-use flight booster for the Invid Scout seen in the series.

http://www.gearsonline.net/series/mospe ... cha/eager/ <- under the "With Booster" heading.

It doesn't add any weaponry or armor, it's just a space-use booster engine that makes the Invid Scout faster. (4x faster, per RT2E, see my speed listing post under "Booster Scout".)

[xunk16]

Nothing prevents the Invid to experiment on germs and viruses in their Genesis pits.

Genesis pits don't work that way... they don't manipulate the evolution of a single thing, they're a pocket biome that replicates the natural world's evolution at an accelerated rate. With containment in the genesis pits we've seen practically being on the honor system, they'd be facing near-immediate contamination of the entire area if they accidentally or intentionally created something airborne. So, in short, the lack of the means to do so safely generally prevents them from doing it... and that's assuming they even understand that such a thing is possible, or that the Regess wouldn't find it hugely distasteful as she did the Regent's... excesses.

Yes, there are the "biomes development" Genesis pits. For these, what is considered "contaminants" is something that would not be of the current studied biome, because it would falsify the results. Hence the humans being referred to as "contaminants" toward a "jurrassic" study. However, that does not prevent the Regess to choose to study what will be their survival rate instead, since the experiment was probably already contaminated beyond repair.
Plus, if you study a biome, you'll need the bacteria and viruses of the time and place. If you don't, something is going to get very wrong with your pocket ecosystem.
So we basically have the proof we need, in the anime itself, that they should be able to replicate at least a part of a biome's bacteria.
In the very least, those that will naturally occur out of the created lifeforms' excrement.

Now the second part would be clearer in the old comics, since we see single Praxian mutations being created one at a time. Or in the RNU, which exploits the "creation" Genesis pits a lot. Though a part of this still can be seen in "Prelude to Shadow Chronicle". But even without these, we still have the Inorganics. However those were found out / developed, they still need to be produced. And you don't produce a whole biome of them each single time. Point is, there is a second part to the Genesis pits, the one which create stuff.
And it usually does it one specific thing a a time.
Depending on the canon you follow, it's either as a mass production unit (RPG), input / output mold (Comics, old & new), or created for a specific job which it will do until modified (RNU).

Since there are fossils of bacteria, and since the Regess would need bacteria for her experiments, it is very done that the Genesis pits can and will produce bacteria. Since the Regess can also isolate a creature, or even better create / mix one from scratch, to then program a Genesis pit as a production unit, i repeat : I don't see why it couldn't be done.
It certainly hasn't been done in known canon(s), as biological warfare, but there is nothing preventing it.
In fact, the ingredients are all there, directly in the (partly) animated series, or at least in the 2nd ed RPG, to form that hypothesis as a game scenario.

Plus, you seem to consistently ignore the individuality, though limited, of the Invid scientists.
However, these too survived the port to the 2nd ed. Which means some could conduct more dangerous experiments on their own.
Or simply mess up because of the flaws coming from the sillier approach to the Invids some material did take.
In the end though, a combination of Invid brain and Invid Scientist will have something we can't deny : Curiosity.
So even if something goes terribly wrong on a frontier world experiment... Invids are going to want to know why.

Nothing prevents the invid to build a false distress signal, or any other kind of bait really, to get the Zentraedi into an atmosphere and the exposition zone.

... wouldn't the lack of things like hands generally prevent them from doing that? Or their lack of understanding of other species technology? Or the low intelligence of the average Invid? Or the fact that the Zentradi sensors are so good they don't need to get closer than a light second to get a decent read on what they're dealing with?

Moreover, the Zentradi attitude that everything from equipment to manpower being eminently disposable would tend to make them rather indifferent to the whole idea of answering distress calls and they're no strangers to the idea of booby traps and ambushes. Even if they did board such a ship, their body armor is a hermetically sealed spacesuit. Zero chance for them to pick up any infections.

Hands... again; scientists. As we no longer have the old comics (I think it was the RT : Graphic Novel), we do no longer see them "sculpt" stuff as prototypes; it's true. But since they remain in canon, at least for the RPG, they must have some way to do sciency stuff; which would include tool manipulations, however weird and organic looking these might be.
They might lack understanding of others species, but that too makes them curious. Though the Invid "zoo" is no longer directly in canon, it remains that studying other species is kinda why most Genesis pits are built. Hence, the Invid strive to understand. And what they might lack in cultural and individual insights, they don't when studying mass social characters. I guess this would include Zentraedi communication systems (mind you, knowing there is a signal doesn't mean you are able to decrypt it, or understand it, but quantities of chatter might be studied, like we do animal chatter), fleet movements (akin to a flock's movement), and coordinated Vs combative behaviour. Which means they would certainly not miss a fleet of Zentraedi suddenly firing on their own. But they also would probably know of a few things on how to bait them. Build false hives, amass ridiculously undefended amounts of protoculture in a precise spot, etc... If not good at it at first, they would eventually find some working stuff by trial and errors. A bit like ants trying to cross a river and eventually ending up piling bodies as a boat.

That the Zentraedi can pick up on signals and readings about invids, from so far up, only means they can be baited from further away still.
But even such distant methods cannot necessarily pierce every forms of cover. Some things must be investigated from closer.
"Warriors #0 : Prelude" and "Metal Swarm" also present that while the role of advisors is to keep the Zentraedi acting as you mostly describe, commanders do not always follow their advices. Indeed, they will generally find any reasoning, that make it palatable for their report, to follow their emotional combative natures. And since old cannon is generally not enough, the same can be said about Khyron.
Not only is glory important in their culture, which does incur some form of personal achievement in the face of danger, but the mission can and will be re-interpreted if it is found to be contrary to the Zentraedi imperative. Which included to destroy the SDF-1 for Khyron, even if that meant going against other Zentraedi. OR to develop "mock-up culture", as a counter to psychological warfare.
So... and that's personal interpretation, I guess being the one to recon and report a new threat so that your superiors would be able to share the credit by ordering the assault would be pretty standard. But you wouldn't want to be a fool reporting nothing.

Since the Invid do not necessarily know how to bait a "distress call", they might possibly just achieve an "unknown" signal. Which would still serve its purpose.
And if the original germ is actually an accident, then the Zentraedi might just wonder "What the shapings did kick the Invid nest?". Anything that got Invids this excited might either be a threat, or another fleet with which to share glory...

Hermetically sealed space suits are good and fine... But once into the selected location, they also can't immediately just "fly backwards with their regults".
An infested scout left behind could scratch through such an armour. The Zentraedi also have a problem of being very big on size and not much on maintenance of equipment, which includes such space suits. They could bring back the germs on board without thinking about cleaning it. The germ might be small enough to enter by a microscopic defect into a suit's seal, for which this would normally have no effect.

And then you'd have to define your bacteria for your own campaign. The Sentinels and UEEF manual already brings us Intellent Viruses. Packs of bacteria / germs / virus, that act as a single sentient entity. It can plan, hide, slow it's metabolism so that symptoms are visible only when it is ready to spread. It could be able to corrode through armor. Or even act like Ophiocordyceunilateralis and change the behavior of infected soldiers once it is in.
In short... it could be a b****.
Nature is awesome this way.

Of course, the more your pathogen is potent, the more it also will cause problems to the Invids.
Casualties on their own side will turn the Regess against the program, but it won't concern the Regent as long as it gets results.
In this, it wouldn't be too different from the squabble about the Inorganics. Seemed like a good idea at the time, proved to be a somewhat inconvenient regret on the Regess moral standard, eventually left to serve as canon fodder.

But you're right that eventually this should fade. Zentraedi do not always wear their suits on their ships... now they would.
They don't usually do that much maintenance... but they would now gain respect for those who keep these suits in working order.
The Masters could even dispatch technicians of their own to go with the fleets, just to be sure quarantine procedure is followed.

And both edition forgot to check for consistency on the part of the material given in each books and the way it relate as causality to the events of the series.

It's not that they forgot to check for consistency in 2E... it's that a lot of the stuff you're thinking of just isn't a thing anymore in Robotech. They were literally told it was Out of Bounds.

Yes, old stuff is missing. Which does create plot holes.
But I did not go back to old material because I was missing them.
I had to go back, discover them, because the new material wasn't up to the task.
Remember, I discovered 2nd ed first.

Spoiler:

But even with itself, it has more problems : most units speaks of stuff we don't have the stats for. (Experimental models, missing ships, social order, etc...)
The timlines are so vague they can't really serve as a backdrop if you have never seen the show... and even then will seem contradictory except if you have known about the reboot comics. Which themselves are so distant in continuity that it becomes hard to know if they even fit together.
(Strangely, they seem more in their place while read in the old comic continuity; if placed in the right order...)

Canon can be suffocating, in Macross especially, but becomes singularly empty in the Masters. No feudalism in the Neo-feudalist regime. A big blank about other forces that could be out there. Once into New Gen, Shadow Chronicle, this is mostly good... except you will lack the historical knowledge for minor battles and some such to create Bgs, or the backstory to define the ruins and the geo-political aspects of the UEF.
While one could limit oneself to this abridged canon... I can hardly tell what kind of game would come out of it.
Which basically means you get the tool kit, but must re-create most of the setting from scratches.
And the plot holes means you will make mistakes.
Unless you default to the work that was done with 1st ed, which at least gives us a way to look at this world and feel a bit more like it exist, like the PC belong.
It's not that the reboot didn't do a good job per say. It is that it is hard to tell because it remains unfinished.
The consistency they forgot to check, outside of the plots motivators, is how they did choose to cover the subject in each era separately.
Unless of course the goal was that 2nd ed AND its source-books was to be played only AFTER SC. In which case, it would mostly work.
(Except... that's a lot of work, technical history and stats, for units that would all be in ruins, disabled, and of forces no longer in service...)

Some stuff did continue to exist, simply because the anime is still there... It doesn't prevent 2nd ed from not covering it.
The Jotun rightly comes to mind (RRT at least had it planned), but also a lot of vehicles, some of which are supposed to help with the retrieval and maintenance of VFs. Which remains mostly unexplained. What does happen to your Vf once your out of the cockpit?
There is no longer an Atlas of Earth for the Macross or Malcontent era. Despite the quadrants being still mentioned in the anime.
How does the UEF works anyway? What is the legality of things? Military or otherwise?
Reconstruction always had scarce information on it...
Then there is the spots where they wilfully stayed vague in order to not suffocate the players... like; while not expanding on the Master wars on other continents, they don't necessarily state that it is in just one point - so that the players can actually participate.
They tell enough on the flower of life so that we know it exist, not really enough to understand that "new" version of it... Hence scientist players and Gm are blatantly out of the blue from the start of a game.

It is a strange mix of good and bad.
I mostly think they did the best they could, while being creatively censored.
2nd Ed looks like it was written to anger the less possible people by being open about which way HG would decide to turn after.
Be it to the past, or toward new horizons.
With HG pulling a 350° on the franchise and Palladium loosing the licence, I guess these books will remain representative of their era.
Robotech was going nowhere, fast.

However, until new management issued decisions, that's the official canon we're left with.

In spoiler because we already kinda had that conversation before, and like you said, people aren't probably that much interested in which books a specific individual is going to use. If we're here, we probably all have our ideas about what works and what don't about the Palladium products.
I like the major "serious side" of the 2nd; however, I'm not sure they did have a plan of what to do creatively.
Yes, come back to the OSM... but then what? Robotech came OUT of the OSM, it wasn't the OSM per say.
They should have given it direction once back to their roots.
Instead, they highlighted the problems there was into building the 1st draft (the anime).
By leaving wide open empty ellipses waiting to be filled, and traces of decision making lacking the rationale to unite it into a coherent whole.
(The recent debate over the Beta and Alpha's capacities, the UEEF's doctrine, and others... between Mr.Kaiba and Shadowlogan, rightly comes to mind...)

Well, yes and no... the UEEF ship designs are pretty terrible in an actual fight. They're not so much "space warships" as "space landing ships" made to ferry a lot of troops from a staging area to orbit over some planet where a landing op is planned. That makes them pretty vulnerable, and therefore makes it a lot easier to manage them and the UEEF vs. the Invid. The GM doesn't actually need to outsmart the players strategically to make the Invid a threat there or even think outside the box, he just has to leverage the UEEF's mission profile against the UEEF players. The Invid have a built-in defensive choke point called reentry you can batter players to death against.

On a level playing field, yeah... the Invid absolutely suck and they're kind of supposed to. That's why they got curbstomped by the Haydonites, the Masters, and the Zentradi. But the humans don't get to fight the Invid on a level playing field. They're contesting Invid occupations, trying to run Invid blockades to land troops on Invid-controlled worlds. If they're not fighting outnumbered and cornered, the GM is probably Doing It Wrong. They're an antagonist that really needs a GM that thrives on the suffering of the player characters to be effective.

Also a good thing to consider.

I have seen some here speaking of an Invid booster for space flight...
Do we have anything on it's capacity and MDC somewhere?

That'd be the space-use flight booster for the Invid Scout seen in the series.

http://www.gearsonline.net/series/mospe ... cha/eager/ <- under the "With Booster" heading.

It doesn't add any weaponry or armor, it's just a space-use booster engine that makes the Invid Scout faster. (4x faster, per RT2E, see my speed listing post under "Booster Scout".)

AH! Got it! I was afraid it was just an OSM imported fix.
I had totally forgotten we had them. (P.16 SC core manual, Deluxe Gold Edition.)
Well that's good "news".
... Still not quite enough though. (Sigh.)

[Peacebringer]

Seto's kind of right; in I am at least not educating him and he doesn't speak for everyone.

R1e/R2e are RPG games, not an IPhone.

"Seto, if you could post articles, video or audio of Palladium quoting they had to follow HG and certain shows produced are non-cannon, that'd be great."

If the Regess can convert her entire civilization into energy, she can convert the entire Zentraedi-armada into energy. I'm just dying to read your response to that.

Also, according to your posts, the Zentraedi vaporized the surface of the Invid homeworld; yet the Invid managed to conquer the Masters. The Zentraedi attacked and vaporized the surface of the Earth, and yet, they lost their ENTIRE fleet. The Zentraedi are rubbish.

I referred to you insisting the events of the show supersede the RPG game-mechanics; which negates your math-based argument. You've basically contradicted yourself. That was my ONLY reference to a strawman.

Right, the Zentraedi are methheads.

Actually, the Invid do biowarfare. Go back to your, "Vast", library and read it.

And the Xai-Zor is real, I just have to go to another city again to get my old HD. I think I have a pic. of it and some stats, but I can't post stats here.

"Nobody cares"; awe, there you go again thinking you speak for Palladium books, everyone on the forum, Harmony-Gold and everyone in the world again.

Hey Seto, can I borrow your RT2e book?

