#!/dev/haru

by order of our great global moderator it got buried so I commented that it was funny

A vote from an outside source has been added: Viral Shredder Viral Shredder

Hi. Have you voted? I didn't think so! You should vote.

wow it's been like 20 minutes and you're already two pages ahead of that

In hindsight that was hilarious and stupid but I'm happy it happened

A vote from an outside source has been added: Teleporting Leech Neinzul Combat Carrier

A vote from an outside source has been added: Neinzul Combat Carrier Spire Maw

http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=51851 vote you a bad words

http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=51851 vote you a bad words

A vote from an outside source has been added: The shuttle is cute, you should use it (Lightning Shuttle) The chainsaw ship, clearly (Viral Shredder)

A vote from an outside source has been added: Autocannon Minipods Autocannon Minipods

A vote from an outside source has been added: Combat Carrier Viral Shredder

A vote from an outside source has been added: Spire Maw Viral Shredder

Starring Harudoku as Sam Raimi and Integrity as Bruce Campbell Welcome to Haru and Integrity Play AI War: Fleet Command! AI War: Fleet Command is a wonderful game brought to you by Arcen Games, a wonderful (and tiny) studio that's spent the better part of the last five years, producing no less than SIX content expansions and many patches to fix bugs, improve and streamline the general play, and generally make the user experience as friendly as possible while ensuring the game has some wonderful tactical depth. The flagship (heh) game in question is sort of a hybrid of a space RTS and a 4x game, aptly described by one reviewer as "Sins of a Solar Empire meets Supreme Commander meets simply nothing else". One of the many twists the game offers is that the players, representing the remaining human factions after a pair of rogue AI cores nearly destroyed the entire human race, cannot ever fight each other; the entire game is focused on the delicate balance of humankind desperately attempting to re-grab the reins of power from its AI overlords without being noticed. The AI represents effectively infinite resources, you see, but in its human-programmed arrogance, doesn't believe you enough of a threat to take it down... so instead of massing up an army bigger than the AI can fight off, your goal is to remain unknown and unnoticed until you're ready to alpha strike the AI homeworlds and deliver a crushing blow before they can destroy you. Integrity and I will be switching off styles, in some posts representing a cool, analytical technical readout of the situation and in others representing the continuing flavor and story, the human struggles in the world dominated by AI. We'll do our best to make it obvious which is which; the descriptive poster of the update will focus on keeping the readers up to speed with what's actually happening, and the other will focus on being entertaining. Now, we get to the interactive bit. Here, we have a map of the available starting planets: Each player must choose a starting planet, and we need YOUR help! Each planet comes equipped with the same furnishings... but they also all come with bonus ships. Please vote for which ships, among the following, you'd like to see us use! [spoiler=Voting is closed, but for posterity's sake] Teleporting Leech Teleporting Leeches use a special mechanic known as 'reclamation'; in short, any ship they damage (for over 50% of its health) will be converted into an allied ship on death. Consequently, more powerful ships and bigger starships are immune to these units' damage types, but on the plus side, they can teleport instantaneously and are also shaped like teeth, which I think is a point in their favor. Spire Tractor Platform Using an array of powerful tractor beams, these ships are what we know now as the scourge of anyone using Spire Stealth Battleships (which, for some inexplicable reason, are not immune to tractor beams). You can do some tricky things with them, like pulling entire sections of the enemy army away from objectives to protect, but mostly you'll just mass them up for chaff for your more important ships. Zenith Viral Shredders What do you get when you cross a chainsaw with self-replicating nanomachines? Well, in this case, you get these wonderful things. While they're unable to attack many ship types (remember where I said 'chainsaw'? Yeah, I meant that they're literally melee ships, attacking by crashing into the enemy), they actually self-replicate, creating duplicates of themselves like a weird cross between the Zerg Swarm and the 'grey goo' that so many sci-fi novels are obsessed with. I'd like to repeat that first part, though: They're literally a cross between a chainsaw and self-replicating nanomachines. Seriously. Come on, guys. <Sweet Guitar Riff> Autocannon Minipod These ships are, put bluntly, pretty much chaff, but they have a really cool name and weapon type and you can make a load of them for very, very cheap. Lightning Torpedo Cheater Someone, at some point asked the question "Hey, what if AI fleet ship swarms were just useless? Why don't we introduce a new ship type to completely invalidate them, and find out?" Then, they forgot to remove it for the public release, and the fans fell in love so that they could not remove it. These things are monstrous and amazing, but also holy shit they completely invalidate fleet ships. They shoot miniature lightning torpedoes that don't lose damage even though they hit an area, making them perfect for blowing up huge swarms of, for instance, neinzul. Please note the previously-mentioned AI types. Spire Railcluster Much like the Lightning Torpedo Cheater Frigate, these are good against small ships, but unlike those, they don't completely invalidate most, if not all of them, and require some tactical use. They're basically large starships that mount many powerful (but very low-range) railguns and in practice they're quite fun to use. Protector Starship You know how in MMOs, there's a dedicated class for tanking when you go on big raids? Enter the Paladin of the game, the Protector Starship. They mount special modules that, instead of, for instance, taking hits for other ships, just go ahead and shoot down all attacks of certain weapon types before they can reach your fleet. They require some good tactical thinking, so consequently, they usually end up doing nothing. Spire Maw Have you ever wondered what would happen if you could make a space ship that eats other space ships? No? Wow, I must be weird. Well, still, that's what this is: Simply, it eats other ships, chews them up, and swallows them so it can eat more. I don't know if you knew this, but Fighter MK Is are actually a delicious part of this complete breakfast. Saboteur Unlike the Age of Empires II units of the same name, these ships make OTHER units suicidal. Using the same system as the reclamation system, a ship hit with this gets a fatal case of the space gonorrhoea, and explodes violently and disgustingly on death, damaging other nearby ships. <picture redacted> Electric Shuttle Using weak, but wide-areaed weapons, these shuttles do much like the Lightning Torpedo Frigates do, but unlike those, actually require you to put in the effort of flying closer to the enemy and putting yourself in harm's reach to manage it. Unfortunately, they can't get a full attack boost from things like friendly flagships, but they're still relatively potent. Unfortunately, this makes them rather boring. Gravity "Parrhesia's Favorite" Drain The ultimate in amazing gravity-altering technology, these powerful and deadly ships annihilate swathes of units singlehandedly. Also, the units they annihilate are mostly their own allies by the sheer unadulterated force of their own uselessness. By spending metal on these, you are actually dragging not only your whole army down, but also the power and, hell, dignity of your entire team. As a great man once said, "why the fuck am I stupid and useless for making these?" Anti-Armor What the fuck do you think they do? Zenith Paralyzer Much as the name implies, these units PARALYZE (see what they did there?) enemy units, rendering them unable to move or fire. Much like most utility units in this game, their roles in combat mostly come down to annoying a few people before keeling over from superior firepower and dying. This will become a theme, don't worry. Translocator Starship Someone looked at a group of AI fighters and said, "Hey, those are getting awfully close. Can you build a gun that does no damage, but makes sure that they're as far away from me as possible? They're really making the view from my penthouse apartment kind of trashy." And, with the power of bureaucracy, it was done: The Translocator Starship was born, and the galaxy was never the same as they kept pushing enemy ships out of the convenient range of all the other weapons, thus annoying everyone forever. But hey, the view is gorgeous now. Neinzul Combat Carrier NOW we're talking. This ship is a ship that produces more ships (which also happen to be living alien hivemind creatures, I guess?) to overwhelm and annihilate enemy units. A few of these (and the ship cap is low, so you'll only ever HAVE a few of these) and you can flood a planet in short-lived suicidal death machines hellbent on destroying everything in the short existential terror of their lives. Fuck yeah. Infiltrator Space Planes are wonderful, fast, swarming units (of which you can build many), capable of cloaking themselves, kiting enemy units, slipping past defenses, wreaking havoc, and generally just existing in huge enough swarms to pretty much annihilate anything short of a fortress or a golem, and even these can't handle their radar dampening range, which effectively says "You can't shoot me unless you can outspeed me". Of course, they also move too fast to be caught. Now, this would be nice, but we didn't roll Space Planes, and Infiltrators are basically the beta, shit versions of them. Advertisement: BECOME A HARUTOPIAN PILOT! (or someone else in this universe) The Empress Needs You! If you think you have the skill, the luck, the RAW FORCE OF WILL necessary to pilot one of our powerful ships (or be a researcher on one of the science labs we bring to our other planets, or just a normal peasant, or whatever else), leave a name and a preferred role IN THIS THREAD (with however much descriptive fluff as you'd like to type up) and we'll include YOU in our Let's Play! Join the Integristani Fleet today! Handy with a welder? Got good reflexes? Bring glory to yourself, your house, your Sultan, and your God! Enlist today! Not so handy with a welder? Hand-eye coordination more like hand-die coordination? Our cutting-edge science vessels are guaranteed to require no more than a grade school education, with openings for those with more talent! No army marches without support back home: be that support today!

