Wings Over the Pyre

Current Mood: predatory
Current Music: Wine, Woman, and Song - Around My Cabin Door - Our King (Squid's Redoubt)

After a rousing evening of running Canthan New Year missions with Kay and getting shot in the face in Call of Duty 4 with point5b, I decided to actually give in to my urges toward megalomania and hunger for destruction, and pick up where I left off in my last game of Sins of a Solar Empire. Luckily, I was bright enough to save it and the save game is still compatible with the latest patch, so in a brilliant fit of insight and genius, I just loaded it up and felt the command chair settle in around me.

I think my summary of the Advent, the faction I’m currently playing, to point5b was, “Imagine a race made up entirely of obsessive-compulsive psionic hive-minded Communist 12-year-old girls. Now put me in their overmind.” As a hint, this is what the Sins site itself says about the reaction of TEC (the ostensibly “normal human faction”) to discovering the progenitors of the Advent:

Shocking acts of deviancy, at every level of society, violated the venerable taboos common to all the Trader Worlds. Sinful cerebral integration technologies, unrestricted biological experimentation, strange forms of collectivism, and the wholesale usage of countless neurochemicals were but a few of the transgressions.

The voices for all the ships sound like petulant pre-teens on a bender and their fleets and defense forces lean heavily on fighter operations. Of course I’m having an absolute blast playing them.

This is a Deliverance Engine. It takes 18 Tactical Slots in planetary orbit to construct (by way of comparison, a big space laser gun takes one slot and a hangar for three bomber squadrons takes six.). What it does is act like a giant space mind control cannon that, when pointed at any planet in a solar system and charged up with antimatter and the trigger pulled, fires a big pulse of psychic energy at the target that temporarily makes them all mentally aligned to the Advent and gives any ships in combat in the system of the same faction as the firer a massive boost in power and morale.

It’s an Orbital Mind Control Satellite.

I fired it at my enemy’s homeworld. While my fleet was currently bombarding it to kill and enslave his population.

This is what it looked like:

You can’t see all my fleet, as it is arrayed all around the planet, the elements which can bombard doing so and the rest on the lookout for targets, but this is right after the Deliverance Engine gave everyone on the surface a bit of attitude adjustment. I now own this planet. I still need to hunt down the remnant of his colony worlds and destroy the pirate base system which is somewhere on the map, but I all but have this one in the bag.

Man, this is fun.