Shooting gallery? Really? I have pointed out ways, even with your flawed math/stats whatever, the Invid can be, "Better", than what you perceive. Get out your dice and roll up a new character; you last one turned into a giant space-Popsicle.

And did you just state that all the hard-work Kevin Siembieda put into R1e was, "A joke"? Tsk. Tsk.

The point of a GM is to ensure the players have fun with friends; if not, the players won't play Robotech; who cares what they can get away with; A GM isn't their boss/manager.

Warning: Warning for Trolling, and Flaming/Flamebaiting. -B

[Seto Kaiba]

Plus, if you study a biome, you'll need the bacteria and viruses of the time and place. If you don't, something is going to get very wrong with your pocket ecosystem.

That assumes, of course, that a Genesis Pit's recreation of a particular biome is anything more than a macro-level approximation.

The Regess didn't need that level of detail for her research, because she was only interested in finding the form most suited to life on Earth for her people to adopt.

Since there are fossils of bacteria, and since the Regess would need bacteria for her experiments, [...]

Not for the kind of research she was doing... she was 65 million or so years back, and the half-life of DNA is 521 years. She wouldn't be able to get anything usable from fossils that old. The upper bound for any recoverable DNA sequences at all (not a complete genome, just fragments) is about 1.5 million years.

Plus, you seem to consistently ignore the individuality, though limited, of the Invid scientists.

One problem is this whole notion requires two things that weren't in the same place to be in the same place... the scientists (with the Regent) and the genesis pits (with the Regess).

They might lack understanding of others species, but that too makes them curious. [...] I guess this would include Zentraedi communication systems

That's a pretty big jump from evolutionary biology to applied cryptosystems...

(mind you, knowing there is a signal doesn't mean you are able to decrypt it, or understand it, but quantities of chatter might be studied, like we do animal chatter), fleet movements (akin to a flock's movement), and coordinated Vs combative behaviour. Which means they would certainly not miss a fleet of Zentraedi suddenly firing on their own. But they also would probably know of a few things on how to bait them. Build false hives, amass ridiculously undefended amounts of protoculture in a precise spot, etc... If not good at it at first, they would eventually find some working stuff by trial and errors. A bit like ants trying to cross a river and eventually ending up piling bodies as a boat.

The Invid never exhibit anything close to this level of understanding of their enemies in the official setting, though. Either these scientists are less good than you credit them with being, or their areas of interest are much narrower than you credit them with being. Possibly both, as they're rather new to this whole "technology" thing.

"Warriors #0 : Prelude" and "Metal Swarm" also present that while the role of advisors is to keep the Zentraedi acting as you mostly describe, commanders do not always follow their advices. Indeed, they will generally find any reasoning, that make it palatable for their report, to follow their emotional combative natures. And since old cannon is generally not enough, the same can be said about Khyron.

Khyron is explicitly highly atypical for a Zentradi, though... enough so that his fellows treat him as a liability despite how effective his maverick actions occasionally are.

Not only is glory important in their culture, which does incur some form of personal achievement in the face of danger, but the mission can and will be re-interpreted if it is found to be contrary to the Zentraedi imperative. Which included to destroy the SDF-1 for Khyron, even if that meant going against other Zentraedi. OR to develop "mock-up culture", as a counter to psychological warfare.
So... and that's personal interpretation, I guess being the one to recon and report a new threat so that your superiors would be able to share the credit by ordering the assault would be pretty standard. But you wouldn't want to be a fool reporting nothing.

That's kind of at odds with how they're described in the RPG, which casts most of the majority of Zentradi soldiers as little more than organic robots conditioned to unflinchingly follow orders. There's a bit of jockeying for position and office politics among the commander-type Zentradi, but the only one who exhibits anything like a hunger for glory is Khyron... it's more a hunger for destruction, like he was an adrenaline junkie, and even the other Zentradi commanders think he's a reckless weirdo. We do see Khyron "creatively" reinterpret his orders and try to abuse loopholes, but again he was kind of a weirdo and definitely had a screw loose. He was kept around despite his recklessness making him a liability because he commanded a unit of surprisingly effective assault troops.

Since the Invid do not necessarily know how to bait a "distress call", they might possibly just achieve an "unknown" signal. Which would still serve its purpose.

That might work for humans, but what do the Zentradi care? They see the universe in black and white... something is either an enemy or not. Enemies get destroyed, everything else gets ignored.

Hermetically sealed space suits are good and fine... But once into the selected location, they also can't immediately just "fly backwards with their regults".

Yeah, but with a We Have Reserves mentality they're not going to bother trying to extract a boarding force that gets ambushed. Once it becomes clear it's an ambush, they're just going to blow up the entire area to be sure they got the enemy. They're also going to be on high alert the entire time, which makes sneaking up on them pretty unlikely to say the least.

But you're right that eventually this should fade. Zentraedi do not always wear their suits on their ships... now they would.

Actually, the vast majority of them do... it's just the officers who don't. Even the guards in the corridors are shown wearing their armor in the series.

It'd actually be quite surprising if they didn't, given that they're experts at space warfare where battle damage-induced decompression is an ever-present hazard. Some of them are hardy enough that they can endure a brief jaunt in vacuum, but that's just the commanders.

I had to go back, discover them, because the new material wasn't up to the task.

Because that material was specifically excluded... it wasn't omission-by-error, it was deliberately binned because Harmony Gold dismissed those works from canon during the reboot in '01.

You're somewhat unusual in that you actually like that material. To a lot of fans, including the ones in the franchise's creative staff, that material is cringe-inducing.

I like the major "serious side" of the 2nd; however, I'm not sure they did have a plan of what to do creatively.

Oh, they did... but that plan has fallen by the wayside since Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles was only technically successful and led to Harmony Gold once again abandoning any plans for future development of the Robotech story. When the OVA's first episode failed to live up to the creative staff's promise that it would attract new fans and bring sponsors in who would pay for the future installments, they basically got defunded.

By leaving wide open empty ellipses waiting to be filled, and traces of decision making lacking the rationale to unite it into a coherent whole.

To be brutally frank, it was never going to be an entirely coherent whole precisely because it's a Frankenstein's monster assembled out of three totally unrelated shows that were rewritten and dubbed "on the fly". It was never going to be perfect, the goal was to shed the legally problematic and embarrassingly poor-quality material and reinvent Robotech as something that more adult viewers could take seriously. Revisiting and completing Sentinels was never in the cards for legal and financial reasons, but the goal was to start clean and they tripped up just a few years on from their fresh second start due to the damage Carl Macek inflicted on confidence in the brand with his three (technically four) failed attempts to continue the animated series and the increasingly negative fan views of the licensed works in the 90's. With nobody but HG willing to put money behind Robotech, and HG itself only willing to put up the bare minimum, they set themselves up to fail with the pilot for their rebooted Robotech being the anime equivalent of a B-movie.

If the Regess can convert her entire civilization into energy, she can convert the entire Zentraedi-armada into energy. I'm just dying to read your response to that.

Can she, though? Is the ability to be converted to energy something she designed into the Invid she commands? You'd think if she could do that she would've used that power to protect the Invid's original homeworld from the Haydonite attack that rendered it uninhabitable or protect their second homeworld (Optera) from the Robotech Masters plundering it and rendering it uninhabitable. She didn't even destroy the UEEF fleet that tried to blow up the planet she was standing on with a black hole bomb, and they were a LOT fewer than a Zentradi fleet.

Also, according to your posts, the Zentraedi vaporized the surface of the Invid homeworld; yet the Invid managed to conquer the Masters.

... but they didn't conquer the Masters. The Invid conquered Tirol, but only after the Robotech Masters had abandoned the planet and left behind only the sick and elderly (according to Rem and Cabell) with no way to defend themselves. Conquering a literally-defenseless planet is no real achievement.

The Zentraedi attacked and vaporized the surface of the Earth, and yet, they lost their ENTIRE fleet.

But, explicitly, only because humanity figured out a weird corner case abuse of the barrier system Zor built into his battlefortress... a maneuver that convinced the Robotech Masters themselves that the people who's obtained the ship were as knowledgeable about robotechnology as they themselves were. Had humanity not had the most advanced starship in the universe dropped in their laps, it would have been an easy victory for the Zentradi.

Right, the Zentraedi are methheads.

More like heavy coffee drinkers, really... given how the drugs are described.

And, as noted previously, that only applies to the grunts who are supposedly kept in stasis and are little more than obedient organic robots.

Actually, the Invid do biowarfare. Go back to your, "Vast", library and read it.

There is zero evidence of that in the official Robotech setting.

And the Xai-Zor is real, I just have to go to another city again to get my old HD. I think I have a pic. of it and some stats, but I can't post stats here.

Oh, I don't doubt that you saw something you believed was a design from MOSPEADA back then.

However, having access to essentially every official publication by Artmic and Tatsunoko for the series, we know your recollection is inaccurate because Artmic only made one ship design for the Inbit. Process of elimination points to this being a case of mistaken identity on your part. You're either mistaking something from a non-canon Robotech comic as MOSPEADA material, or you're misidentifying something from another series entirely as being from MOSPEADA. The name "Xai-Zor" is kind of a big tipoff that it's not from MOSPEADA. The Inbit mecha names are puns, mostly starting with G, and there are no hyphenated names in the series materials. Likewise, the name "Zor" is from Southern Cross, not MOSPEADA.

Shooting gallery? Really?

Yes, really. As demonstrated, the math clearly shows that the Zentradi and other factions can simply back away from the Invid at a rate that allows them to keep the Invid in weapons range while the Invid are out of range to respond with their own weapons. You have a row of defenseless targets waiting to be shot... that's a shooting gallery. Or a turkey shoot, if you prefer that term.

I have pointed out ways, even with your flawed math/stats whatever, the Invid can be, "Better", than what you perceive.

Thus far, you haven't tendered a single viable suggestion. You've attempted to deny the facts, which we later ascertained was because you are referring to the game's obsolete and wildly inaccurate 1st Edition while the rest of us were referring to the current and substantially more accurate 2nd Edition, and made a variety of claims that are impossible under the current edition's rules due to the lack of various necessary capabilities, but you haven't tendered anything I could call a viable suggestion.

And did you just state that all the hard-work Kevin Siembieda put into R1e was, "A joke"? Tsk. Tsk.

Not quite. I didn't say his hard work was a joke. He really tried. The problem is that effort has to be combined with results to mean anything, and the result was... well... comically wide of the mark.

[xunk16]

That assumes, of course, that a Genesis Pit's recreation of a particular biome is anything more than a macro-level approximation.
The Regess didn't need that level of detail for her research, because she was only interested in finding the form most suited to life on Earth for her people to adopt.

[...]

Not for the kind of research she was doing... she was 65 million or so years back, and the half-life of DNA is 521 years. She wouldn't be able to get anything usable from fossils that old. The upper bound for any recoverable DNA sequences at all (not a complete genome, just fragments) is about 1.5 million years.

Yeah... but then again, these dinosaurs were really there. Alive. Eating. Reproducing.
All of which points to at least their bacteria and the ones usually found as symbiotic to certain creatures, at least as much as it is needed for their biological function, to be there.
Plus, there wasn't only dinosaurs. There were plants, and insects, and probably stuff we never saw.
Somewhere along the lines, all this will need bacteria to eat and develop correctly. Some of which will escape the clones and populate the new environment.
(Though using the outdated reptilian model for said dinosaurs might be a consequence of not being able to reconstruct them correctly, yes...)

Plus... if all DNA was unusable after that time frame... this whole technology wouldn't work.
No matter how she does it, she does it. She can use DNA that is that old. And it would probably be easier to start by rejuvenating bacteria from scratch in order to analyses their DNA to reconstruct that of the bigger critter than the reverse. Simply because spectrography and shape would be closer related at that scale.

Plus, you seem to consistently ignore the individuality, though limited, of the Invid scientists.

One problem is this whole notion requires two things that weren't in the same place to be in the same place... the scientists (with the Regent) and the genesis pits (with the Regess).

The pit that mutated Edwards in Prelude to Shadow Chronicle did not came back from Earth.
Neither did the Inorganic pits left optera, the Regess wouldn't want those.
So, in fact, the Regent and his scientist did have access to the technology. And probably a bit of know-how since the scientist are kinda supposed to administrate these while the Regess is away.

Now, I recognize that the regent would probably pull the plug from any "too intellectual" passive endeavour... But that doesn't mean there wouldn't be any Regess loyalist staying behind because no one told him to stop his stuff directly and in so many words.
Especially since the first step of the Invid war was to populate new frontier planets and amass what they needed to create / complete their "army". (At least in old material... maybe Optera was left less barren in the reboot?)

They might lack understanding of others species, but that too makes them curious. [...] I guess this would include Zentraedi communication systems

That's a pretty big jump from evolutionary biology to applied cryptosystems...

Going from peacefully grazing slugs to a space invading civilization IS also a huge evolutionary jump.
Now the Gura-Invids brings us a nice intermediary stage between these two, but still.
Considering most of this was made possible by the Regess and Zor Mind-copulating... I guess at least one Invid would have some ideas about frequencies.
Especially since we are speaking of a psionic race already able to sense energetic fluctuations.

I can't say what they would be detecting would be very useful to anyone else, but that doesn't stop them from trying.

The Invid never exhibit anything close to this level of understanding of their enemies in the official setting, though. Either these scientists are less good than you credit them with being, or their areas of interest are much narrower than you credit them with being. Possibly both, as they're rather new to this whole "technology" thing.

I don't contest their way of going at science is awkward sometime. But that goes with the territory of having an alien race doing alien things.
And while it might not be official for the purpose of HG striping it bare, the RPG kept Invid ingenuity at work with the Janus Scenario in the Genesis Pit Sourcebook. They do try stuff. And sometime stuff that works out.
But they can be "easily" deceived through the little they really understand about their enemies.

What we have here is a 2nd ed example of Invid applied strategy and scientific applied development.
Something that forced the Master into investing way more resources on that front to make the Invid believe two things :

1. We are so numerous that we don't care you are turning our troops into zombies.
2. We invest at least as much as you do here because we can, and we beleive you'll break first.

The book gives us a picture where the Masters eventually intimidated the Invid into submission, but a a great cost.
Now where were those zentraedi vitrifying qualities when that happened?
Either away, which means they had other threats to deal with.
Or the Master's doctrine is not so eager to have their own shoot friendly fire as you are currently describing.

That's kind of at odds with how they're described in the RPG, which casts most of the majority of Zentradi soldiers as little more than organic robots conditioned to unflinchingly follow orders. There's a bit of jockeying for position and office politics among the commander-type Zentradi, but the only one who exhibits anything like a hunger for glory is Khyron... it's more a hunger for destruction, like he was an adrenaline junkie, and even the other Zentradi commanders think he's a reckless weirdo. We do see Khyron "creatively" reinterpret his orders and try to abuse loopholes, but again he was kind of a weirdo and definitely had a screw loose. He was kept around despite his recklessness making him a liability because he commanded a unit of surprisingly effective assault troops.

