Rate my sci-fi campaign premise /tg/

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>>54418101

> The players are a squad of elite power-armored orbital drop shock-troopers fighting in the nitty gritty, they're the first ones into a conquered planet, and they're the last ones to leave the battlefield. The aliens are insectoid in nature, and mindless, driven by instinct to consume every world in their path, and extract their resources to continue their martial juggernaut, for no reason other than to satisfy their primal thirst for total supremacy, the continuation of their kind, and the destruction of all else.
> Each alien species is specialized to fill a single niche as effectively as possible, and are only moderately skilled at tasks outside of their specialty. One species expands obscenely quickly and can build scores upon scores of cannon fodder warships with minimal effort, another expands slowly but once in place, entrenches itself in fortifications to the point only sustained decades-long orbital bombardment can hope to drive them out, another reproduces rarely but are unstoppable paragons in single combat, on the ground or in the void, and so on, there are little over a dozen species.
> As a rule of thumb, the alien outnumber humanity 10:1 and due to their genetically inbuilt biotech, have no need of lengthy supply lines or advanced infrastructure to fulfill their purpose. On the other hand, humanity's artificial technology is generally at least twice as efficient as the alien equivalent, humanity is unified as a whole, doesn't constantly go to war with itself, and unlike the aliens, humanity has a coherent and adaptive strategy, as opposed to the alien's policy of a never-ending onslaught the same way, every time, until it works.

> (2/2)

That's it, a longwinded excuse to fight waves upon waves of space-bugs in a desperate war of mutual extermination in the not-so-far future. What do you think of the concept /tg/, and how would you implement it yourself?

>>54418101
>>54418135

/tg/ pls respond

>>54418212

Shameless bump.

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>>54418212
Needs more space nazis

>>54418101
>>54418135
Drop the multigalactic scale. Your aliens are nowhere near scary enough for that. They are at best a local threat considering your description. You can change precursors to just some neighbours of humans who had their biotech army going rogue to get the same setup in the end only on a smaller scale.

Humans have a couple of systems and are probing for further expansion.
Aliens died out and their biotech goes on a conquest.
Epic showdown.

Depending on how the game would go you can drop some other aliens in the mix. Either for humans to defend/see how they are doing and taking in refugees or for some pretty angry alien empire to come for pointed questions of what the fuck this trash is doing on their doorstep.

>>54418287

The humans are already Starship Troopers dialed up to elevn-tier, they can't get any more Nazi without going full-on Fourth Reich in Sphess.

>>54418369

Thank you, I think I'll do that. Aay lmao refugees encroaching on human space could be interesting, especially considering the ayy's less advanced war technology, and the human's extreme xenophobic militarist stance. I'd say they're assimilated into the empire, segregated into cannon-fodder auxiliary units and put into what amount to system-wide labor camps to fuel the war effort. A few missions to escort some alien refugees and/or put down a few violent insurrections could add some much needed variety.

As for an advanced alien empire budging in, the remnants of the bioweapon's creators invading mid-campaign could be a nice twist.

>>54418596

> *eleven-tier

>>54418101
>>54418135
Biggest problem I see is that your bugs go from fighting among themselves after defeating their creators, to operating as a unified force again.
Without some controlling group, they should be fighting themselves as often as humanity.
Next problem is that they started as specialised components of a biological war machine that could only function/succeed as a whole.
Unless you are doing !notTyranids that are able to copy and reproduce each others forms and functions, with no overall Hivemind behind them the only way the non-ship forms could spread is by being competing parasitic infestations on individual ships.

>>54418101
>>54418135
This setup makes no sense.

So these ultimate killing machines wage war on eachother for literally millions of years vying for dominance, but humanity's warfare amongst itself within a few systems has somehow outpaced them so utterly?

Not only that, but humanity is driven back rapidly despite their tech being twice as good, and the aliens are all cooperating together like they were supposed to originally except not really because infighting still happens?

This is all very confused on what you want to accomplish. It's like you tried to put a twist on a generic spacebugs faction by not making them 100% united, but then just ignore that fact whenever it isn't convenient.

