>>358723
>tl;dr quit your whining and let the astranians have their full turn.

Hey, there's no need to be an asshole. LW's turn has definitely been longer than the other two. By both updates and RL time.

>I mean, the whole skirmish seemed like an giant clusterfuck and not something any trained army would do. They jumped directly into an enemy formation, vastly outnumbered. That's pretty fucking stupid.
It is easy to feel invincible when you can both teleport and respawn. Of course, the Astranians have much more limited resources here, but careless habits die hard.

>>358725
>If anything strains the link, it's the body that'll lose out every time.
That seems rather at odds with the notion that they're an under rather than an overmind. (But should we take this to WotU dis?)

>>358730
I figure the distinction has more to do with the structure of it. The fact that it's not just one big mind, but a soup of individuals.

course that all changes if you kill a FUCKLOAD, way more then there are in this quest. like, several planet's worth. then it turns into a overmind and uses rage mode. which most likely involves throwing planets around. since with just a single planet of them they could change the orbit of their homeworld.
the effect would be like all of the scellor in the universe looking at a single location and going "tonight, you"

>>358731
The distinction is relatively subtle. The difference between suggesting and commanding. An overmind is normally active, the Undermind is normally passive. In a military metaphor, you could say it's like the difference between a bunker and a tank.

>>358735
You'd have to kill more than half of all scellor alive, round abouts, and only after already killing enough fast enough to cancel out how many new scellor are being born.

Scellor biotech is principally superior for farming and life support. They have fantastic medicine, no sense of personal space, and access to scifi architecture technology. They are very expansionist when it comes to life-supporting planets. Under ideal conditions, without special reason to pop kids out super fast, every scellor female alive produces two children every year, which evens to 1 child every year for every individual. Around 1 in 30 scellor are sentient; non-sentient drones usually live around 30 years, and scellor start having kids at around age 6.

In their home setting, liveable worlds are common, and there are ridiculous ancient-advanced-technology whatsits like ringworlds and dyson spheres littering the galaxy. Terraforming is relatively simple, if slow, and FTL travel brings you from one star system to a neighboring one in a matter of hours, if you've got the money for a decent engine. Scellor have been spacefarers for hundreds of years. The only limits on their expansion are how much psykonium they can find (they only need more to increase their population, what they already have sustains them indefinitely), how many worlds other people let them colonize, and how many of them get killed by the people who aren't letting them colonize worlds.

Are you a bad enough dude to kill half of the scellor?

>>358739
>Under ideal conditions, without special reason to pop kids out super fast, every scellor female alive produces two children every year, which evens to 1 child every year for every individual.
>Scellor population doubles yearly
Fuck a duck! 'Expansionist' hardly even covers it.

>>358739
I want to see such a bad enough dude. Kinda.

>>358740

That'd be 2 children per female. 1 doesn't double. Anyway if skellor have too many kids w/out psykonium, the kids just die.

>>358750
Say there are 10,000 scellor. 5,000 women. In a year, the women pop out 2 babies each. At the end of that year there are 10,000 adult scellor and 10,000 baby scellor.

So yeah, it doubles every year. I'm wondering how exactly they deal with that sort of population growth.

ON THE OTHER HAND it takes more than one year for a scellor to start popping out babies, so... not quite double every year. I guess it's more complicated than that.

It sounds like psykonium is the limiter, and the reason the entire galaxy isn't awash in Scellor.

god help everyone if they find a way to manufacture it.

>>358751
You're forgetting the death rate, too. (And since we're talking bodies here, the fact psychic patterns can survive doesn't matter, except that it might make them less careful at keeping said death rate down.)

They are still outdone by mice for raw growth rate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fancy_mouse#Breeding
...but those kind of have population booms and busts with food supply. And get eaten. A lot.

There is the question of what the growth rate of psychic patterns is. We known it's not hard-linked to body-population growth rate because Maolla has previous lives and had to wait to be born after chargen, i.e. a dying body doesn't mean a dying pattern and a new body sometimes re-uses an old pattern rather than creating a new one.

>>358763
they are extremely un-careful. they use the super experimental stuff.

>>358763
Wait, so psychic patterns is what uses up the psychic rock stuff and not the bodies?

>>358767
the bodies use it. they recycle the bodies after death. and it doesn't get used up. recycling gets it all back out.

So apparently the Scellor were doomed to fail from the start? The Astranians were better off in psychic skill, technology, mobility, and preparation time.

Why bother having them as a fucking choice then if they were never a contender? This may as well be Tozol vs Astranians quest. Except now the Astranians can just rush the tozols with their bullshit weaponry; who gives a shit about subdermal plating if rayguns just vaporize flesh? This isn't a contest anymore.

I also think it's complete bullshit that all the sabotage that went on during the scellor turn had an actual effect, then we were prohibited from doing anything like that anymore. Why legitimize it while at the same time preventing it from happening again? That's just fucking playing favorites.

