MARATHON II: The Alien cometh. A CVnU event, the OOC.

@mercy_: @strigidae_23@andres_knightfall As the CoE is being slow to respond, I'm going to start soon and will begin cutting out the real world cities for now. It'll be about five hours before I start up the OP.

@guardian_of_gravity: just bump them again

@strongarm: Done.

OP's up, action is currently in space until further notice, at which point some ships will break through the blockade and land.

Good Luck!

I may make threads for some of the cities I've made up for the sole purpose of blowing up in this thread with the force of a thousand Michael Bays...

...if I don't feel laaaaazy.

@maya_lopez: I'd appreciate it if you'd join or read, but a good luck works too. :B

@guardian_of_gravity: You can destroy the Nation of New Gods (Kalli) It's in Australia. If I do join, it'll just be for the space battle.

@maya_lopez: Oh thank you.

Now to get my Bay face on...

*Puts on bayface*

Wait...this looks stupid...

*Takes off Bayface*.

Just to let you know, the thingy is starting.

Awesome

@_golem_: Nice.

@_golem_: If you look closely, some of his missiles are getting shot into the ground. :P

That intro was pretty BA by the way LJ/GoG/Vracky

@kayle_rez: Thank you.

KK I'm planning on to post, but only a decent sized Cerb forces in the ground and one uber,uber,uber military ship in space to make up for PK glass ships and add some kills to the Cerb list.

I'm going to post as Madison when I get back from work

Until then I'll be browsing the webs and trying out the DuckTales remastered game I just bought. Why?

That's why.

So who wanted to post next?

Me, I'm working up a post so Cara can interact with Androm
(So how powerful are the Hiearchy ships because I'm sending in two jugg Cerb ships that have three layers of over shields each with double digit gigaton strength)

@_cerberus_: Varies, generally so much better than Peacekeeper ships that even the best ships short of super prototypes like the Churchill can only win against a vessel of the equivalent tonnage with a three to one numerical advantage at least.

Of course Peacekeeper ships are glass cannons and kind of suck and the good ships are rare.

@guardian_of_gravity: Can I say that the Cerb jugg ships easily tanked any attacks that the "regular" Hiearchy ships threw at them (The Cerb ships then fall back behind PK ships while taking pot shots)

@_cerberus_: Sure, not all ships are equal. This is a confederation of indoctrinated, paid off, recruited, converted, or conquered alien races with the common goal of wiping out humanity and near-human races from the multiverse rather than a uniform polity after all.

@guardian_of_gravity: Can I mention Cerberus won the battle on Mars and established a colony prior to the invasion?

@_cerberus_: Yeah I already said the PKs pretty much lost.

@guardian_of_gravity: okay just making sure, anything essential I should now about Hiearchy combat abilities before I post?

@_cerberus_: Nothing not already covered in their breakdowns in the prelude to war blogposts.

@guardian_of_gravity: Okay I'm making the post as of now

@_cerberus_: Goodie.

Is this battle taking place across the galaxy as well?

posted, kinda short :P

@_cerberus_: Not every post has to be a novel to be good :)

pics help a lot tho xD

@guardian_of_gravity: Just a doubt. Can Dell be at the fleet?

+10 Awesome points for using a City of Heroes pic of the Rikti.

@alurvelve: @dell_conagher: Sure! And CoH going away made me sad.

@guardian_of_gravity: I miss mowing down anything and everything with my Dark Melee / Shield scrapper.

@alurvelve: Still, got a lot of promising fanmade spiritual successor projects out there. So one can hope.

I really should try joining at least one of them.

@guardian_of_gravity: As much as I would love for one of them to have success. I believe it will end up being similar to star wars galaxies Emu project. A lost cause and what IS done, is a shell of its former self.

When it boils down to it. What made CoX such a great game was not just its amazing character creation, but the community. By far the BEST online community I have ever been a part of.

@alurvelve: And they certainly are a very stubborn bunch. They've never given up on either trying to get someone to buy CoX or remake it.

@guardian_of_gravity: Well that game was a part of many peoples lives for almost a decade. People have met some of their best friends, wives, husbands, etc. Can't say I blame them. Passion is passion. No matter if it is literature, games, music, politics, religion, sports. You name it. We will always have people who fight for what they believe in.

@alurvelve: When you compare it to say Star Wars galaxy, on one hand you had CoX which had no major issues and had a very steady, very reliable player base, just with a model it's parent company didn't understand. On the other hand you had a game which was already slowly dying and by the time the news hit it was a shell of it's former self.

Now I honestly believe that if NCsoft cared enough to advertise CoX when Superheroes became huge with Batman begins and huger still with the dark knight and the start of the MCU it would have been more than big enough for NCsoft to never dare shutting it down. But I always got the vibe of NCsoft being at best indifferent and at worst actively malignant towards CoX.

@guardian_of_gravity: SWG even Pre-CU was a broken game. People just remember the good nostalgia things and believe the game was all roses and butterflies. While that was far from the truth. Everything before the NGE had more bugs, and was just one giant grind fest to try and unlock Jedi. There was no content before that and people seem to have forgotten that. Don't get me wrong I played SWG and it was my first mmo, but that game had far to many flaws and that's why it got remolded over, and over, and over and failed.

CoX like you mentioned did not have the advertisement it deserved. The games engine was also very dated for today's market. However the game was still making money when NCsoft made their announcement and dropped the ball. As a company they wanted to put their focus on their Eastern market. Which was the deciding factor to closing CoX. NC was not selling and didn't seriously consider selling the franchise. Which is sad because that game had so much potential. The Devs had numerous other story arcs waiting to be pushed out. Including space content that we now will never get to see.

All boils down to money and CoX while it was making money, was not making enough money to warrant them keeping it open.

@alurvelve: True, it's honestly a damn shame given the surprising quality of CoX's setting that the I.P is being sat on.

@guardian_of_gravity: CoH 2 was even copy righted, which gave people some hope that maybe they were working on a new version of the game with an updated engine. Sadly that was not the case. They just didn't want someone stealing their thunder.

The setting made me enjoy CoX. Setting is the main reason I could not get into Champions online. I felt their world, characters, and stories very bland. Once upon a time I toyed with the idea of trying to create a rpg setting here on the Vine based on CoX. I had written up examples of all the zones/areas, major characters, organizations and a generalized timeline of important events up to that point. But it ended up being one of my many projects I sat on.

@alurvelve: Freedom Force (an amazing superhero tactical RPG) and City of Heroes are my primary influences for the part of my works built around Tombstone and the Ant, with Exemplaria being a bit of a loveletter to Paragon city.

@guardian_of_gravity: Lord Recluse and the Arachnos were awesome villains and I loved the Rikti invasion stuff.

I created a Statesman account so he could not be 'god-modded' and killed off. Much like we saw major comic characters in the old Prime stuff. Lady T had made a Sister Pshyche account, Paragon, ReEnforcer, and Nobody all had accounts for a major character as well. To use as plot motivators where/when needed. Was going to implement a character creation system similar to creating a character from the game. Primary power set, secondary set, then power pools.

@alurvelve: Well, I do have expies of CoH and Rreedom force characters around, although Ant and Tombstone are massively divergent from the originals.

Arachnos, along with 40k's Chaos and C&C's brotherhood of nod, are also primary inspirations for the Black hand, the primary antagonists of my work as a whole.

Rikti expies are also part of the Hierarchy featured in this event.

@guardian_of_gravity: Time for me to get to bed. Was nice chatting with you and best of luck on the rpg. :)