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hymn: Thanks for the input. It's been a busy week, and my work hours are very irregular this week, but I will finish inputting the information and formatting the text this week. Your concerns are duly noted; what will be the headers for each post are currently footers: the edit reason. The text needs quite a bit of formatting to be more easily navigable, to be sure. An outline of the format will also be provided, as you suggest. Since I've already input quite a bit of the info, I'll probably finish what I started before I reorganize the text in the fashion you suggest. It may not be exactly as you describe, but the final version will be quite a bit more organized, to be sure. I suppose I should have done it up in Word or Pages first, and will take that under consideration when I begin reorganizing. For now, my intention is to just get the rest of the Class info input.
I should also have posted the following info about the classes, but basically Priestess and Artificer gather artifacts (but because it's Trem, all they have to do is kill enemies to get the items they need). Of the other classes, Nymph and Mer-centaur are the shape-changers: Nymph can become any of four types of "new" Alien, while Mer-Centaur can become any of four different forms: two of which are two "new" Alien classes, and two of which are "native" forms for this shape-shifter, namely Merman and Centaur. You'll see, as soon as I finish the layout above. Of the remaining two classes, Evolute and Drunk Monk, both are progressive classes, much like the current Aliens: as the player gets more kills, he can Advance to more-evolved/better/deadlier forms. It will all be based on gathering Bounty (which are basically just Evos). So, it's just Tremulous: Kill foes, get cool toys, kill more stuff more efficiently.
So two classes are Item-Gathering, two classes are Shape-Shifting, and two classes are Progressive or Evolutionary. The Unvanquished are kind of like Humans who have adopted Alien forms, methods and tactics to battle both the Humans and the Aliens. Since the backstory is very vague, it can be added that they are a new hybrid of the xenohumans who have long lived among alien species, and now seek to end the Human-Alien War, or to dominate the local volume of space where their Confederation has achieved a stronghold. I'm definitely open to ideas.
Yes, they are RPG-ish. However, given the current two Tremulous races, I felt a third form of Combat and Advancement was needed, to allow the Third Race to have a real unique flavor from the other two. As to magic in a scientific world: I don't believe the two are mutually exclusive; indeed, the more we know about science, the more there is to speculate about the magical things we can do with science, properly applied. Or as A.C. Clarke said, "Any Magic is simply Science sufficiently advanced.", e.g. Warhammer 40K, et al.
As to concept art, yes, it will be quite easy for an image-spammer like myself to find and post sufficient amounts of art links, and indeed, that will be a future addition to this thread, or possibly an art contest thread in this or another forum, in the near future. I already have some pretty clear ideas, but I wanted to provide just a smidgen of information, to whet players appetites.
The name, so far, is the Unvanquished, a tribute to some player-names from this very forum. As always, all ideas are freely-given, totally open-source and subject to change due to community input. Magical Ghost-Ninja Space-Pirate Mythological-Animal-People is just a personal riff and semi-private in-joke on all of the varieties of critters that have been proposed as a Possible Third Race, so I just combined them all into one nightmarish monstrosity. So many people had suggested "Pirates" or "Ninjas" or "Ghost Pirates" or "Space Ninjas" or "Minotaurs with Battle-axes" that I felt combining all of these aspects would be appropriately StarCraftian/Warhammer-ish/over-the-top/just-what-the-players-asked-for.
Thanks very much for all of your input so far. I'm looking forward to finishing the data input and reformatting the text this week, and I hope you'll stop by, as I very much value your input, and well-expressed ideas.
Cheers!
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seffy: Thanks. As a former PCXL reader and PC game magazine addict, I've read about four thousand game reviews for all kinds of games I've never played: RTS, RPG, console, racing, adventure, dungeon-crawling, etc. I've actually only played about twelve games: Unreal (and every mod ever made for it), Q2 for the PS1, Starsiege (for about a grand total of a day), Tribes (and every mod ever made for it), Tribes2 (for a grand total of about a week), Unreal Tournament (all the way through, plus I played a lot of modded UT), Q3a (all the way through, and halfway through again), TeamFortress 1.2 (for about a year, every single day), Daikatana (for one day, then traded it for Deus Ex), Deus Ex (all the way through, three-and-a-half times: Good, Bad, Ugly and speed run/Batman-style), RtCW (about half way through - then I found Tremulous), Halo (at somebody else's house, on their Xbox), Halo2 (ditto) and a few others, like Rune, Half-Life, TeamArena, etc. The only RPG I've ever sat through was DX.
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both: Thanks. I like shooters, 'cuz I can just get up and walk away. Killing NPC-rats for copper never drew me in, when I could just go play Tribes and blow shit up. But killing Dretches for Bounty, when the Dretches are players? Now that sounds like fun. Especially when the Dretches can evolve into Dragoons if I feed too much.
