Build-A-Base: Defenses

Phoenix Point
1

I’d like to suggest that there be some turrets and defenses, for our Phoenix bases, that we can customize: IE, by adding weapons that we find, to either stationary or mobile frames, structures, turrets, sentry defense-bots, wandering defense-bots, what have you.

I think it would be extremely cool and satisfying, to be able to go out and find weapons in the wilderness, and then bring them back to base, and incorporate a percentage of those weapons, into our base defenses.

This shouldn’t be impossible to design and to code in? Other than graphics, it would basically amount to a neutral/friendly “alien enemy”, like a crab-man, only it would be one that’s on our side.

For balance-reasons, these things should probably be TOUGH, but EXPENSIVE, and they should also probably be somewhat stupid, incapable of reacting very quickly to new challenges.

SOME level of AI would be nice, though—I mean, these things exist inside of a fairly futuristic world, based off of our modern world—so, it can probably be expected of the Phoenix Project, that they would have used competent programmers, to code their kill-bots, and such things.

Personally, I’d like to see a variety of specialized set-ups for these weapons-platforms, where we can use them to deal with the threats that our soldiers currently aren’t concentrating on. So, for example: if we’re using small teams of highly specialized commandoes, it would be nice to have the choice of spending a LOT of money, on a mass-assault deterrant (flamethrowers, grenade launchers, and massed heavy pistols, shotguns, and light rifles, for instance).

Or, maybe just a big dumb wall, lined with a score of pea-shooter light pistols, rigged up to a simple motion-detector, and a whole lotta ammo! Someone could just flip an emergency-switch, and VIOLA! meat-grinder city. You’d have to be really careful not to friendly-fire yourself, of course, but that would be a part of the challenge.

These kind of DUMB weapons platforms could be equipped with whatever you had to spare–flamethrowers would be nice, of course, or machine-guns, shotguns, what have you. The trade-offs are the expense, and the fact that these things are in no way as useful, or as accurate, as an actual trained soldier, with the same weapon. They JUST function as a stop-gap, to defend one relatively small section of a hallway. That can be a beautiful thing, but you’re still making tough choices, with a chunk of money.

If, on the other hand, we have a plethora of soldier-recruits, training in our bases, then defenses with superior AI, that can provide lots of cover and support, and medical assistance, would be lovely.

Little hunter-killer drones should be an option, as well. Either explodey drones, or ones rigged up with weapons. Ideally, these would probably perform better, if operated by highly trained soldiers, but there should also be AI options, as well.

“Melee” drones, turrets, and other defenses shouldn’t be ignored, either: These things may take power to run, but they never run out of ammunition, and that’s important! The enormous heavily-armored robot version of a Viking berserker ought to give any alien invasion pause.

Speaking of DUMB defenses: cameras and motion-detectors should of course be all over the place, but, those things can be limited, and they can also be destroyed.

Remote-controlled defenses is another option, from AI–rig a machine-gun or whatever to a camera, and put armor on all that, and you’ve got a limited-field, but respectable, defense-system that a soldier—or even a technician that’s been video-game trained—can sit and operate, from the comfort of a nicely-padded chair. If the poor guy has a heart-attack, or goes on vacation, or just really needs to refresh his beverage, then AI can always be a backup-option.

Other DUMB defenses could include things like electrified fields, laser-grids, land-mine and explosive-defenses, rigged floor and ceiling collapses, giant swishey death-pendulums (my favorite!), and whatever the imagination can conjure up.

One final suggestion for this massively TLDR post: Please consider that the Phoenix Project is NOT fighting other humans, and so, the really NASTY weapons: chemical, biological, nuclear, blinding weapons, sonic weapons, and other weapons that are illegal for use in human wars, those are a possibility, here. They’re ugly, but they work, and putting them to use, to preserve life as we know it, is a far nobler purpose than any other that they might be put to.