Honestly, the idea was more interesting when I only read the initial lines. The idea of these carefully crafted alien races that were bred for a specific kind of warfare suddenly finding themselves fractured from their other support elements is neat. Say you have one race that was supposed to be heavy ordinance and the giant walking tanks of the aliens. What do they do when they suddenly have no air support, or scouts, or infantry? They would have to adapt, possibly with normal technology to supplement their biological adaptations. Perhaps they would have a more unique outlook on what the important aspects of warfare are based on how they were bred to thrive.

Millions of years of evolution and warfare applied to specialized space insects is far more interesting than the generic space marines vs space bugs you're pitching.

>>54418949

The bugs are fighting one another, it's one of the primary reasons they haven't wiped out humanity. They aren't able to copy and reproduce one another's forms, the biological war machine was created as an ecosystem, with each species coming as a wave of their own, with each building upon the last's progress to colonize and ravage the worlds ahead of them.

The species are versatile and able to fulfill tasks outside of their specialization, but not a fraction as well as the species designed to fulfill that task. For example, the Fyrid breed rapidly, and as a result, have much more production power, but are poor in combat and sophisticated biotech on a bug-to-bug basis, whereas the Znotli breed even slower than humans, but individually are paragons of single combat, on the ground or in the void. Their specialized nature keeps them balancede against one another in an endless back-and-forth stalemate, by their creator's design.

>>54419262

You're right, and earlier an anon helped me realize I had a problem with the setting's scale. I've downscaled the timeline to a few hundred thousand years, as opposed to several million years, and it takes place across a few hundred thousand systems, as opposed to the entirety of the Milky Way galaxy. I appreciate the criticism, without it I wouldn't have noticed the plot holes and inconsistencies in the concept.

I feel like this setting is trying to straddle the line between high-tech and low-tech, but instead of meeting in the middle it's a mish-mash of extremes.

Intergalactic multi-millions-years-old warriors bug fighting pre-singularity humans? Humans that have spent thousands of years fighting throughout the galaxy, but somehow haven't experienced massive technology advancement that would result from such warfare to push them through the singularity? Super bugs that recognize their creators as a hostile faction in a classic robot-rebellion-but-with-meat, but don't recognize that they need each other to function? It feels like the setting is trying to be dramatic by making everything as big and explosive as possible, which leaves it a caricature of itself.

And honestly, if they're fighting each other all the time I don't really know why they're expanding. You'd think they'd try to secure the home front before expanding - or would try to expand away from each other and minimize contact. In the former they would never meet humans, and in the latter it'd be unlikely that we'd make contact with all of them. The core conflict feels contrived. Especially with everything required to cross intergalactic voids, where there's little to no reason to expand into.

Honestly, it feels like a goofy version of Muv-Luv.

>>54419597

I realized the problems with the setting's scale shortly after posting, and reading it again, the timeline seems ridiculous. I'm going to take a day or two to refine the concept, think it through a bit more, and then I'll repost the thread, because this is just embarrassing.

>>54419561
I already figured that was the case by the time I posted it, even 1000 years seems like plenty for at least one of the bug factions to have an idea eventually, unless they were literally programmed to not have ideas outside of performing their function, in which case they should have never turned on eachother to begin with.

I'm just really having a hard time grasping what you're after with this setting for a campaign. Why not just tell your players you're running Starship troopers, or play a 40k RPG and have them fight against nothing but Tyranids?

What makes this scientifically advanced fascist humans fighting space insects different? The fact that, allegedly, these bugs have been divided and forced to adapt to not having their support networks. I say allegedly, because apparently they're still working together just fine and the only time them fighting matters is as an excuse to give humans more time to get their shit together.

>>54419685
>What makes this scientifically advanced fascist humans fighting space insects different?

This is the question OP really needs to ask about his work. There's nothing wrong with using Starship Troopers or one of its countless derivatives as a setting, just as there's nothing wrong with trying to put your own spin on this genre.

But "your own spin" should be just that. There are a lot of grandiose modifications to the formula here - a lot of "big ideas" that are trying to compete with each other and are having a hard time working together (ironically like the not!Arachnids).

I think on a more basic level, you can take some time to look at other settings that play with these ideas (40k, StarCraft, the several different interpretations of Starship Troopers itself including the movies and the multiple animated shows, Muv-Luv, and anything else you can find) and look at how they differentiate themselves. Both to get your own wheels turning, and to see what kind of change is important and what kind isn't.