The other who have met him personally sometime thinks he is a weirdo. Breetai asked for him specifically, even knowing of his record.
Khyron is in fact still pulling his shenanigans from one side of the galaxy to the other, because his superiors doesn't see him as too much of a threat.
His troops, even his sub-officers, seem pretty okay with following him. And he managed to keep his command despite being a reckless hot head.
He has no problem amassing a whole lot of malcontents once the other officers aren't there.
Khyron makes many remarks to the fact that he is the only "real" Zentraedi around. While we might temper this with reason, even more given his addictions, the fact remains that he wasn't trialled or executed. His paperwork is apparently ordinary enough, so that an officer would still want to call upon him. Azonia and Myria do address him ordinarily enough, despite their general training teaching them that females are superiors. Somehow, even after all his emotional burst and impulsive behaviour, he is still respected. And even after numerous insubordination, he is kept more or less on the front-lines.
All in line with the idea that, Khyron, is in fact doing what he should.

For me, that's as much as saying that Khyron is not weird at all. He might not be the preferable Zentraedi, but he certainly comes from an otherwise very much known, very visible minority. At least so that he'd be considered "yet of acceptable requirements".
If I remember correctly, I think there is traces of the relation between Breetai and Exedore being somewhat unusual though. They are showed as being amongst the few intellectuals / philosophers of their race. They recognize that trait into one another, and prize their friendship because they know / feel they wouldn't have the same chance with another.
This, plus the general way Dolza is presented, give us an Idea that maybe, just maybe, there was more Khyrons than Breetais in the Troodi fleet.
And there is certainly not a whole lot of Exedore, not by any canon.

This might also have been a good idea from the part of the Masters... since, you know, it took a Breetai and an Exedore to plan a coup from mass treason; and succeed.

Since the Invid do not necessarily know how to bait a "distress call", they might possibly just achieve an "unknown" signal. Which would still serve its purpose.

That might work for humans, but what do the Zentradi care? They see the universe in black and white... something is either an enemy or not. Enemies get destroyed, everything else gets ignored.

Not necessarily to the ones they serve though. Especially with protoculture running low and the SDF-1 out of reach.

Hermetically sealed space suits are good and fine... But once into the selected location, they also can't immediately just "fly backwards with their regults".

Yeah, but with a We Have Reserves mentality they're not going to bother trying to extract a boarding force that gets ambushed. Once it becomes clear it's an ambush, they're just going to blow up the entire area to be sure they got the enemy. They're also going to be on high alert the entire time, which makes sneaking up on them pretty unlikely to say the least.

A single scratch by a now confirmed dead invid? Why waste the troops for this little?
Plus, you said it yourself, black and white mentality.
It made it much of a problem to order Zentraedi around to kill other Zentraedi.
They are also most shock to see the humans "ready to inflict huge loss on themselves".
Somehow... I feel the Zentraedi might need a pretty good reason to shoot down one of their own in cold blood.

An Epidemic might do it in time. But it would have to prove itself first.

But you're right that eventually this should fade. Zentraedi do not always wear their suits on their ships... now they would.

Actually, the vast majority of them do... it's just the officers who don't. Even the guards in the corridors are shown wearing their armor in the series.

It'd actually be quite surprising if they didn't, given that they're experts at space warfare where battle damage-induced decompression is an ever-present hazard. Some of them are hardy enough that they can endure a brief jaunt in vacuum, but that's just the commanders.

Well... I don't know how much of an officer's suit Max did steal. (It is sometime referred to as a soldier suit on the net...) But that guy wasn't in a suit at least.
Nor were the whole lot of Zentraedi of lower ranks having a casual conversation about defection.
Nor were Bron, Rico, and Konda most of the time.
I really had the impression only the ones on corridor patrol duty were in suits at all time.
And even then, there was numerous Zentraedi in suits that did have the helmet off.
Or the visor opened.

So if you have a bacteria crawling into a slightly scratched soft seal, using the muck in the ship as a petri dish, then starting to go around the ventilation of the ship... and not showing immediate symptoms... By the time the ones with suit would put their helmets back on, they would already be infected.
Getting the first ship isn't that hard.
It is the reaction time from the Masters to this incident that is of the essence.

If the Regess can convert her entire civilization into energy, she can convert the entire Zentraedi-armada into energy. I'm just dying to read your response to that.

Can she, though? Is the ability to be converted to energy something she designed into the Invid she commands? You'd think if she could do that she would've used that power to protect the Invid's original homeworld from the Haydonite attack that rendered it uninhabitable or protect their second homeworld (Optera) from the Robotech Masters plundering it and rendering it uninhabitable. She didn't even destroy the UEEF fleet that tried to blow up the planet she was standing on with a black hole bomb, and they were a LOT fewer than a Zentradi fleet.

She is ever evolving though... She might have gained that ability after the defoliation.
And the Invid and Zentraedi are both protoculture imbued... so I guess this could work.
Especially since Ariel could teleport Bernard, which isn't. BUT, Ariel was also in a different stage of evolution from the Regess, so...
She did not use it right from the start on a UEEF fleet that was in great parts shadow camouflaged. Might have been hard to judge the threat.
And once she did manage to sense it, her mind was already made to leave earth.
At which point the damage she inflicted on the UEEF fleet is changing from one source to another... but she did at least get the missiles.

There was probably other attempts to Phoenix her way through a few fleets.
Maybe in correlation with using the "Invid Nebula" as a sensing device.
Those that did not survive to tell the tale were, however, never accounted for in canon.
They still are listed as MIA.

But really I think it is much more simple than this.
Would you leave your millions of children behind, without supervision, if they weren't able to think by themselves?
Especially at a troubling time when your psi tower network is mostly down, some of your brain relays were destroyed, and the kid evolved enough that you'd normally have as Scientist back-up are currently ongoing an unstable adaptation into being able to go against your wishes? (Something that you don't understand?)

It might have been different with the Regent at her side, but alone?
I think she is keeping her strength to save her kids.
Transporting them from one place to another, maybe to mount an important hit and run operation? Why not.
Leaving them all behind while your at full passenger capacity of aliens to drop them unto an unknown world?
And that they might get pummelled in your absence? I think not.
These damn humans and masters and troodies all fold right in your face while you're slurping your flower nectar in the morning.
There is no telling what they would do if you did abandon your kids.
Hell, a few months outside and your favourites princesses already don't acknowledge you anymore.

Also, according to your posts, the Zentraedi vaporized the surface of the Invid homeworld; yet the Invid managed to conquer the Masters.

... but they didn't conquer the Masters. The Invid conquered Tirol, but only after the Robotech Masters had abandoned the planet and left behind only the sick and elderly (according to Rem and Cabell) with no way to defend themselves. Conquering a literally-defenseless planet is no real achievement.

The Zentraedi attacked and vaporized the surface of the Earth, and yet, they lost their ENTIRE fleet.

But, explicitly, only because humanity figured out a weird corner case abuse of the barrier system Zor built into his battlefortress... a maneuver that convinced the Robotech Masters themselves that the people who's obtained the ship were as knowledgeable about robotechnology as they themselves were. Had humanity not had the most advanced starship in the universe dropped in their laps, it would have been an easy victory for the Zentradi.

Except the Zentraedi were nowhere near Tirol in general when we saw the whole fleet the first time. So who knows what they are really dealing with out there?
There also weren't any Zent left to acompany their Masters on their journey to Earth.
But he is right though. Sadly, there was only a few bioroids left on Tirol at best.
Mainly because the Tiresian we see are the ones who rejected the triumvir's way of life.
No spending loss on defending political insurgents.

Plus, Bioroids are apparently also affected by speed issues.
Not so bright if the Zentraedi ever lead a revolt.

And the Xai-Zor is real, I just have to go to another city again to get my old HD. I think I have a pic. of it and some stats, but I can't post stats here.

Well, you can at least show the picture. That way the debate would move into a new stage.
Or... can you describe it from memory?

[Seto Kaiba]

Yeah... but then again, these dinosaurs were really there. Alive. Eating. Reproducing.
All of which points to at least their bacteria and the ones usually found as symbiotic to certain creatures, at least as much as it is needed for their biological function, to be there.
Plus, there wasn't only dinosaurs. There were plants, and insects, and probably stuff we never saw.
Somewhere along the lines, all this will need bacteria to eat and develop correctly. Some of which will escape the clones and populate the new environment.
(Though using the outdated reptilian model for said dinosaurs might be a consequence of not being able to reconstruct them correctly, yes...)

Plus... if all DNA was unusable after that time frame... this whole technology wouldn't work.
No matter how she does it, she does it. She can use DNA that is that old.

Forgive me for saying so, but you've jumped to a conclusion here and ignored a rather obvious alternative explanation.

We know, from modern scientific research, that the half-life of DNA is approximately 521 years and that the maximum age at which recoverable sequences can be detected and magnified is 1.5 million years. However, the Regess's interest in the natural progression of evolution on Earth means she doesn't HAVE to attempt to reconstruct these creatures on the genetic level. The most advantageous approach, and also the simplest, would be to start with simple precellular life and go forward from there since she can technologically compress the timescale of the experiment. Her goal was to chart the course of evolution through Earth's history, so the sensible place to start would be from the beginning. Her interest was in the anatomical structure of the ideal lifeform for Earth's environment, so for her purposes it wouldn't matter if what the genesis pit produced wasn't a perfect match for historical creatures genetically or biochemically. All she cared about was its anatomy... the shape.

The pit that mutated Edwards in Prelude to Shadow Chronicle did not came back from Earth.

True, but it also doesn't appear to have been working correctly given what it produced.

Especially since the first step of the Invid war was to populate new frontier planets and amass what they needed to create / complete their "army". (At least in old material... maybe Optera was left less barren in the reboot?)

Like the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie-pop, the world may never know... because all the different depictions of Sentinels were kicked out and only the broad strokes of the story apply according to HG. Optera's depicted as a barren and hostile world though, and the Regent doesn't seem to have had much if any presence on it by the time Edwards backstabbed him.

Going from peacefully grazing slugs to a space invading civilization IS also a huge evolutionary jump.
Now the Gura-Invids brings us a nice intermediary stage between these two, but still.
Considering most of this was made possible by the Regess and Zor Mind-copulating... I guess at least one Invid would have some ideas about frequencies.
Especially since we are speaking of a psionic race already able to sense energetic fluctuations.

But again, remember that things in the old material basically didn't happen in the official setting... like the whole schtick between the Regess and Zor.

Or the Master's doctrine is not so eager to have their own shoot friendly fire as you are currently describing.

It's literally right there in the show. What prompts Breetai and co. to defect is that they KNEW they had been singled out for extermination because they had been deemed "contaminated". Even the forces that barely had any contact with humans, like Azonia's, were going to be wiped out by the main fleet.

The other who have met him personally sometime thinks he is a weirdo. Breetai asked for him specifically, even knowing of his record.
Khyron is in fact still pulling his shenanigans from one side of the galaxy to the other, because his superiors doesn't see him as too much of a threat.

Sort of. The way it's actually characterized in the series, Khyron's behavior gets a pass despite his superiors because he's a brilliant commander despite his many eccentricities. The whole reason he's nicknamed the way he is is BECAUSE other Zentradi consider him a dangerously reckless unit leader who takes the already-cavalier attitude the Zentradi have about casualties to extremes even they consider unpalatable. Ironically, the problems with Khyron mostly stem with him being told to not do the one thing he's good at... totally destroying the enemy. His frustration with Breetai and later Azonia is basically frustration with being told to NOT be maximally effective.

Khyron makes many remarks to the fact that he is the only "real" Zentraedi around. While we might temper this with reason, even more given his addictions, the fact remains that he wasn't trialled or executed.

Reality ensues... if you're a highly effective bastard, you can get away with being a bastard.

Not necessarily to the ones they serve though. Especially with protoculture running low and the SDF-1 out of reach.

Yeah, but as established many MANY times in the series the Zentradi aren't normally told to do something other than "go here and kill all the things".

A single scratch by a now confirmed dead invid? Why waste the troops for this little?

One Invid isn't going to get close to a Zentradi. The only way they stand a chance is with a huge swarm, and at that point the Zentradi commander's going to go "oh hey, ambush, blow it the hell up and move on".

Somehow... I feel the Zentraedi might need a pretty good reason to shoot down one of their own in cold blood.

Not in the series, and DEFINITELY not in the RPG where the rank and file are (mis)characterized as totally obedient borderline automata.

We literally see Khyron employ summary execution on multiple occasions for things as trivial as "getting excited" or "running away from me while I'm shooting at my own troops".

So if you have a bacteria crawling into a slightly scratched soft seal, [...]

Soft seal? These guys wear hard armor. If a seal is compromised in a vacuum, they're dead and the Zentradi abandon the corpse.

Anything that got on a Zentradi soldier would almost certainly be killed either by the radiation of space or by the decontamination process when they returned to their ship.

And the Invid and Zentraedi are both protoculture imbued... so I guess this could work.

Not sure what you're trying to claim here... there's nothing about them being "imbued" with protoculture, their biological processes aren't dependent upon it.

And once she did manage to sense it, her mind was already made to leave earth.

But that isn't the case, she didn't decide to leave Earth until after the neutron-s missiles were launched... she spent quite a while fighting the shadow-cloaked UEEF.

Except the Zentraedi were nowhere near Tirol in general when we saw the whole fleet the first time. So who knows what they are really dealing with out there?

The Masters, apparently, because they have a long conversation about it in the show... which is what I was citing.

Mainly because the Tiresian we see are the ones who rejected the triumvir's way of life.
No spending loss on defending political insurgents.

That's at odds with what was actually in the Sentinels material, where it's explicitly stated the ones left behind were the old and sick.

[xunk16]

Forgive me for saying so, but you've jumped to a conclusion here and ignored a rather obvious alternative explanation.

We know, from modern scientific research, that the half-life of DNA is approximately 521 years and that the maximum age at which recoverable sequences can be detected and magnified is 1.5 million years. However, the Regess's interest in the natural progression of evolution on Earth means she doesn't HAVE to attempt to reconstruct these creatures on the genetic level. The most advantageous approach, and also the simplest, would be to start with simple precellular life and go forward from there since she can technologically compress the timescale of the experiment. Her goal was to chart the course of evolution through Earth's history, so the sensible place to start would be from the beginning. Her interest was in the anatomical structure of the ideal lifeform for Earth's environment, so for her purposes it wouldn't matter if what the genesis pit produced wasn't a perfect match for historical creatures genetically or biochemically. All she cared about was its anatomy... the shape.

