In this post, will show two of the three main factions of the game, Humans and the X'or...
Humans
War has been part of Mankind for ages. Our history has been but a succession of conflicts. How could we have been simultaneously looking for ever more power and for ever more well-being just can’t be understood. Many of us stopped believing, and more than one prophesized the end of our world.
And then we discovered how to reach the stars. While contemplating the infinite reaches of space, we understood our fate had just changed forever. It was a challenge only a group of united people could overcome. Conflicts over food, religion, raw materials or even power ended. Mankind was finally as one, and our imagination knew no boundaries. We built spacecraft we would never have dreamed possible. We were finally able to travel beyond the limits of the solar system, exploring and colonizing far and unknown worlds.
But peace, indeed, would not last forever. Soon, greed ate away at the dream of a united future. Alien planets, with unknown bounties aplenty, rekindled our race’s worst instincts.
What started as a dream for many was crushed by a few. Earth declared war on the separatist colonies and a new chapter of our history was written with the blood of Man.
In the end, the colonies were brought to their knees by the new technologies that made the Earth intervention fleet so powerful. But that victory didn’t come without a heavy price tag for Earth. The war that raged between brothers of the same race drew the attention of another race, much more powerful than ours. That race allied with Earth’s government and put an end to the troubles in the colonies. To win the war, Earth’s government sealed an alliance without questioning the benevolence of the aliens, who so generously offered to share their knowledge with us and promised the greatest of futures together. Had we been able to learn from our own History, we would have been more careful. Soon, it was humanity that faced an uncertain future…
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Ship designs
Human ships tend to be wider than they are tall to accommodate more colonization modules. This, however, makes them more vulnerable to attack from the top and bottom sides, as they provide a very “fat” target. Their ships have strong defenses but lack maneuverability. Human weaponry tends towards projectile weapons. Human captains tend to prefer fighting at long range, launching a mix torpedo volleys and particles.
Characteristics
The humans that have been brought to this sector of space are fighting for their survival and yet not all of them agree on how the future of mankind should be. There are constant tensions between the survivors. Humans get a natural race bonus on their trade skills and are average in most other skills.
X’or
Greed. Power. Hate. Some people are guided by their emotions, some civilizations are destroyed by their passions. The X’or will never share such a fate. Their single and only goal is integration, the expansion of their species. Gathering all the data, all the technologies, they implement them in their cities and in their fleets, they improve their worlds and universe. They develop new processes to improve themselves, and they integrate it in each of their drones and spaceships as a means of strengthening the unity, the nucleus, the Core…
The age before the Core belongs to the ancient past, to races long since forgotten. Nobody knows if the first beings developed by themselves or if they were experiences from other people, trying to create intelligent machines.
The past and the origins of the X’or are lost in the sands of time.
One thing is certain, though: since the appearance of the Core, machines became real, living entities. Through the Core, the X’or gave their life a meaning and they started to multiply. They were only a few, without a goal, without a frame; but the Core gave them what Nature didn’t: evolution. As they are not plagued with the problems biological races face, such as wars and diseases, they became, in a very short lapse of time, the equals of civilizations that had been evolving for millennia.
Because they have no biological needs and they can survive in the most extreme conditions, the X’or colonized planets no biological being would ever dream of colonizing. Instead of trying to compete with other races, the X’or avoid them and only observe them silently, trying to understand their technologies. Since their territories hold raw materials with very low yield and they have such a major technological advantage, the X’or don’t really fear being attacked by the other races.
In their never-ending pursuit of knowledge, they discovered forgotten technologies of a long passed civilization in some random ruins. Since then, they explore the galaxy looking for other artifacts from that race, which, much like the X’or, was mostly interested in knowledge. While searching for more clues, they encountered another race of old. A race older than the Core itself. A race that doesn’t hesitate to exterminate other life forms to acquire knowledge.
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Ship designs
The ships of the X’or are assembled by combining ring-like structures with insect-like spikes, giving them medium attack and defense abilities and average maneuverability. The X’or prefer lasers over particle weapons and try to evade their enemies in battle with complex maneuvers.
Racial Characteristcs
The X’or are a robot race with a central hive mind. The resulting efficiency gives them a very high production rate. As there is no individual in the X’or collective, the race lacks overall creativity. They have slow research and very weak diplomatic skills. The X’or get natural race bonuses on mining and production and penalties on research and diplomacy.