So, you could rig up a bunch of drones that fly around and blind the enemy with little cat-toy lasers, and turrets and drones that fire hypodermics full of powerful hallucenogens, nerve-toxins, fast-acting diseases, muscle-relaxers, tranquilizers, doses of radioactive elements, etc. It’s the fate of the world on the line, after all, so yes, things could get NASTY.

And, no base would ever be complete, without a self-destruct mechanism.

Great big guns—like the ones already pictured on turrets in the Phoenix Point: Access Granted, would of course be very nice to have, but I would love to have some more niche and circumstantial defenses, because of course, that would add a TON of “personal finger-printing” on my own experiences with the game.

Thanks for reading!

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Good idea for expansion or some big mod. But you know what? Using weapons which can easily harm human and leave area contaminated is little bit stupid to use in base defence in my opinion. :wink: And I’m not sure how would we manage all this defence when we manage building size objects construction not the turret or camera size objects. I don’t suppose it will be like Minecraft where you put squares everywhere and they have some function. :wink:

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Well, no reason why we couldn’t manage smaller objects? I mean, soldiers are smaller than buildings, yes? And we manage them, a LOT.

As far as easily harming humans, they would only do that, if you set them up really poorly, and then allowed your people to play around with them, in an irresponsible way. Just like guns. And, just like guns, if you keep people from playing around with them, and doing things that they shouldn’t, then they wouldn’t be any more dangerous than a loaded stapler.

On the other hand, guns in this game can already be dangerous–the possibility of friendly fire casualties already exists!

Just like the rest of the game, YOU have to be careful. When crab-men are around, you have to be careful not to get too close to them, and you have to be careful to manage them well, or else, you lose.

It’s the same with base-building: Don’t put the kindergarten or the kitchen right above the molten lava. De-activate traps, when you feel they’re not needed. But, bases need defending. There’s more than just an alien army out there. More than just three armies. There’s a whole entire alien ECOSYSTEM, trying to take over our world.

It’s insidious, it’s implacable, and it’s deadly. To combat that, weapons are needed, and these weapons are not toys. There’s always going to be an inherent danger—a Darwin awards—present, and ready and waiting.

You have to find a happy medium, with total freedom, combined with total vulnerability; on one side—and total paranoia, and living inside of a death-trap; on the other. It should be very possible to build something that is balanced, live-able, and comfortable. Somewhere that’s even a HOME for your people—and not just your hardened veteran soldiers, either, but for everyone in YOUR PERSONAL PHOENIX-PROJECT.

Including the scientist in the wheelchair. Including the grandmother who’s your lead technician. Including your janitors (Yes, the future apocalypse still needs janitors!). Including the next generation! Kitchens and kindergartens. Bedrooms, libraries, bars, arcades, theaters, and maybe even flower gardens. Home, food, family, and recreation.

Human places.

Places worth protecting, where people can live lives worth saving. (and yes, I do think that these are things that should be given at least some consideration, in the game, and in base-building, in particular. I’ll write a post on that, when I get around to it.)

And, no-one’s forcing you to build any of these things, in the first place. What’s key here is having options. Having choices, and the ability to further individualize your base, and your experience of the game. If you don’t want to use smaller traps, or whatever, then you shouldn’t be forced to. These are just tools, and you should be able to pick them up, and put them down, as YOU choose to.

I’m all for them, though!

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Oh my gooood… Are you a woman? (btw it’s not an offence) I suppose so. :wink: Ok let me answer some part of your post.

But we do it during the simple briefing or base inventory screen or during the mission. Building the base defence is not an instant thing you do while reloading your weapon. Or building such detailed maze as you wish can’t be done in screen consisting of few icons and list of items. :slight_smile:

If building structures will look similar to that of original X-COM (or even close to the most recent variations, buried in the ground or in alien spaceship), then you will start building a kindergarten in sector D5 and that would be all - except the time needed and workers to do that. You would not decide how many walls it will have, if there will be 5 or 8 cameras, maybe 4 turrets guarding kids and a bonus - suicidal tank full of chemical gas hidden in the closet in north-east corner of main room just in case the kids couldn’t make it out of their favourite structure. :wink:

Believe me you wouldn’t want to use such weapon in underground base. :wink: It is not a matter of not looking into the barrel. :slight_smile:

BTW. I admire your imagination. :wink:

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Thank you very much for your compliment!