Obvious? How is the supposition, that the Regess would build biological empty shells in the hope of getting any data about their survival's potential, obvious?
You can't have an idea of a creature's survival by anatomy alone. Especially if you are an alien having to discern between the potentials of a jelly-fish and a Platypus. Somewhere along the lines, you'd have to establish a model of the critters in their environments. That they wouldn't be an historical match doesn't mean they should work entirely different to the critters adapted to the world you try to bring them to. And if the model is a whole lot of mock-ups, then so would be the results. However, she eventually achieve working deductions... so...
We do know from the anime that she wanted the most "adapted" life-form on earth. This include to see how it would react to a functioning environment. The creatures also live long enough to produce eggs, which means a gestation time, which includes lots of eating, which needs bacteria for digestion in the very least. (Especially for Earth based lifeforms.) And / or an adaptation to fight such things in order to survive them.
And if she starts from pre-cellular life in order to achieve this results, she would still pass by the unicellular stage at some point. Which might lead to viral and other germ lifeforms. Either this, or she might go the other way, like we do, trying to identify old genes having survived in current species; isolate them, then try and rebuild from spectrographical analysis and morphological specimens.

Either way she goes, she achieve life and diverse functioning biomes.
Enough so that the 2nd ed. RPG depicts these critters as being able to survive and sometime escape their Genesis pits to roam the new Earth.
Critters having "evolved" in an environment devoid of any bacteria / virus / germs, wouldn't last long this way.

The pit that mutated Edwards in Prelude to Shadow Chronicle did not came back from Earth.

True, but it also doesn't appear to have been working correctly given what it produced.

Yes well, Edwards was never shown to have bothered to learn how they worked before entering it.
It is kind of a miracle that he kept his sentience and memories at all.
Which means the scientist slugs working for him weren't totally incompetent either.

Especially since the first step of the Invid war was to populate new frontier planets and amass what they needed to create / complete their "army". (At least in old material... maybe Optera was left less barren in the reboot?)

Like the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie-pop, the world may never know... because all the different depictions of Sentinels were kicked out and only the broad strokes of the story apply according to HG. Optera's depicted as a barren and hostile world though, and the Regent doesn't seem to have had much if any presence on it by the time Edwards backstabbed him.

Then the Barren Optera from Prelude goes in the same direction as the 2nd ed. RPG.
And that part at least does follow the original direction of the Sentinels and diverse now non-canon prequel comics, though without entering in too much details.
Which does include Invid (sometime against Zentraedi) activity in Master space long before the first robotech war.
As per the Genesis Pit Sourcebook, the UEEF sourcebook, and the New Generation Sourcebook.

Going from peacefully grazing slugs to a space invading civilization IS also a huge evolutionary jump.
Now the Gura-Invids brings us a nice intermediary stage between these two, but still.
Considering most of this was made possible by the Regess and Zor Mind-copulating... I guess at least one Invid would have some ideas about frequencies.
Especially since we are speaking of a psionic race already able to sense energetic fluctuations.

But again, remember that things in the old material basically didn't happen in the official setting... like the whole schtick between the Regess and Zor.

It is however kept into the 2nd ed. RPG's canon. Zor did return with the deduction that the Regess took a humanoid form only to facilitate their "exchange".
The Regent did react to "her infatuation" by developing a deep loathing of the Master's anatomy and everything close to it.
New Generation sourcebook, UEEF sourcebook. (Might have been a mention of Zor's betrayal in a new gen episode from the Regess, but I don't remember which one. Apparently not the last two. I could be mistaken. There is certainly past history with the Masters described as treachery though.)

And if we're to ignore what all these descriptions clearly refers to... then I let you imagine what the speculation around what the "[Masters] first dealt with the invid in peace" means. Without any clear time-frame, it does give us even more opportunity for the invid to learn about technological communications, not less.

Or the Master's doctrine is not so eager to have their own shoot friendly fire as you are currently describing.

It's literally right there in the show. What prompts Breetai and co. to defect is that they KNEW they had been singled out for extermination because they had been deemed "contaminated". Even the forces that barely had any contact with humans, like Azonia's, were going to be wiped out by the main fleet.

Yes, once defection and treason have been proven. And assimilation of alien cultural elements is very high on the danger list. Most of the fleet doesn't see themselves as traitors though. Which brings dissension to their own ranks, more defections. So either the Zentraedi aren't so Black & White as to be unable to form their own moral judgement, or the laws under which they live do generally presents the elimination of traitors as a very serious, very last resort affair.
If one was to execute traitors which would then be proven innocent, he most likely would be "cleansed" too.

At the very least, there is the mention that "Zentradi shouldn't kill Zentraedi" counter-balancing this idea that a traitor is "no longer a Zentraedi".
Which all make sense. You don't want your army of hot headed warriors starting to kill each other over every little heated debate.
But you don't want them being unable to police their owns either.

His frustration with Breetai and later Azonia is basically frustration with being told to NOT be maximally effective.
[...]
Yeah, but as established many MANY times in the series the Zentradi aren't normally told to do something other than "go here and kill all the things".

Aren't normally doesn't mean never. They also know how to build traps and do recon as per the mars operation. They also have scout ships, which would be useless if they were simply created for a galactic systematic genocide. If they never used these skills, the master wouldn't have taught them to use it. Canon is very clear that the Zentraedi can be somewhat unstable about anger issues. Or obsessions for personal questions of honour. Officers are generally better at keeping this in check for a reason.
And the simple idea that they could vouch for self recognition and better posting does present them with some initiative... which contest / contrast drastically this "black & white" statement. Taken with the little description we have of the fall of the masters' empire in 2nd ed.; I'd say we pretty much do not have a picture of vitrifying everything. At least as long as the masters could profit from it.

From Master Saga and a few lines per Exedore, we also have the idea that the masters aren't against the idea of new allies. (Despite probably trying to enslave them afterwards.) As the vanguard of their empires, this does teach us that Zentraedi might also be trained for a few "first contact" scenario which doesn't include a "shoot first ask later" mentality.

A single scratch by a now confirmed dead invid? Why waste the troops for this little?

One Invid isn't going to get close to a Zentradi. The only way they stand a chance is with a huge swarm, and at that point the Zentradi commander's going to go "oh hey, ambush, blow it the hell up and move on".

Abandoned structures with strange energetic readings.
Attacks comes from a burrowed invid left because he was infected.
I'm not suggesting to bring an Invid to a Zentraedi infantry.
But to bring the Zent solider near the dying invid.

Major difference in stance here is that I take the point of view where Zentraedi were active in something else than the space bulldozer department.
Which isn't contradicted by 2nd ed.

Somehow... I feel the Zentraedi might need a pretty good reason to shoot down one of their own in cold blood.

Not in the series, and DEFINITELY not in the RPG where the rank and file are (mis)characterized as totally obedient borderline automata.

We literally see Khyron employ summary execution on multiple occasions for things as trivial as "getting excited" or "running away from me while I'm shooting at my own troops".

Which were literally refusing to fight and going in search of alien cultural element, right IN HIS FACE!
I'd say that qualifies as irrefutable proof of "contamination", insubordination, and treason. Wouldn't you?
And... we also have already established that he is kind of a bastard. My point was that he might not have been alone, which isn't necessarily the case of all the staff. Nor of their code of conduct. There is an important difference between an execution for something evident as a crime and turning against your own specie with reasonable doubt, or for a simple one-time use strategic advantage.
Especially if you are educated with brain-wash and stimulants.
The triggers that gets to you, wonderful bio-weapon, must be very precise.

Zentraedi are shocked about aliens killing their own to achieve their goals.
Zentraedi are also shocked about not executing prisoners.
And they are even more shocked by un-zentraedi behaviour.
Sacrificing a ship, once it has been demonstrated as carrier for a pathogen, is one thing.
Killing a recon party that comes back with the Intell you just asked for is totally different.

At the very least, it might create unease amongst the troops.

So if you have a bacteria crawling into a slightly scratched soft seal, [...]

Soft seal? These guys wear hard armor. If a seal is compromised in a vacuum, they're dead and the Zentradi abandon the corpse.

Anything that got on a Zentradi soldier would almost certainly be killed either by the radiation of space or by the decontamination process when they returned to their ship.

Their suits still has articulations though, right? These should be made from flexible materials.
Then there is a visor. Which should be sealed by something. Which does probably mean some kind of glue, rubber, silicon, alien equivalent.
The radiation in space is not necessarily a factor if you get it out while creating a pathogen for your table. It might be radiation resilient.
And the Zentraedi are HUGE, which leaves plenty of spots for barely visible scratches (which would still be huge at any other scale), folds and crease creating themselves in old sealing materials, etc...
Liquids and dust doesn't get less stealthy because you are big.
They would also be kinda harder / longer to clean off. Especially if the contaminant is microscopic.

And for decontamination processes onboard Zentraedi ships...
I'm not entirely sure they even know about these. I don't remember any instances of decontamination happening on board a zentraedi ship.
At the very least, we could include the tube for the micronian prisoners in the "lab"... but that is far away from the doors.
They have so strict a protocol about bringing stuff back on board, that they left their spies distributing fridges, Minmei dolls, and... food!
(At the very least, the guard searching them wasn't really thorough...)
Plus, they are really poor about anything "maintenance" like. Which should probably include "cleaning stuff".
(At the very least, it explicitly did in the RNU, with the Zentraedi abandoned to themselves living in slum-like conditions on their space station. And we still have the un-repaired section of ship from the anime, which are left not only leaking, but dirty as hell.)
Without the masters changing this order of things, and being there to supervise the hot heads which might try to escape the new decontamination and quarantine matter entirely... (Like 5 year olds trying to escape a bath); I'd say they most probably would enthusiastically escape cleaning as much as they can. AND be proud of it if they succeeded.
Unless there is a punitive department giving a soldier the humiliation of Mr.Broom and Mr.Bucket.
Including guards to inspect that the sentence is carried.
Probably laughing their helmets off.

And the Invid and Zentraedi are both protoculture imbued... so I guess this could work.

Not sure what you're trying to claim here... there's nothing about them being "imbued" with protoculture, their biological processes aren't dependent upon it.

Even the new canon doesn't exclude them both having been modified by contact with Protoculture / flower of life influences.
As long as the Zentraedi keep this explanation for their size changing abilities, and the Invids for their psionic powers... I'd say the possibility of similarities, biological, or molecular, is still there.

Mainly because the Tiresian we see are the ones who rejected the triumvir's way of life.
No spending loss on defending political insurgents.

That's at odds with what was actually in the Sentinels material, where it's explicitly stated the ones left behind were the old and sick.

By itself, that would be an admission that they didn't undergo the treatments imposed by the Triumvirates to be transferred into perfect trio of cloned bodies.
Cabell and Rem are very much individuals, as Zor was. As per the conformity treatments available on Masters' ships, they would be very much anomalous.
Which makes them parts of the batch using life extension treatments prior to the tripartite philosophy becoming totalitarian.
All of which is still in the anime, and alluded to by the 2nd ed. RPG still.

It isn't because I do like the old material that I only use these as source for the discussion.
Especially when answering someone which does pride himself from following that precise iteration.

[Seto Kaiba]

Obvious? How is the supposition, that the Regess would build biological empty shells in the hope of getting any data about their survival's potential, obvious?

… that’s not even close to what I said.

Per the show and the RPG, the Regess is interested in what form her people should take in their next evolutionary step and settles on humanoid. She isn’t interested in perfect genetic fidelity for her study of Earth’s prehistory because she’s not studying their genetics or biochemistry… she’s interested in their anatomical suitability to become a dominant lifeform. When she finally settled on humanoid, she didn’t rebuild her people on a genetic level to BE human… she just made her children human-shaped. They’re still Invid on the inside, with the Invid’s natural abilities and the green blood that comes with it.

All she has to do is start with replicating prehistoric conditions with pre-cellular life and slam that genesis pit’s fast forward button until an apex predator achieves morphological stability, then just freeze-frame that sucker and start examinations.

You can't have an idea of a creature's survival by anatomy alone.

You absolutely can… that’s literally what palaeontologists DO. They analyze what remains of an extinct prehistoric lifeform’s anatomy and extrapolate how it likely lived from the similarities which its anatomy has to modern lifeforms.

And if she starts from pre-cellular life in order to achieve this results, she would still pass by the unicellular stage at some point. Which might lead to viral and other germ lifeforms.

Potentially, depending on how focused her experiments actually were… but that’s a long, LONG way from creating designer bio-weapons.

Critters having "evolved" in an environment devoid of any bacteria / virus / germs, wouldn't last long this way.

Kind of makes containment breaches a self-solving problem, don’t you think? She might do that entirely on purpose so no experimental subjects go walkabout. Mind you, if she did recreate the various prehistoric biomes the lifeforms in them wouldn’t survive on modern Earth anyway due to changes in oxygen saturation, climate, no immunity to natural microbes, etc. At the end of the day, it’s six of one half a dozen of the other.

Which does include Invid (sometime against Zentraedi) activity in Master space long before the first robotech war.
As per the Genesis Pit Sourcebook, the UEEF sourcebook, and the New Generation Sourcebook.

Which is inconsistent with the official setting and inconsistently presented even in those books…

Unfortunately, the quality and accuracy of the RT2E books really took a dive after Jason Marker left… a move that coincided with Palladium having largely run out of official material and having to resort to filler and Harmony Gold having abandoned the animated Robotech storyline for pie-in-the-sky dreams of starting over with a live action movie. The UEEF Marines book is the worst of the lot, positing discredited fan theories and even incorrectly citing dead characters as still alive well after their deaths.

And if we're to ignore what all these descriptions clearly refers to... then I let you imagine what the speculation around what the "[Masters] first dealt with the invid in peace" means. Without any clear time-frame, it does give us even more opportunity for the invid to learn about technological communications, not less.

… one problem with that line of reasoning. The UEEF Marines sourcebook describes the Invid’s scientists as largely scientifically-illiterate yes-men for the Regent.

Yes, once defection and treason have been proven.

No, literally anyone who’d had any kind of contact with humanity (direct or otherwise) was set to be exterminated. Dolza didn’t even know they’d reacted to the news they were about to wind up on the other side until he’d finished glassing Earth and they attacked him.

And the simple idea that they could vouch for self recognition and better posting does present them with some initiative... which contest / contrast drastically this "black & white" statement.

Not really, no… the Zentradi commaders saw rival commanders as, essentially, enemies to be beaten by jockeying for status. Breetai was furious when he was stripped of command of the operations around Earth and took the first available opportunity to throw Azonia under the bus and reclaim his status. Khyron casually executes his own subordinates on several occasions and chafes at having to take orders from Azonia. Their whole mindset is organized around a concept of “is it an enemy or not”.