OH YEAH AND HOW ABOUT ALL THE FUCKING RAILROADING HUH

>>359053

U just mad cause the furries are winning

>>359055
no cause furries are OP

Nerf the furries or we quit the Internets you!

>>359053
The scellor were not doomed to fail, they /completely failed/ in their first chapter and got NOTHING done.

The Astranians are the underdogs in this and it's not like any scellor died before anyone gets too much in a huff.

>>359058
>And it's not like any scellor died

Huh. I guess they can survive being hacked apart without needing to respawn.

>>359058
We didn't get a chance to DO anything! We said to do x, y, and z, and then went on the psychic voyage, after that the turn ended. No progress report on anything. The psychic voyage was sabotaged heavily and we had no fucking idea what we were supposed to be even doing through most of it. If the fucking bat saw the scellors' location through the psychic attack that's just bullshit because it breaks the rules that we were told. She didn't do ANYTHING during the attack but smack our greenie in the face. She didn't get any psychic information about our location according to the rules we were told and it's patently ridiculous that scellor would be that ignorant about the danger. If LW claims that she got information through that, he's FUCKING CHEATING.

Don't fucking give me that bullshit about Astranians being the underdogs. They have every fucking advantage over the scellor right now but numbers. Information, technology, psychic warfare, position, resources, time. And they always had those advantages! This is a fucking set-up. So I say again, if we were never given a chance to win, why let us even play?

>>359061
>So I say again, if we were never given a chance to win, why let us even play?

I fully agree with this sentiment.

>>359060
No, that's the thing, they just respawn, they aren't dead for good.

It's just a game.

>>359064
No, sadly it's a game between three factions with rabid fanboys.

>>359063
...Somewhere else entirely, out of the battle.

>>359065
Go tozols!

>>359064
People expect certain things from games. When those expectations are not fulfilled, of course they don't fucking like it.

Also what does "It's just a game" even mean? Does doing something that's designed to be enjoyable suddenly mean you can't get mad about what happens while doing it?

*takes pipe out of mouth* What you all don't realize is this is a rock paper scissors situation. Astranians toast Scellor with their beam weapons, fanatical bloodthirst and psychic blocking shields. Tozols ruin Astranians when their shield tech turns out to be the same as your average Displacer and in short, doesn't work at all. Then Scellor come in and the Tozols are all so naive and horny they get seduced right away turning the whole thing into a giant orgy.

>>359061

>. The psychic voyage was sabotaged heavily

The ONLY suggestion that was taken there that could remotely be considered 'sabotage' Ended up having no negative effect.

>If the fucking bat saw the scellors' location through the psychic attack that's just bullshit because it breaks the rules that we were told. She didn't do ANYTHING during the attack but smack our greenie in the face. She didn't get any psychic information about our location according to the rules we were told

You mean the 'remember, everything that happens is metaphorical!' rule? That we were explicitly told? And how part of the Scellor got cut off and left behind? And how she specifically mentioned that she lost a part of herself during the attack?

>and it's patently ridiculous that scellor would be that ignorant about the danger.

Because the Scellor totally don't have a culture that supports recklessness and disregard of consequences for actions.

>And they always had those advantages! This is a fucking set-up.

Yeah, it'd be almost like if the Tozzles were casually decimating astranian armored patrol units during their turn or something.

I'd like to answer a couple of issues, here.

> How did Ekia know where the scellor were?

She always knew. Leaving aside the question of how easy it is to spot giant metal ships leaking radiation lodged in the landscape, the scellor are, psychically, really obvious. Every one of them is constantly being fed with psychic energy from the rest of their species to the point of saturation, and feeding information, sensations and thoughts back the other way. Their natural modes of communication with each other are either telepathic messaging or psychically vibrating the air to make sound. Sentient scellor, who have more self-control (read: they have some self-control), can conceal themselves and their communication from casual detection, but drones, who have no mental restraint, cannot. The scellor could have landed anywhere on the planet and Ekia could probably point right at them, so long as they have a pile of drones around.

And this was always a thing! Even during the intro of the quest, when the characters were in the vastness of space, Ekia mentioned being able to feel them. And when Radde listed the reasons why he chose that landing space, concealment was not one of them; in fact, some of those reasons were formed on the assumption that the astranians would attack them there.

> Why did the ayaar attack, so dumb

It shouldn't be a spoiler, now that that section is over, the reveal that the ayaar intent was to cause confusion and chaos, then teleport in, grab a captive and leave. The scellor have effective and scary methods of getting information, and such a captive would be invaluable! But the attempt was always going to be very risky. In this case, the gamble failed.