You know what, why not Name: Sir Gravity Drain III Gender: don't care Class: which one is the shittest, perhaps you need a new class called "beta" just for Sir Gravity Drain III Other: Literally the best person in the whole world in all of the most useless categories, Sir Gravity Drain III was recruited in hopes that he could turn his prodigous talent towards the alien beatdown effort. Unfortunately, this will not be a test of his world-class underwater basketweaving skill, nor his strikingly powerful golf swing. And also, bolas are not on the list of X-COM approved weapons, leaving him rather useless. But hey, at least his inevitable chryssalid might be just as shit at fighting!

Name: Empress Harudoku V. Sanada, Esq. Class: Sniper Sex: Female Other: Deranged into thinking any weapon she carries is a vessel to her SUPERNATURAL LATENT MAGICAL ABILITIES, thus refuses to carry anything that isn't either laser, incendiary, or psionic. They just don't look magical enough otherwise. Also deranged into thinking she's the Empress of a fictional land known as Harutopia, and the physical embodiment of its Goddess.

yay for doubleposts

serenesforest.net moderator Integrity, everyone

Could be better. Could be worse.

I have some sort of HTC. I don't really know much else about it.

Heya, Em'rald. Been a while. How's it going?

Oh fine.

DECK THE HALLS WITH U235, FLALALALALAAA, LALA LA LA NO USE RUNNING, BOMB IS LIIIVE, FLALALALALAAAA, LALA LA LA WATCH THE WORLD MELT TO SLAG, FLALALA, LALALA, LA LA LA TORCHED THE EARTH, DON'T MEAN TO BRAAAG, FLALALALALA, LALA LA LA! edit before anyone comments FUCK YOUR METER AND RHYTHM SING IT BETTER that is all

Red is best color.

Cogito ergo nukes.