(This goes all the way back to the OSM, where the fact is explicitly acknowledged.)

Taken with the little description we have of the fall of the masters' empire in 2nd ed.; I'd say we pretty much do not have a picture of vitrifying everything. At least as long as the masters could profit from it.

The Zentradi being essentially the “or else” in “submit to us, or else”.

Abandoned structures with strange energetic readings.
Attacks comes from a burrowed invid left because he was infected.
I'm not suggesting to bring an Invid to a Zentraedi infantry.
But to bring the Zent solider near the dying invid.

That’s the problem… the Zentradi’s first instinct when dealing with a suspicious environment is to blow it the hell up. The Zentradi tried to smoke Zor’s battlefortress out and the minute there was an indication that a trap had been laid they flattened Macross Island from lunar orbit.

Major difference in stance here is that I take the point of view where Zentraedi were active in something else than the space bulldozer department.
Which isn't contradicted by 2nd ed.

The Macross Saga sourcebook’s pretty clear on the Zentradi existing to keep the worlds that the Masters conquered under control by the threat of excessive force...

Which were literally refusing to fight and going in search of alien cultural element, right IN HIS FACE!

We see him shoot a few troops who refused to fight, but earlier in the series we see him shooting perfectly compliant troops who were simply excited for battle. Likewise, his reputation shows the Zentradi are quite cavalier about the idea of even friendly fire-induced losses as long as it gets the job done. Breetai quite casually sacrificed whole ships (sometimes more than one at a time) just to find out where his enemies were.

They are VERY casual about killing their own.

Killing a recon party that comes back with the Intell you just asked for is totally different.

Dolza literally announced his intention to exterminate three whole fleets because some of the troops in just one of them had been exposed to Earth’s culture. Your claim doesn’t stand in the face of the evidence of the series.

The radiation in space is not necessarily a factor if you get it out while creating a pathogen for your table. It might be radiation resilient.

The radiation in space is pretty darn dangerous and deadly to microorganisms… and as a space force they would naturally undergo decontamination after a foray off ship outside of a sealed pod or fighter simply because of all the great unpleasantness you can track back in from space which isn’t a designer bioweapon. (Space dust is freaking deadly… it’s an incredibly dangerous thing.)

They have so strict a protocol about bringing stuff back on board, that they left their spies distributing fridges, Minmei dolls, and... food!
(At the very least, the guard searching them wasn't really thorough...)

That stuff was probably decontaminated on return to the ship… the spy trio simply didn’t turn out their pockets completely when making their presentation.

Plus, they are really poor about anything "maintenance" like. Which should probably include "cleaning stuff".

Just because the Zentradi don’t know how to repair their technology doesn’t mean they’re a pack of unhygenic slobs… and there’s even an MOS for them that’s basically the cleanup guy who handles all the materials recycling.

Even the new canon doesn't exclude them both having been modified by contact with Protoculture / flower of life influences.

These things are not magical, post-reboot… protoculture is just an exotic fuel. Your fuel station attendant doesn’t develop pan-dimensional clairvoyance by huffing fumes.

By itself, that would be an admission that they didn't undergo the treatments imposed by the Triumvirates to be transferred into perfect trio of cloned bodies.
Cabell and Rem are very much individuals, as Zor was. As per the conformity treatments available on Masters' ships, they would be very much anomalous.
Which makes them parts of the batch using life extension treatments prior to the tripartite philosophy becoming totalitarian.
All of which is still in the anime, and alluded to by the 2nd ed. RPG still.

The RPG actually offers a different explanation for it in the Masters Saga sourcebook… it puts forward the view that the Robotech Masters and their triumvirate lifestyle is actually atypical in Tirolian society. The Masters are the social and political elites of Tirol, an oligarchy that began as something very like a cult that gradually infiltrated much of Tirolian life. The triumvirates are the social and political elite of Tirolian society… basically their version of the 1%, chosen to be the seed of a new empire.

When the Masters took the privileged few on their fool’s errand to recover Zor’s battlefortress in the name of restoring their oppressive imperial rule over their corner of the galaxy, the working stiffs and have-nots of the world got left behind to enjoy the slow collapse of their civilization.

[xunk16]

Obvious? How is the supposition, that the Regess would build biological empty shells in the hope of getting any data about their survival's potential, obvious?

… that’s not even close to what I said.

Per the show and the RPG, the Regess is interested in what form her people should take in their next evolutionary step and settles on humanoid. She isn’t interested in perfect genetic fidelity for her study of Earth’s prehistory because she’s not studying their genetics or biochemistry… she’s interested in their anatomical suitability to become a dominant lifeform. When she finally settled on humanoid, she didn’t rebuild her people on a genetic level to BE human… she just made her children human-shaped. They’re still Invid on the inside, with the Invid’s natural abilities and the green blood that comes with it.

All she has to do is start with replicating prehistoric conditions with pre-cellular life and slam that genesis pit’s fast forward button until an apex predator achieves morphological stability, then just freeze-frame that sucker and start examinations.

If Love Live Alive is any indication, that "form" thing would include internal organs as well. At least, I expect it to be the case since Sera is implied to be pregnant from Lancer. In fact, that would probably mean to keep much of the "chromosome" mechanism intact. Which is related to DNA, which would probably iclude some form of junk DNA... hence still bacteria / germs / viruses. They might still have a few characteristics of the invid on the cellular level; but it's a hell of a guess work which would take only anatomical form and manage reproductive compatibility.

You can't have an idea of a creature's survival by anatomy alone.

You absolutely can… that’s literally what palaeontologists DO. They analyze what remains of an extinct prehistoric lifeform’s anatomy and extrapolate how it likely lived from the similarities which its anatomy has to modern lifeforms.

Except she does go further than paleontologists do. She don't just argue with herself about their environment and behaviours, falling wrong 80% of the time for years on out. She builds an entire reality show about it. Then again, if she IS just guessing... that's a load of complications for something that would have so much chances to fail when tried for real afterwards. A hell of a risk to take with your own kids... especially this close to extinction.
In that precise instance, I can't say that you're right. Your deduction might hold if we are to write off the entire Invid race and science as "just a fluke", but I'm not ready to go there in face of canon, nor in face of the 2nd ed. RPG...

And if she starts from pre-cellular life in order to achieve this results, she would still pass by the unicellular stage at some point. Which might lead to viral and other germ lifeforms.

Potentially, depending on how focused her experiments actually were… but that’s a long, LONG way from creating designer bio-weapons.

Ah... but I'm not necessarily mentioning bio-weapons created as such, rather a resurrected pathogen which would be used after its effect would have been discovered by accident.

Critters having "evolved" in an environment devoid of any bacteria / virus / germs, wouldn't last long this way.

Kind of makes containment breaches a self-solving problem, don’t you think? She might do that entirely on purpose so no experimental subjects go walkabout. Mind you, if she did recreate the various prehistoric biomes the lifeforms in them wouldn’t survive on modern Earth anyway due to changes in oxygen saturation, climate, no immunity to natural microbes, etc. At the end of the day, it’s six of one half a dozen of the other.

Except that it isn't what we see happening for most of Earth's Genesis pits in the sourcebook of the same name.
I agree the Dinosaurs would have that problem, and possibly the giant prehistoric bugs out of their hole.
(In fact, even with a contemporary immune systems, the jurassik pit creatures would probably die from confronting the up to date version of these.)
But this isn't the case for the Florida Hell Gardens. Nor should it interfere with the Ice Age one, nor the Gura Invids for that matter. And we also have example off-world of creatures getting out once a pit is abandoned.
The security is the underground facility and its field protected air vents, plus the Invid patrols. One might also think the Regess freed her creatures on purpose.
Or that she indeed doesn't care about critters leaving. OR maybe that she would prefer it that way. To see which one have the will to escape and would survive once out.

Which does include Invid (sometime against Zentraedi) activity in Master space long before the first robotech war.
As per the Genesis Pit Sourcebook, the UEEF sourcebook, and the New Generation Sourcebook.

Which is inconsistent with the official setting and inconsistently presented even in those books…

Unfortunately, the quality and accuracy of the RT2E books really took a dive after Jason Marker left… a move that coincided with Palladium having largely run out of official material and having to resort to filler and Harmony Gold having abandoned the animated Robotech storyline for pie-in-the-sky dreams of starting over with a live action movie. The UEEF Marines book is the worst of the lot, positing discredited fan theories and even incorrectly citing dead characters as still alive well after their deaths.

Shame. I was going to say the UEEF one is the most enjoyable and playable, especially if complemented with the Genesis Pit one.
So... Now we're saying the 2nd ed. RPG isn't even canon, on the forum of the company that did make it, and for the purpose of planning a scenario using it?
At this rate, it becomes really a one sided argument, don't you think?

And if we're to ignore what all these descriptions clearly refers to... then I let you imagine what the speculation around what the "[Masters] first dealt with the invid in peace" means. Without any clear time-frame, it does give us even more opportunity for the invid to learn about technological communications, not less.

… one problem with that line of reasoning. The UEEF Marines sourcebook describes the Invid’s scientists as largely scientifically-illiterate yes-men for the Regent.

A Yes-man isn't necessarily stupid. A lot of very good Yes-men were imported from nazi Germany for the US to win the space race.
And... can't seem to find the "scientifically-illiterate" part.
Instead :

• The Regess considers the Regent's Invid Scientist to be yes men for the Regent, whose job was to make him feel superior and to stroke his ego [rather] than to do any actual meaningul science. - Interestingly enough, the Regess can be wrong, and these scientist could simply be philosophically inclined the same way the Regent is.
• One of the few castes of Invid who are completely free-thinking.
• Invid scientists are extremely intelligent, most are loyal to their species, and operate as the Regent's general and advisors...
• They have incredible scientific knowledge, much of it learned from their shared thelepathic connections with each other and the Hive Brains.
• They have studied the species of the sector for centuries and have intimate knowledge of their biology, ecologies and technology.
• The only place they have failed time and time again is in the understanding of non-invid cultures and beleifs.
• Some even contemplate launching coups against the Regent and Regess to seize control...
• Ability to recognize technology... just as capable to understand what a Cyclone is, even when turned off, as a human...

And since we have no real example of Invid Scientist in the little canon that remains... I guess this means the UEEF sourcebook would be the only contemporary source on the matter.

Also... The Invid did manage cybernetic implants on an alien race (human -Dusty Aries). That's pretty technologically advanced.

Yes, once defection and treason have been proven.

No, literally anyone who’d had any kind of contact with humanity (direct or otherwise) was set to be exterminated. Dolza didn’t even know they’d reacted to the news they were about to wind up on the other side until he’d finished glassing Earth and they attacked him.

Yes, that's the code, they knew they were wrong, they were afraid to be found out.
They decided to side with humanity because they were already dead and didn't wanted to go out fighting amongst themselves (on a same ship / same fleet basis). At least this way they had a slim hope. I guess that would means self-survival to be very high in their "automaton" brain-washing. Which make a whole new spot of grey between the black & white.

And the simple idea that they could vouch for self recognition and better posting does present them with some initiative... which contest / contrast drastically this "black & white" statement.

Not really, no… the Zentradi commaders saw rival commanders as, essentially, enemies to be beaten by jockeying for status. Breetai was furious when he was stripped of command of the operations around Earth and took the first available opportunity to throw Azonia under the bus and reclaim his status. Khyron casually executes his own subordinates on several occasions and chafes at having to take orders from Azonia. Their whole mindset is organized around a concept of “is it an enemy or not”.

(This goes all the way back to the OSM, where the fact is explicitly acknowledged.)

Which does include a rather grey area of when does a enemy becomes more important than another. If anyone can be an enemy, including your superior officer, then really you don't see much white in any given situation. You must be able to rationalize your own arguments and make a choice based decision.

Abandoned structures with strange energetic readings.
Attacks comes from a burrowed invid left because he was infected.
I'm not suggesting to bring an Invid to a Zentraedi infantry.
But to bring the Zent solider near the dying invid.

That’s the problem… the Zentradi’s first instinct when dealing with a suspicious environment is to blow it the hell up. The Zentradi tried to smoke Zor’s battlefortress out and the minute there was an indication that a trap had been laid they flattened Macross Island from lunar orbit.

Right... but that was after landing and meeting resistance, no?
Which is after sending recon, being shot at by the SDF-1, then engaging the fleet... and if I remember correctly, engaging forces on the ground as well. THEN they blew the island.
And they thought the trap was serious because they couldn't understand that the resistance was not more ferocious.
Now that doesn't strike me as the picture you paint of them flattening every planet they see as soon as they are in range. And they do inspect things to confirm what they are. Even if they just poke at them to be sure first.

You are saying they wouldn't go at all, I'm saying you just need the right prompt.
One that would be believable at your table anyway.
Does that mean that they might shoot all zentraedi derelict afterwards? Making this a one time deal?
Well... that is another matter entirely. Do they recycle their ships? If they do, then I guess this might work once or twice more at least. If they don't... Well...
Of course a derelict of your own specie is fishy off of its course.
And the masters won't need more than one confirmation.

After that... you see where the players go I guess...

Which were literally refusing to fight and going in search of alien cultural element, right IN HIS FACE!

We see him shoot a few troops who refused to fight, but earlier in the series we see him shooting perfectly compliant troops who were simply excited for battle. Likewise, his reputation shows the Zentradi are quite cavalier about the idea of even friendly fire-induced losses as long as it gets the job done. Breetai quite casually sacrificed whole ships (sometimes more than one at a time) just to find out where his enemies were.

They are VERY casual about killing their own.

Then again... being too excited for battle might lead them to mistakes. (The death of a few Vs the deaths of all.) He is increasing his survival rate by encouraging the others to behave in a more zentraedi-correct manner. Once again, top of the list shocking is : "un-zentraedi behavior". As for Breetai sacrificing ships, it isn't the same as shooting at them. Their deaths will be in the service of the imperative. It is the general goal of their lives anyway. As long as they die usefully, I'd say these soldiers were happy to comply.

Killing a recon party that comes back with the Intell you just asked for is totally different.

Dolza literally announced his intention to exterminate three whole fleets because some of the troops in just one of them had been exposed to Earth’s culture. Your claim doesn’t stand in the face of the evidence of the series.

He can't confirm how far the contamination would have spread. There is no reliable "cultured" detectors. He can't take chances. The only other example in their history lead to much worst than this. AND they have been drilled to consider any traces of "cultured" individuals to be as dangerous as demons for the sake of their "gods".
My claim is based on the evidence of the series.
It's not that killing three fleet is casual... Indeed, most of the series is telling us that they are most afraid / disgusted of the human maybe possessing a trait able to render them un-zentraedi. And even then, that is described as something that doesn't come up often.
This is pretty specific.