And I understand your concern, but it just depends on how those things are to be used, Yokes. Of course you don’t use things like mustard-gas, or the Ebola virus, in an underground base.

There’s plenty of chemicals that can be turned to militant purposes, for example, though; and plenty of ways to use them, very very safely.

The same goes for nuclear and biological weapons. It just requires careful, responsible design.

For example, consider the umbrellas that spies used to use, for WW2 and cold-war assassinations, by converting the harmless-looking umbrella-design, into an air-gun that would fire tiny radioactive pellets into the legs of targets, from extremely close range—which would then cause the death of the target, from means that appeared to be perfectly “normal”, if completely hideous cancer, in a matter of weeks, or a few months.

This is a real-world example of a device that actually exists. People used it, on other people, and it was perfectly safe for the spies to use, because the radioactive pellets were so small—practically microscopic, as part of their design—and because they were housed inside of the lead-lined handles of the umbrella-guns, until fired.

And, for bio-weapons, these are the least predictable, and therefore the least safe of the three, but if you absolutely have to use them (like if your entire species, and world, is at direct and imminent risk of annihilation, by an alien force), then you design the bacteria, or the virus, or the parasite, protist, fungus, whatever–in such a way that humans are naturally immune, or heavily resistant to it–so that we can easily build up an immunity to it–while the Enemy is very much not, and then you make it so that it cannot exist outside of a living host, and/or, some other means of easy quarantine, and then, you make an anti-virus, vaccene, antigen, etc., just to be safe. And, you keep lots and lots of records on how it was designed, and how it is likely to mutate.

It’s still dangerous, yes, in theory, but biological weapons do have advantages: For one, they can be perfectly harmless, and even beneficial, to one organism, while being perfectly lethal, to another. They also spread, on their own; and they can disappear–go extinct–in a way that, potentially, won’t adversely affect the bio-sphere that they are introduced into, at all. No half-life, no toxic ground-water. Stuff like that.

And, this is not the original X-Com game. So, there’s no real way of knowing what we will or won’t get to do, in terms of design.

I’m hopeful that we might get something a little closer to the kind of building-design that goes on in a Sims game (or at least something closer to Dungeon Keeper, or Evil Genius), than the clunky base design of the early (and newer) X-Com games.

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Yes I understand your point but I’m afraid that developers don’t have time to implement such intricate forms of warfare.

And about biologic weapons. Remember that we will have to deal with fast mutating virus. We could harm it few times but after a while it could mutate biologic weapon against us. And I suppose that only Synedrion could prevent it from happening at least in a longer period of time.

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Just as far as AI, Phoenix already Hass access to a fairly advanced AI in the form of the Scarabs. Can’t remember which lore deals with it specifically, but that solves that problem. Heck, maybe badass turrets require a wrecked scarab (mitigates the pain of getting on blown up), or requires one to be on base for them to work (forces you to prioritize defense or offense for specific time frames).

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*Development on the Scarab began in 2025 with the objective of providing secure all-terrain transport for crews heading to remote Phoenix bases scattered around the world. The fuel cell powered vehicle would be fully automated with a contained atmosphere capable of accommodating eight personnel for a week without exposure to the outside. Radiation proofing and graphene mesh armour promised amazing levels of protection. The first units were produced in 2027, as Phoenix Command struggled to secure the secrecy and integrity of remaining bases after seizures by state actors in 2023, and the failed organisation wide activation of 2025. Due to the world crisis leading up to World War Three, only a small number were actually produced. In 2032 Scarabs were released to AI control to defend themselves, and as of March 2047 the whereabouts of most of them are still unknown.*

That is most of what we know about the Scarab at the moment.

source

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Thanks for tracking that down. I was feeling a bit too lazy for it, and that makes it much easier for OP and anyone else looking at the thread. I love this community.

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