It's psychological. Scellor, being "immortal" as they are, have a huge safety net under everything they do, most of the time. Almost all their aggressive expansionist policies and the ways their race operates are designed to make sure this continues to be the case. Combine this with the cumulative tedium of repeated living - a big part of why the scellor are such thrillhounds - and any scellor's natural inclination, when faced with a range of options, is to take the big risk with the big reward. Or even the big risk with the medium reward. They're just too used to the idea that, no matter what, it'll all be ok in the long run. High-class scellor, such as Radde and Piyerra and, indeed, the ayaar, are supposed to be above this sort of thing; but it remains a weakness, especially with spur-of-the-moment situations - such as when you're presented the chance to take a valuable captive and your best chance is right now, before the enemy has set themselves up properly. The ayaar leader made the call to take the risk, and dice came up low.

He was sort of crazy anyway.

>>359083
That... wasn't really handled as a hostage grab. They teleported in then just stood there and fought. If I were to have planned it, I'd have had two of the trio pop in near the front of the formation, calling all attention to them, then a few seconds later the third would pop in at the rear to grab someone who's unprotected. Then the first two would just teleport out.

Quick and clean... instead they just sortof stood around and took on vastly superior numbers without using teleport-evasion or gravity wells, which I would've been effective at disrupting the mass of the enemy. Or disarming them if used with enough fine control...

Also why didn't the surviving one use time travel to just replay the battle? Did they simply not have the ability? I'm a little uncertain how rewind works, to be honest. After the rewind, do replayed events affect the 'present', or are changed events limited to the area of effect of the rewind? So that it's like, in the 'present', the area seems to have been changed as if someone edited reality there? So it's not so much changing the past as it is recovering possible futures/present events in a specific location...? Or does it cause a time offset in that area, so that the past is effectively brought into the present to be revisited?

>>359089

None of the ayaar were powerful enough to use the time-rewind power. That's basically the "ultimate ability" of that psychic discipline, and only a few have it. In the scellor home setting, it's also illegal, by interstellar law. To answer your questions, though, it's less like time travel in actual fact and more like moving everything within a certain area back to the position it was before. The sun, for example, would stay where it was in the sky, not move backwards.

As for the grab, you need two ayaar together to teleport an unwilling target, or just a target that can't teleport themselves. The ayaar leader was supposed to be the distraction, which is why he teleported in first and started acting up as a big scary guy. There's also limitations to "chaining" teleports, you can't just go bamf-bamf-bamf. You need to either move away from where you teleported or wait out a "cooldown", of sorts.

What sort of craziness happens at the edge of the time thing's area of effect (like if somebody recently left the area)?

>>359083
actual dice? ugh, i hate actual dice.

>>359107
No, those dice were a metaphor.

>>359103
It's not a strict three-dimensional bubble; not only everything that is in the area, but WAS in the area is affected. In the specific case of something leaving the area, it disappears from where it is and returns to where it was. This does cause chaos, which is part of why it's illegal. Things which are directly on the border of the effect, in particular, are in extreme danger.

>In the scellor home setting, it's also illegal, by interstellar law.
Is there any way for them to even know that?

>>359137

Space police.

>>359143
Man those guys aren't any fun at all.

>>359147
fun is also illegal

Now everybody's finished rolling out the Jump To Conclusions mat over 'ZOMG y u scellor railroad?!', let's change tack:
>>/quest/386156
>they will go on to live a thousand lives, each as meaningless as the last. each scellor the witting and unwitting pawn of their precious hive mind [...] with all thier mindless obedience they remind me of you Tactica Command, and that troubles me, I would like you to think about what that means.
So Ekia seems to know about the bugs, and implies she intends to Do Something About That.

She's planning on replacing the Hivemind or become one of her own?
Cause that sounds like an insanely stupid but badass villainous plans I'd expect from the Astranians.

>>359155
I don't see what that has to do with the bugs. The hivemind she's referring to is the Undermind, meaning she doesn't actually understand how it works.

>>359173
indeed, scellor do not have a hivemind.

>>359173
She's using the Scellor, somewhat incorrectly, as an analogy for the bug's control of the Astranians. Attempting to get TacticaCommand to identify weaknesses in that command structure, as a precursor to attempting to turn it against the Astranian high command. Best logic to use to turn someone traitor is their own.

>>359169
>>359173
>>359178
>>359189
That is a good point. The Astranian culture doesn't leave room for the peculiar pseudo-socialistic-anarchistic-capitalistic-deistic-secularist mindset of the Scellor people.
They made the Undermind, it exists as a sort of spiritual 'organ' much like a second backup brain. Any attempt to mess with it is at best going to give all scellor a migraine, or worst case induce the Undermind to awaken fully into an individual being, inducing a Slaanesh-birthing Eye of Terror-class event.

>>359307
it being a single consciousness was what happened when it was first made. it moved their planet out of the way of a extinction event.
so when their civ was around.. looked like bronze~iron age they did that. they could move a planet. think about what would happen NOW if it went rage mode. it could probably crush stars into black holes.