I don't see that fear coming from an abandoned outpost / crashed ship, or from contact with the invids.

They have so strict a protocol about bringing stuff back on board, that they left their spies distributing fridges, Minmei dolls, and... food!
(At the very least, the guard searching them wasn't really thorough...)

That stuff was probably decontaminated on return to the ship… the spy trio simply didn’t turn out their pockets completely when making their presentation.

In which case, don't you think the "contamination" would have been spotted sooner?

Plus, they are really poor about anything "maintenance" like. Which should probably include "cleaning stuff".

Just because the Zentradi don’t know how to repair their technology doesn’t mean they’re a pack of unhygenic slobs… and there’s even an MOS for them that’s basically the cleanup guy who handles all the materials recycling.

Cleaning stuff that might still be usable and classifying which is not in the recycling bin is not the same as saying a sick Zentraedi showing no symptoms wouldn't be sent to his quarters to infect others. Or as saying they would clean the stuff in the recycling bin.
Some bacteria thrives from the heat, hibernate in the cold, and only mutate in the radiations... if they do react at all.

(By this point we're talking a major monster of nature, but there is either a story, or there isn't­.
As far as the real world is concerned, humanoid mecha are very impractical and we don't have folding spaceships, or giants conceived to better support higher gravity. Or even envisioned as a good idea for a space force... which would then need more fuel to lift off their weights and their supplies!)

As for the clean-up guys... I thought they were considered lower-tier Zentraedi. A bit like their technicians that are mostly ignored as unworthy until they are needed.

Even the new canon doesn't exclude them both having been modified by contact with Protoculture / flower of life influences.

These things are not magical, post-reboot… protoculture is just an exotic fuel. Your fuel station attendant doesn’t develop pan-dimensional clairvoyance by huffing fumes.

Who said that was fumes coming in their makeup? That part was never technically and meticulously explained. The pollen is still hallucinogenic though.
And even a little better than this, even just with the anime.

By itself, that would be an admission that they didn't undergo the treatments imposed by the Triumvirates to be transferred into perfect trio of cloned bodies.
Cabell and Rem are very much individuals, as Zor was. As per the conformity treatments available on Masters' ships, they would be very much anomalous.
Which makes them parts of the batch using life extension treatments prior to the tripartite philosophy becoming totalitarian.
All of which is still in the anime, and alluded to by the 2nd ed. RPG still.

The RPG actually offers a different explanation for it in the Masters Saga sourcebook… it puts forward the view that the Robotech Masters and their triumvirate lifestyle is actually atypical in Tirolian society. The Masters are the social and political elites of Tirol, an oligarchy that began as something very like a cult that gradually infiltrated much of Tirolian life. The triumvirates are the social and political elite of Tirolian society… basically their version of the 1%, chosen to be the seed of a new empire.

When the Masters took the privileged few on their fool’s errand to recover Zor’s battlefortress in the name of restoring their oppressive imperial rule over their corner of the galaxy, the working stiffs and have-nots of the world got left behind to enjoy the slow collapse of their civilization.

Political / religious... same difference. (In that precise case at the very least.) Heretics then. Second grade citizen at best. They still aren't the core of society as defined by the masters and represent an alternative to their social order. Something any totalitarian regime will eventually be wary of.

[Peacebringer]

Here's an old link to the Inbit's Xai-Zor I got from my old HD.

http://www.nishimizu/animie/mospedea/inbit/xaizor.html

Regess energy-power = metaphysics for a children's TV-show. ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.

Caffeine is not the same has a good combat-drug; methheads.

Like I stated before; letting your enemies kill each other then going after the weak is a sound military-strategy, not necessarily a sign of military-weakness; yet, you kneel to mathematicians whom you hail has emperors. The Zentraedi are no more; the Masters are either dead or enslaved and all that is left are a race of annoying, incompetent (in your own words), race of upright, hairless walking apes.

Keven Siembieda is a great job; it's still an enjoyable game and when playing an RPG game based off of a show for children, I don't expect realism and never laughed at the stats.

[glitterboy2098]

"server not found."
and couldn't find it on the wayback machine archive either.

[xunk16]

Even just http://www.nishimizu.com gives nothing back, even on the wayback machine.
I sympathize with your pain. Loosing a source when someone calls for it is terribly frustrating.

[Seto Kaiba]

Here's an old link to the Inbit's Xai-Zor I got from my old HD.

http://www.nishimizu/animie/mospedea/inbit/xaizor.html

That isn’t even a properly formatted URL… it’s missing the top-level domain (e.g. “.com”).

Just to be thorough, I took the domain name to the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine and ran it against every major TLD in the index. 0 records. Historical DNS records also returned nothing as to this site’s existence at any point in time.

That said, I think some aspects of the URL itself are an indicator of its probable (lack of) quality as a resource… given that they misspelled both “anime” and “MOSPEADA”.

All I get from searching on the name “Xaizor” is a bunch of results for the localization name of a Fire Emblem character whose proper name was Saizou, one of the villains from the Fire Emblem Gaiden game that was remade as Fire Emblem: Shadows of Valentia. I did find one old fansite purporting to offer more Inbit ship designs, but as expected they were actually a bunch of designs from another show. The Gatlantis Empire’s ships from the 1978 series Space Battleship Yamato II.

The Zentraedi are no more; the Masters are either dead or enslaved and all that is left are a race of annoying, incompetent (in your own words), race of upright, hairless walking apes.

Pretty much, yeah… and the Invid would’ve been first into extinction if they’d ever gotten into an actual fight with someone competent. Sometimes it really is better to be lucky than good. They took their beatings and actually got to walk away in the end with half their civilization intact, and that technically makes them far and away the winners when everyone else is busy genociding each other.

[glitterboy2098]

if you have a copy on your hard drive, perhaps upload it to imagr or google drive or something so you can share it?

[Peacebringer]

Here's some images of the Zai-Zor;

Line-art of the ship:

https://ibb.co/K2RCgZt

And here's a screenshot of the ship in action from the MOSPEADA series:

https://ibb.co/yhLQDqW

Warning: Warning for Trolling, and Flaming/Flamebaiting. -B

[xunk16]

Here's some images of the Zai-Zor;

Line-art of the ship:

https://ibb.co/K2RCgZt

And here's a screenshot of the ship in action from the MOSPEADA series:

https://ibb.co/yhLQDqW

Really?
That was kinda anti-climactic.
How could you have been fooled by the enterprise and Picard identified as Kirk?
Oh... wait. We've been memed.
Well. That doesn't raise the level of the discussion.

[Seto Kaiba]

Really?
That was kinda anti-climactic. [...]

… were you seriously expecting a different outcome?

I told you at the outset that we knew for a fact Artmic only created one Inbit ship design when the Genesis Climber MOSPEADA series was in development. That means that there was never any chance that these “Xaizor” claims weren’t false… the only question was whether the claim of having found a second Inbit ship design was an innocent case of mistaken identity or trolling.

[Peacebringer]

War is deception.
-Sun Tzu

Here's what happened: Rumors leaked of a new, unknown Invid ship*. The Zendtaedi armada's Exedore**, convinced the armada's Breetai that the Invid are, "Rubbish", their battle-pods can out perform and fight the Invid, based on mathematical principals alone, and consulted his library, not to find a single-record of this new weapon-ship, so it must be a case of mistaken identity. Breetai is still cautious and divides his forces thinking the ship, in the back of his mind, might be one from another civilization. Mean while, a Khyron-like officer ignores his commands that stem from the Exedore-like officer, to simply, fly backwards. Disregards rule of law, attacks and is easily surrounded from x,y,Z coordinates and gooified. Seto's character was eventually captured when the Invid infiltrated the command ship with their Khyron-like and Zentraedi clones***, mutating the crew; Seto's character is turned into a blob. Roll up a new character.

Ways to make better-Invid

1. The GM decides, to make the game more interesting, to change the tactics/stats. End of story.




*Coming from MOSPEADA's Inbit, might be cannon, might not".
** PC played by Seto.
***Based off of the Invid's genetic-manipulation starting on p. 142.

Warning: Warning for Trolling, and Flaming/Flamebaiting. -B

[Zer0 Kay]

Now everyone knows to ignore anything peacebringer adds to a conversation on canon as a lie.

So every one else. To make Invid more "interesting" just throw more at your gamers?

[xunk16]

Really?
That was kinda anti-climactic. [...]

… were you seriously expecting a different outcome?

I was half expecting a fan-drawn, or otherwise taken from comics, unnamed ship then mislabelled by another fan.
At least, there would have been some wrong to redress. But as it is... it's just a useless way to fill kilobytes.
I also notice that you dropped our previous line of arguments.
Should I take this as a stalemate?

To make Invid more "interesting" just throw more at your gamers?

That is not (immediately) solving the speed issue. (Technically, one side will eventually need to re-fuel / re-arm.)
But so far, we have a bit more than this.
The canon only really limits us in one way; everything tried by the invid that makes them stronger must be dropped by the Regess before she goes to earth, and eventually "proven" to the Regent as inefficient, for being either too suicidal or for the enemy trying to cover his wounds, successfully long enough to short his patience.

1. Use invid spawn as needed.
2. Re-integrate old canon ships to balance space capacities. (Namely the Scorpion and Starfish class.)
3. Don't forget to put your players in as much of a bad strategic position as possible. If there is no cover for the Invids, use the players ships themselves. Ants are small, but they still can kill a bird if they find the back door.
4. Simulagents are not just for BSG jokes, if the players succeed too much, reveal their favourite PNJ as a Cylon.
5. The invids might manage to catch a derelict Zentraedi ship with clones still in stasis. They could go all black-bioroid (See Genesis Pits) on them and manage briefly a fleet of Regults.
6. Invids have psi relays to increase psi range, use all available psi power and these relays to incapacitate officers that read scanners, radars, and coordinate the enemy fleet. (Generally they are limited to invid hive towers, but the thing exist, so bringing it to space isn't really too much of a stretch. You put it on the ship of your choice.)
7. Invids have Perytonian slaves, when everything else fails : blood magic.
8. Invids are scientists that put the new gender bender trends to shame; don't forget to input the odd mutations here and there. All should be short lived, or accidentally successful experiments; except if you don't care about breaking continuity. That could include more powerful invid brains with unstable psychic energy, or highly competent simulagents able to tap into ley lines against their life expectancies.
9. Invid scientists enjoy much freedom and could be in control of their own sector of space. If you feel you have to stray too far from canon, don't hesitate to get the fight as far from the continuity as you can; in order to field test your "experiments" in a canon bomb safe zone. By this point, use the assumed unknown alien races and first contact teams. (UEEF sourcebook.) Namely, the Scientist in question could have found an ally able to provide him with the missing assets you need as a trump card. If you plan on going all or nothing between a bad ending and Gurren Lagan, fill this unknown alien ally role with the Monte Yarrow.
10. As a last resort, one could create an improved version of the space booster with higher speed; this should however have a defect that make them dangerous to the invids themselves. If it wasn't the case, they would keep the upgrade.
11. Bacteriological warfare should remain an option. Though in certain cases, the pathogen needed would have to be exceptionally resilient (Think Prometheus or Adromeda Strain). Most other attempts would suffer the same limitations as Invids normally have.
12. Trap the adversary if you can. This can range from using false communication signals (somewhat ineptly), to wait the exact moment of reentry before making the Invid's position known. Control the battlefield by aiming for undefended worlds and bring the battle to you on the ground. (Undergroud hives, protected from a Zentraedi rain of death, would be an intelligent gamble.)
13. If you have a "royal", don't hesitate to Phoenix your way out of a bad situation. Or... who knows... maybe an unimportant prince or princess could kamikaze a few ship this way.
14. Last resort, especially before the sentinels campaign, don't forget to drop a few pursuer missiles. (Old canon game only.)

And... that's it from the top of my head.
The real difficulty here being that instead of protecting the brain, much of these "solutions" would have you instead check for "protecting the continuity".
Games using the old canon would suffer a little less, but you'd still have to be careful when giving anything to the invids. There must be a way that this "upgrade" will eventually be dropped. The only place where a GM would be really free of this is after the Regess' departure. Surviving prince and princesses could continue to evolve in a more stable manner. Who know... maybe by correcting the defects of your previously used fixes.

At some point, there was a project of having a second UEEF book. This would most probably have covered the UEEF's civil war era.
We are thus in a position to ask if this would have covered the "re-designed" invids from the old Sentinel line. (Wasn't there also one of the reboot comics using the red scout-thingy with four shoulder pods?)
One could technically use theses (not really beautiful) designs in order to introduce faster invids.
However, that would still be pretty late in the continuity itself.

Lastly, there is technically a possible interest in the "Quiet Walkers". Invid could try and catch one in order to study how their teleportation works.
I think the idea is pretty much that such a thing shouldn't be plausible, but the simple fact they exists could lead to the invids trying to achieve this by their own means. I let you ponder the troubles with having teleporting Invids however, or having Invids trying to harness "Quiet Walkers under hypnotic drugs" to their ships in order to make them faster...

[Zer0 Kay]

I made them more interesting post Haydon arrival (completely non-cannon) by following the Robotech formula man meets alien, alien beats man down, man gets back up, man makes important alien friends, man and alien friends repel aliens making way for new alien threat. Old aliens tech becomes part of human tech.

The Invid aren't warriors. So they suck at designing things for war. Human/Zentradi/Tirolians using same growth by design tech... much scarrier.

[Seto Kaiba]

Now everyone knows to ignore anything peacebringer adds to a conversation on canon as a lie.

As an amusing bonus, his reference to Sun Tzu is a misquotation… a perfectly apt cherry for his sundae of failure.

So every one else. To make Invid more "interesting" just throw more at your gamers?

So many of this thread’s participants are going about this entirely the wrong way.

The cold, hard truth of the matter is that the math clearly shows the Invid kind of suck horribly at massed warfare. That’s a situation they were never intended for. If you, as a GM, force them to fight the same kind of battles as the Zentradi or the Robotech Masters it’s inevitable they’re just not going to be able to provide the same level of professional menace to your players.

You’ll notice a lot of the contributors in this thread focusing pretty much exclusively on ways that they can break the setting to make the Invid more of a threat. They’re focused on either making the Invid into something more like the Vajra from Macross Frontier by increasing the powers of the individual Invid or twisting them into a much more malevolent and destructive species that has zero regard for life and uses psychic magic, germ warfare, and body horror mind control like Warhammer 40,000’s Tyranids. This is one of the reasons I so often accuse Robotech fans of really just being closeted Macross fans… everything has to fit into the Macross Saga mold, or they just don’t accept it even when it blatantly contradicts the show. The UEEF can’t be a planetary assault force set up for landing and supporting ground troops, they just HAVE to be a force based around space aircraft carriers because that’s how it was in the Macross Saga. Invid can’t be an ineffectual planet-focused enemy that isn’t even really interested in fighting humanity because the Zentradi were a highly aggressive space army who just wanted to fight.

The answer to the question posed in the topic post is that you don’t need ways to make the Invid “better”... you need to make better use of the Invid. They’re not made for a grand space warfare campaign like Macross. They’re made for a ground campaign. Either a La Resistance style story similar to MOSPEADA or Terminator: Salvation against the Invid Regess’s children or a grinding land warfare campaign against the Regent’s troops similar to Gaunt’s Ghosts, The Wild Geese, or a Sharpe’s novel. The Invid don’t have to be a foe whose power is on the same level as the Zentradi if your players are a scared bunch of resistance fighters hiding from the implacable Invid security forces they don’t have the firepower to fight en masse or a bunch of burned out ground pounders with laser rifles, cyclones, and a few support vehicles out there on the Sentinels front trying to cope with the Regent’s numerically superior inorganics and free the enslaved masses of alien locals.

If you’re having trouble making the Invid a threat in your campaign, that’s not a sign that you need to make the Invid better… it’s a sign that you, as a GM, are using them incorrectly and have given your players too much of an advantage.

[ShadowLogan]

The answer to the question posed in the topic post is that you don’t need ways to make the Invid “better”... you need to make better use of the Invid. They’re not made for a grand space warfare campaign like Macross. They’re made for a ground campaign.

At the same time it might be worth remember though that the Invid can and do evolve new designs, it is quite possible the Invid have never fought classic space warfare like the Zent/Masters, but if they did eventually they would either evolve/adapt to successfully engage or perish or just run away to successfully survive. Which is what we see them start to do in the later part of NG-saga creating things like the Invid Battloid that is more evenly matched against the Alpha than the Scout/Troopers. I can't help but see the Invid evolve new mecha to better match the Zentreadi capabilities (at least on the mecha front, their only ship type doesn't itself change) as a result of sustained encounters. However that would be a long term thing that would have to be willing to go beyond what the Invid have now and extrapolate out how they might evolve due to pressures the Zentreadi/Masters force on them just like we see the Invid respond to UEEF designs in the long run (Invid Battloid did not just copy the basic Invid design given they introduced missiles if we compare it to the Enforcer/PCU). This would be in keeping with the Regis-Invid MO more than creating super bugs or psychic based operations.

Invid can’t be an ineffectual planet-focused enemy that isn’t even really interested in fighting humanity because the Zentradi were a highly aggressive space army who just wanted to fight.

This isn't strictly a fan thing, its a result of the projects like the Sentinels trying to remold them (or a faction of them) into this.

[xunk16]

You’ll notice a lot of the contributors in this thread focusing pretty much exclusively on ways that they can break the setting to make the Invid more of a threat.

Well... We seem to have lost ourselves in pointing fingers here. I did suggest that protecting the continuity might become a problem in some instances, but that doesn't mean I'm suggesting to break the setting. Not farther than any RPG ever will that is. The fact remains that the characters created at any tables will never have been part of the original franchise into which they are introduced. These heroes will need campaigns to occupy them, and make them special. You can't bloody well trust them against the main events and hope a 50 years long setting will endure. So one has to fill the empty spaces...
Good thing for us, the Palladium books are full of these holes to fill.
I'm here to consider what can be done in these without breaking the setting. And while some seems to think the suggestions given until now are extreme... There are also those who doesn't look at it in a workable stance.

It is easy to point at later supplements and call them "un-canon". They are still there. It doesn't solve anything. Much like repeating over and over again that the invids can't do enough harm because of a perceived incompetence. And from what I understood of the anime and old canon, one can assume that the "broad-strokes" do include much of Robotech still, even by the second edition. For example :

The regent's Invid military machine is much larger and mobile than the Invid seen on Earth. Instead of being confined mostly to patrolling hives and Protoculture Farms, the Regent's Invid roam the stars like swarms of predatory wasp, attacking anyone and anything that utilizes Protoculture or that is associated in any way with the hated Robotech Masters and the Zentraedi. Large fleets of Invid Clam Troop Carriers and command ships are a horrifying but all-too common sight in the civilized solar systems around the masters.

In which I feel totally justified to assume at least the olden days' ships to be still relevant. Especially in light of this....

Perhaps the most extreme example of Genesis Pits in the known universe is the second world in the Iolas System. A former stronghold of the Robotech Masters, it was a center for trade, commerce, research and development before the Regent and his legion descended upon it. After a conflict that raged for hundreds of years, the world became a symbol of war, misery and destruction. Its original name has been all but forgotten, and it is now known simply as Janus.

[...]

The day side is a hot, arid hell, pocked with dozens of Genesis Pits that are so large and so prevalent that they have permanently damaged the planet's tectonic plates. [...] The day side is filled with myriad creatures, mostly former inhabitants of the planet's natural, now obliterated, eco-system. These creatures have all been subjected to the brutal and often random evolutionary powers of the Genesis Pits.

[...]

Janus was once a shinning gem in the intergalactic crown of the Robotech Masters, with a population of more than 10 billion. Now, no one is sure how many clones remain. Certainly not more than a couple million, on a planet as large as Earth and with substantially more landmass and less water.

But it is a certainty that the Robotech Masters and their Zentraedi shock troops ruled a significant portion of the Milky Way Galaxy for centuries. During that time, Zentraedi forces were spread throughout the galaxy to enforce their Master's will and to battle with the ferocious Invid and other enemies.

[...]

The Robotech Masters wanted to know what the Invid were doing there, and whether they had found a new planet on which to grow the Flower of Life.

[...]

Over time and with the collapse of the Robotech Masters' empire due to the ravages of the Invid's unrelenting galactic war, the Masters quite simply forgot about the Ku'Urtz outpost.

I am not disputing the fact that the invids are better suited for ground occupation. Nor am I really disputing the might of the Zentraedi.
What does interest me is to know how a race, recognized with such flaws as to intergalactic warfare, would manage to capture one of the capital worlds of the Masters under the noses of the Zentraedi. In this, this supplement doesn't contradict the allusion of the anime or the old comics that a great war was wagged. Once the Invids are on the ground, they are harder to remove... and apparently orbital cleansing was not option number one in some cases.
What this topic is really about is finding out how you manage to conquer a planet and put invids on the ground. Acknowledging that, however asymmetrical the battles might have been, they must at some point have won some space battles.
And at the very least, one must admit the fall of the Master's empire makes a pretty good setting to play in.
However flawed the material covering the issue ended up being due to cancelled source-books.

They’re focused on either making the Invid into something more like the Vajra from Macross Frontier by increasing the powers of the individual Invid or twisting them into a much more malevolent and destructive species that has zero regard for life and uses psychic magic, germ warfare, and body horror mind control like Warhammer 40,000’s Tyranids.

I'm certainly not an engineer. And I do not come from a strong military background.
I apologize if, to vulgarize some of my suggestions, I do refer to other sci-fi settings from times to times. Tropes can be powerful tools in storytelling. They can cut corners on exposition, but they do not sadly replace consistency.
It is easy to tell the books are wrong, or that something was left to the game-masters and players to explain. A good RPG book should have a part of this. But now that these books are here... how is one supposed to best fill-in the blanks? Harming the less possible amount of continuity along the way?
Maybe some here would have better ideas as to how the Invids would manage "galactic warfare" without ever engaging any space battles?
Or using their assets, such as genetic manipulations, mastery of protoculture in the buildings of ships (alluding to folds), or using their very much canon psychic powers? (Including at least a small part of mind control.)

While the Invids of Mospeada might have had some shred of respect for life, this doesn't really hold for non-invid life-forms in Robotech. Body horror was even a part of the anime, with the experiments performed on Dusty Aries. And it remained a strong theme in the comic Reboot, if we're to take into account the story of Robotech Invasion (see issue #5). Other examples, such as T.R. Edwards' transformation in "Prelude to Shadow Chronicle", still exists.
They are destroying planets with Genesis pits, upturning ecosystems as they go only for the sake of their experiments... Even the Regess, which would eventually confess the error of her ways, still admit to having gone far enough.
Their justification? The preservation of Invid life.
Not very far away from any other national-fascists produced here on earth.
They don't need to have "zero" regards for life in order to be terrifying and twisted. They only need to lack empathy for other species.
Which the setting abundantly supports the absence of. From slave pens, to medical experimentation, to the wastelands created by their occupation.

Something that, somehow, the Zentraedi failed to stop for centuries.
Why? How?
Was it simply political? Cultural? Or maybe the canon is not as limited as some want it to be.

This is one of the reasons I so often accuse Robotech fans of really just being closeted Macross fans…

I feel the need to refute this theory. Then again, I have already shed a lot of pixels on this very forum for this very reason. I did try Macross. And I was on my way to dump the whole matter when I was caught up by Robotech.
Then again, I cannot speak for the writers and creators of Robotech, which might well have the problem Seto mentions here.
They certainly seem to give all the love to macross, insuring that their paying public is well fed, yes... But also insuring that the other parts of the fandom disinterests itself from what they do. (And eventually ceases to exist...)

The UEEF can’t be a planetary assault force set up for landing and supporting ground troops, they just HAVE to be a force based around space aircraft carriers because that’s how it was in the Macross Saga. Invid can’t be an ineffectual planet-focused enemy that isn’t even really interested in fighting humanity because the Zentradi were a highly aggressive space army who just wanted to fight.

The UEEF might be a planetary assault force... It doesn't mean their enemies have to play by their rules. They should know this, and in fact... however ineffectual, they did weaponize their spaceships. And the lore tells us that they might need these weapons against the Invids. They were told that their enemies would be stronger on the ground, but still present in space. (Or at least, that is the intel they should have received according to the histories given by the RPG.)
And yes... It IS hard to swallow that something like the Zentraedi Armada would loose any war. Especially without the Invids being able to be at least a little threat in space...
But Robotech asks of us not to contest that it would happen. It asks of us that we wonder why and how such a loss would be possible.
It also tells us that a galactic empire thought the Zentraedi necessary in face of the Invid menace and others.

Which begs the question of what would ever justify such a great and incredible weapon.
It WAS and remains one of the greatest thread launched by Macross. Not the space battles themselves, but the mystery of such gargantuan enterprise.
It isn't supposed to be that much of a mystery in Robotech. But the stats propose us an interesting tactical puzzle.
Tough I doubt the people having had to fight this kind of asymmetrical warfare in history had the time to feel the wonder of the equation.
The history of Vietnam, north Korea, China, and more recently the middle-east was full of rather a sense of ingenious survival.

If superior strategies coupled with inferior tactics is all we have to describe the Invids... Then it is up to the Gamemasters and Players to find these strategies.
Which is somewhat something left bare, with this topic focusing in tactical advantages and weaknesses.
Something I am also guilty of... mainly because I don't see a better way to go at it given the material we have.

This isn't strictly a fan thing, its a result of the projects like the Sentinels trying to remold them (or a faction of them) into this.

Thank you for this. While the topic was locked for moderation, this statement was the light at the end of my tunnel.
I do hope my sentiment is not too far from what you were expressing.

The answer to the question posed in the topic post is that you don’t need ways to make the Invid “better”... you need to make better use of the Invid.

[...]

If you’re having trouble making the Invid a threat in your campaign, that’s not a sign that you need to make the Invid better… it’s a sign that you, as a GM, are using them incorrectly and have given your players too much of an advantage.

I also agree on this statement. Though it doesn't necessarily answer my questions. Or how one will have to explain to the players how much they are F***ed.

So many of this thread’s participants are going about this entirely the wrong way.

The cold, hard truth of the matter is that the math clearly shows the Invid kind of suck horribly at massed warfare. That’s a situation they were never intended for. If you, as a GM, force them to fight the same kind of battles as the Zentradi or the Robotech Masters it’s inevitable they’re just not going to be able to provide the same level of professional menace to your players.

And yet, this is the way Robotech propose things to be.
So what is the better way to use Invids?

Also... I do realize my previous allusion might not have been clear enough :

We are thus in a position to ask if this would have covered the "re-designed" invids from the old Sentinel line. (Wasn't there also one of the reboot comics using the red scout-thingy with four shoulder pods?)

In fact at least one of these was mentioned on this very forum HERE.
The Invid Mortar Scout, which has three and not four shoulder canons, my mistake. It will also be referenced by the coming Invid Invasion game. (As shown in the current state of the rulebook.) Which seems to imply these were not totally dropped out of canon.
I think some of the others might also be missing. Though the Invid Assault Trooper from the UEEF sourcebook does look like it would be a mix of some of those rolled-up into one.
Maybe they aren't faster or anything... but they could have been.
If you know that to not be the case, then apologies for the mistaken suggestion.

[Seto Kaiba]

Good thing for us, the Palladium books are full of these holes to fill.

Kind of, but not really... and that's one of the problems with the Robotech setting as a whole.

To be blunt, Robotech has the same problem the old Star Wars Expanded Universe did... there's a laser focus on a small group of main characters who are absolutely vital to everything that happens, and outside of that incredibly narrow field of view there's basically nothing going on. There's no real information about the Global War that was allegedly raging on Earth prior to the crash of Zor's battlefortress, but the only events in the story that matter are those involving the Macross Saga characters. Nothing of any real interest or importance happens on Earth while the SDF-1 is off in space avoiding the Zentradi, and nothing of note happens outside of its immediate vicinity once it successfully returns to Earth. That's followed by fifteen years of basically nothing happening on Earth until the Robotech Masters show up, and then every event revolves around the 15th Squad while the entire rest of the military sits in a holding pattern until they screw up badly enough that they get a year or two's grace period where nothing bloody happens before the next alien invasion happens. Then the Invid invade, and outside of brief but furious massacres where the UEEF gets slaughtered in droves and accomplishes nothing there's really nothing going on. There are allegations of slavery, but the Invid and Humans in the series mostly leave each other alone and we don't see any progress made towards liberation even by Scott's group until the UEEF gets its act together offscreen and the third attack is a two-sided massacre. The same goes for the UEEF, really. The Hunters and various family friends run everything and lead every operation... so there's really nothing going on anywhere outside of their immediate vicinity. Even the backstory is huge swaths of Nothing To See Here. It has the Haydonites curbstomp the Invid, then the Masters curbstomp the Invid, then Zor betrays the Masters, and that's about it... there's no real excitement or interest there. They have the whole of the galaxy to play in, but there are only two places in the entire story that actually matter: Earth and Tirol. Everywhere else is a footnote at best. Humanity's presence in space is limited to a military expeditionary fleet and a handful of military bases... there are no emigrant fleets, no extrasolar colonies, and explicitly no options for living outside of the military. You're either a soldier or a slave, and in Robotech there's not a hell of a lot of difference between those two things after a while.

This is one of the main reasons I haven't used the Robotech RPG to run a Robotech game in ages. Unless you're willing to rewrite the story and setting, the best you can really do is wind up playing a background character. The setting itself is so narrow and claustrophobic that there isn't really room to be The Hero of Another Story. This problem got really obvious in RT2E right around the time they did the UEEF Marines book, which is essentially Robotech 1 ¾: In Close Proximity to, But Not, the Sentinels. They couldn't just write a Sentinels book because Sentinels is on broad strokes canon status only, so what they delivered was a book about being a background character in the long-decanonized Robotech II comic books. The book only made it to print because Harmony Gold no longer cared about quality or consistency, having given up on Robotech's animated storyline after the failure of Shadow Chronicles and pinned their hopes on the proposed Warner Bros live action reboot allowing them to make a clean break from the existing Robotech material and fanbase.

It is easy to point at later supplements and call them "un-canon". They are still there. It doesn't solve anything.

Hey, I don't make the news I just report it. Harmony Gold were the ones who decided to decanonize all that terrible nonsense ages ago... I just happen to completely agree with their decision and the reasons they did it.

Frankly, I'm not inclined to take anything from Genesis Pits or UEEF Marines seriously for the reasons already identified... they're not consistent with the official setting, each other, or themselves.

I am not disputing the fact that the invids are better suited for ground occupation. Nor am I really disputing the might of the Zentraedi.
What does interest me is to know how a race, recognized with such flaws as to intergalactic warfare, would manage to capture one of the capital worlds of the Masters under the noses of the Zentraedi.

The simple answer is "They didn't."

The reason this looks like a contradiction is because it is one. These events did not occur in Robotech's setting, and the places they supposedly occurred don't exist. Palladium's writers ran out of official canon material back in the New Generation sourcebook, and this stuff you're quoting is unofficial backstory Palladium came up with with no apparent regard for consistency with the setting and story.

I'm certainly not an engineer. And I do not come from a strong military background.
I apologize if, to vulgarize some of my suggestions, I do refer to other sci-fi settings from times to times. Tropes can be powerful tools in storytelling. They can cut corners on exposition, but they do not sadly replace consistency.

Tropes are not bad, and no apologies are necessary.

Maybe some here would have better ideas as to how the Invids would manage "galactic warfare" without ever engaging any space battles?

That's the thing... it's not just the GMs here who want to make the Invid into something they're not. Palladium's writers were trying to, in the absence of Harmony Gold policing their work, rework the Invid into a serious interstellar menace like the Tyranids or the Pseudo-Arachnids when they were never that kind of threat in the official setting. I can understand why... but I don't agree with it. The writers were trying to spice the Invid up and make Robotech's least-compelling antagonists more interesting, more epic, and more involved in the story. The problem is that it runs counter to all the things that make the Invid such an oppressive threat in the series. Like Star Trek's pre-First Contact Borg, a lot of their menace comes from being a faceless, nameless, and inscrutable enemy that defies comprehension in human terms and has no regard for the niceties of civilization. Their impact in the Robotech story comes from their "from nobody to nightmare" progression and the way they're the threat nobody really saw coming.

If you try to close the plot holes created by Palladium's "original" additions, you just open bigger plot holes elsewhere. How do the Invid engage in hundreds of years of "galactic warfare" against the setting's one and only interstellar superpower while in total control of their evolutionary process and come out of it so desperately terrible at fighting wars that they lose all their territory to humanity within twenty years despite humanity's inexperience and extremely limited numbers? The only way the Regent's campaign makes any sense is if the Invid never waged war against anyone, and only ever invaded and conquered planets that already been abandoned and left defenseless by the Masters as their interstellar empire collapsed in the wake of Zor's betrayal... the line taken by what little Sentinels animation was produced before the project's cancellation.

While the Invids of Mospeada might have had some shred of respect for life, this doesn't really hold for non-invid life-forms in Robotech. Body horror was even a part of the anime, with the experiments performed on Dusty Aries. And it remained a strong theme in the comic Reboot, if we're to take into account the story of Robotech Invasion (see issue #5). Other examples, such as T.R. Edwards' transformation in "Prelude to Shadow Chronicle", still exists.
They are destroying planets with Genesis pits, upturning ecosystems as they go only for the sake of their experiments... Even the Regess, which would eventually confess the error of her ways, still admit to having gone far enough.

Not really... the Invid in Robotech are never really shown committing any of the supposed atrocities that the setting tries to claim they're guilty of. We never once see anyone who is a slave on a protoculture farm, or even a protoculture farm in general. They did engage in a little bit of human experimentation, but it's never really depicted as something they did to be cruel. Likewise, they are never shown destroying planets or civilizations. Rather, we see them invade planets whose civilizations are ALREADY in shambles for other reasons and a lot of the ugliness we see on Earth during the New Generation is a result of humans being horrible to each other rather than Invid oppression and the ugliness we see on Tirol is explicitly the fault of the Masters abandoning their own planet before the Invid showed up. We never see genesis pits harming the local ecology, or them ruthlessly pursuing their experiments at the cost of the world around them. They're supposed to be responsible for having restored Earth's biosphere after their invasion too, which is the opposite of what you're asserting. The Invid are not evil, or even all that amoral, they're just desperate victims of the Robotech Masters and Haydonites trying to make a new life for themselves elsewhere in the canon.

I feel the need to refute this theory.

You can try, but you're not likely to have any success... the objective evidence is pretty substantial.

Generalizing from your own experience is not a viable argument, as we've already previously established your views are highly atypical.

They certainly seem to give all the love to macross, insuring that their paying public is well fed, yes... But also insuring that the other parts of the fandom disinterests itself from what they do. (And eventually ceases to exist...)

Because that's where the money is. Macross Saga merchandise is the only Robotech merchandise that consistently sells well enough to justify making it.

Toynami's Masterpiece Collection line, for instance, sold out in preorder for practically every variant of the VF-1 in runs of 15,000. They took a hard pass on the Masters Saga mecha because there was not anywhere close to enough demand to even seriously consider making toys for that saga, and when they switched to the New Generation after exhausting the VF-1 they had to cut the edition's runs to 10,000 and then 5,000 and still failed to sell out. Harmony Gold is STILL sitting on unsold New Generation MPC inventory over a decade after that line launched. Granted, their overwhelming focus on profitable Macross merchandise doesn't do a lot for fans of the other sagas... but those fans are such a small minority in the fanbase that they were never really going to be the subject of any serious consideration in new product development anyway.

The UEEF might be a planetary assault force... It doesn't mean their enemies have to play by their rules. They should know this, and in fact... however ineffectual, they did weaponize their spaceships. And the lore tells us that they might need these weapons against the Invids. They were told that their enemies would be stronger on the ground, but still present in space. (Or at least, that is the intel they should have received according to the histories given by the RPG.)

Quite the contrary... it means they deliberately structured their forces around what they expected to be fighting. Well-entrenched planetary defenses... not space fleets.

And yes... It IS hard to swallow that something like the Zentraedi Armada would loose any war. Especially without the Invids being able to be at least a little threat in space...
But Robotech asks of us not to contest that it would happen. It asks of us that we wonder why and how such a loss would be possible.
It also tells us that a galactic empire thought the Zentraedi necessary in face of the Invid menace and others.

Here's the thing... Robotech DOESN'T ask that of us. The RPG does, but only in the books that were written after Robotech's creators stopped enforcing consistency with the setting.

Which begs the question of what would ever justify such a great and incredible weapon.
It WAS and remains one of the greatest thread launched by Macross. Not the space battles themselves, but the mystery of such gargantuan enterprise.

It's not actually that much of a mystery... that's just what happens when you've got a galaxy-spanning civil war and you build an army appropriate to that scale. Like Star Wars's clone wars, but the armies have to be bigger because you don't have the ability to shift your entire army across the galaxy in an afternoon.

[Zer0 Kay]

Now everyone knows to ignore anything peacebringer adds to a conversation on canon as a lie.

As an amusing bonus, his reference to Sun Tzu is a misquotation… a perfectly apt cherry for his sundae of failure.

So every one else. To make Invid more "interesting" just throw more at your gamers?

So many of this thread’s participants are going about this entirely the wrong way.

The cold, hard truth of the matter is that the math clearly shows the Invid kind of suck horribly at massed warfare. That’s a situation they were never intended for. If you, as a GM, force them to fight the same kind of battles as the Zentradi or the Robotech Masters it’s inevitable they’re just not going to be able to provide the same level of professional menace to your players.

You’ll notice a lot of the contributors in this thread focusing pretty much exclusively on ways that they can break the setting to make the Invid more of a threat. They’re focused on either making the Invid into something more like the Vajra from Macross Frontier by increasing the powers of the individual Invid or twisting them into a much more malevolent and destructive species that has zero regard for life and uses psychic magic, germ warfare, and body horror mind control like Warhammer 40,000’s Tyranids. This is one of the reasons I so often accuse Robotech fans of really just being closeted Macross fans… everything has to fit into the Macross Saga mold, or they just don’t accept it even when it blatantly contradicts the show. The UEEF can’t be a planetary assault force set up for landing and supporting ground troops, they just HAVE to be a force based around space aircraft carriers because that’s how it was in the Macross Saga. Invid can’t be an ineffectual planet-focused enemy that isn’t even really interested in fighting humanity because the Zentradi were a highly aggressive space army who just wanted to fight.

The answer to the question posed in the topic post is that you don’t need ways to make the Invid “better”... you need to make better use of the Invid. They’re not made for a grand space warfare campaign like Macross. They’re made for a ground campaign. Either a La Resistance style story similar to MOSPEADA or Terminator: Salvation against the Invid Regess’s children or a grinding land warfare campaign against the Regent’s troops similar to Gaunt’s Ghosts, The Wild Geese, or a Sharpe’s novel. The Invid don’t have to be a foe whose power is on the same level as the Zentradi if your players are a scared bunch of resistance fighters hiding from the implacable Invid security forces they don’t have the firepower to fight en masse or a bunch of burned out ground pounders with laser rifles, cyclones, and a few support vehicles out there on the Sentinels front trying to cope with the Regent’s numerically superior inorganics and free the enslaved masses of alien locals.

If you’re having trouble making the Invid a threat in your campaign, that’s not a sign that you need to make the Invid better… it’s a sign that you, as a GM, are using them incorrectly and have given your players too much of an advantage.

That's great and all... for Earth. What about for the SDF3 fighting against the Regent. They're no different than the Regis so how does one use them correctly to make them as big as a threat as they were? How were they able to subjugate spacefaring races who were combat oriented and had more ships than them?

[ShadowLogan]

What does interest me is to know how a race, recognized with such flaws as to intergalactic warfare, would manage to capture one of the capital worlds of the Masters under the noses of the Zentraedi.

The question is when did the Invid capture these worlds? The Zentreadi practically mobilized nearly their entire force to assault Earth in 2011, and the Reno's fleet is implied to be the only holdout. Then you have the fact that in 2013 the Masters essentially abandoned their Empire to travel to Earth.

So the reason the Invid are able to acquire these worlds from the Masters/Zentreadi is not the result of superior capability, but the fact they aren't there to defend these worlds in any meaningful way. "Prelude" only establishes that the Sentinels aliens have been fighting the Invid longer than the UEEF, which could only mean potentially a decade at minimum (2011-2022, likely 2030).

Quite the contrary... it means they deliberately structured their forces around what they expected to be fighting. Well-entrenched planetary defenses... not space fleets.

I think this is true in the late 2030s into the 2040s when we see the UEEF, but for actions in the 2020s into early/mid 2030s we do not really have anything solid to go on any more, unless you count Carpenter's display in TRM saga in 2029. Plus I think in the run up to the 2020s it seems more likely the UEEF would be "balanced" differently given the lack of information on their target world (Tirol) and the Invid (seem to be an unknown to the UEDF in 2030).

That's great and all... for Earth. What about for the SDF3 fighting against the Regent. They're no different than the Regis so how does one use them correctly to make them as big as a threat as they were? How were they able to subjugate spacefaring races who were combat oriented and had more ships than them?

Simple answer is surprise blitzkrieg attack. That is how the Invid invaded Earth successfully. Which could explain their ability to take various Sentinel worlds.

As for the Regent, I think you have to force the UEEF to fight on the Invid's terms who will play to their strength (ie ground/planet-side warfare).

[Seto Kaiba]

That's great and all... for Earth. What about for the SDF3 fighting against the Regent. They're no different than the Regis so how does one use them correctly to make them as big as a threat as they were? How were they able to subjugate spacefaring races who were combat oriented and had more ships than them?

Were the Regent's Invid a "big" threat, though? They were invading the former territory of the Robotech Masters, a region of the galaxy that'd been left largely undefended after the Masters dispatched the Zentradi to locate and retrieve Zor's lost battlefortress and later left to retrieve it themselves when the Zentradi failed.

The Invid basically rolled over the almost token armed resistance on the worlds they invaded through the twin advantages of surprise and superior numbers.

That the Regent's Invid forces were defeated by a force as small and ill-equipped as the UEEF is perhaps the best argument that they weren't actually much of a threat at all. The UEEF only had a few hundred ships at its disposal, most of which were small and lightly armed escorts while the larger ships were often explicitly not very good in an actual fight. The Regent's Invid were beaten by a force that would be on the small side for a first world European nation's volunteer army, with a few tens of thousands of troops. Despite having sensors that could track the UEEF anywhere they went by the emissions of their powerplants and the UEEF never realizing it, the Regent's forces still lost to a numerically inferior force using poorly designed weaponry that actually favored the Invid's own preferred strategies.

I think this is true in the late 2030s into the 2040s when we see the UEEF, but for actions in the 2020s into early/mid 2030s we do not really have anything solid to go on any more, unless you count Carpenter's display in TRM saga in 2029.

Carpenter's troops were rear-echelon transport formations... the kind of troops least missed on the front lines.

As for the Regent, I think you have to force the UEEF to fight on the Invid's terms who will play to their strength (ie ground/planet-side warfare).

Precisely... it's exactly the same approach you would take as a GM for putting your players up against the Regess's Invid. You're talking about a ground invasion against an entrenched enemy who has zero concern for casualties, in this case because his troops are predominantly unthinking and unfeeling robots ala Terminator. This isn't a setting for epic space fleet battles ala Macross, this is the setting for tense ground combat and guerilla warfare.

[slade the sniper]

Insanities do not negate discipline. A lot of soldiers suffer from insanity and have successful careers.

+1

I approve this message.

-STS