Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Tripod Preview

Here's a preview of the new Tripod Design for the Scrin. It may at first not seem that cool, but if you give it all of the gifts it could possibly get then it's a different story.

Annihilator Tripod -

1 Tripod
Cost : 3300/33s
Weapons : Plasma Cannons X 3, EMP Defenses

Plasma Cannons -
Type : Plasma
Range : 300
Targets : Air and Ground
Reload : 2s-3s
Clip : 3
Fire Rate : .5s
Damage : 650
Chance to miss : 8
Splash radius : 5

Q-35 Modulated Plasma Cannons (gift) -
Type : Plasma
Range : 350
Targets : Air and Ground
Reload : 2.25s
Clip : 3
Fire Rate : .5s
Damage : 700
Chance to miss : Always Hits
Splash radius : 5

EMP Defenses -
Type : EMP
Range : 50
Targets : Ground Only
Reload : 8s
Clip : 1
Fire Rate : .01s
Damage : 0 / EMP shutdown for 5 seconds
Chace to miss : Always Hits


Background :

The Annihilator Tripod first saw use about 500 years before the Scrin ran across the Invid in another dimension. The Scrin had had a relatively peaceful period for about 1000 years seeding and destroying worlds with little to no resistance. This all abruptly changed when they came across a world much like Earth. The spread of Tiberium on the planet had slowed to a crawl and was activly starting to regress in many areas and from a distance the Scrin could not tell why. The Scrin decided to error on the side of caution and called upon the most warmongering and successful queen to date, "The Reaper" and dispatched their forces to the planet 15 years ahead of schedule.

What the Reaper found was a planet already inhabited by a bipedal humanoid creature with an advanced civilization. They had come across creatures like this before but most of those encounters had lead to nothing as the Tiberium had done its job in utterly destroying those creatures before the Scrin even reached the planet. Here however this advanced civilization, while not as advanced as the Scrin themselves were, had actually discovered a way to combat the Tiberium and were going about harvesting it and using it for their own purposes! The Tiberium that was to have destroyed them instead gave them access to a vast, if unstable, source of power that they used to leap forward technologically.

The Reaper invaded with its forces but soon found out why the Scins Sensors did not detect these creatures. The planets atmosphere was prone to severe Ion Storms which caused long range sensors to simply be inaccurate and unreliable. After landing the Reaper had trouble communicating with the Scrin Queen Collective and was on it's own. These storms also caused problems with the Scrin Aircraft in use at the time as they were not designed to deal with the Ion Storm and would crash after taking massive amounts of damage trying to fly through them.

At first the Scrin had the element of surprise and was very successful at disrupting the inhabitants forces and mining operations. However it did not take long for the true owners of the planet to regroup and start counter-offensive maneuvers. With the lack of airpower and the most powerful land unit at their disposal being the Devourer Tank the Scrin soon had taken heavy losses and were being pushed back. The Reaper had to move fast and using the spires that they had built and the tiberium they had managed to gather during this war to come up with a solution. After much deliberation the Reaper designed the most powerful land unit that the Scrin had ever used, the Annihilator Tripod. This unit was able to move around the terrain like infantry, allowing it to climb over areas that a hover tank could not go. It also had powerful plasma cannons to deal with enemy fortifications and an emergency EMP field that it could generate to disable enemy mines and traps. It proved to be a highly effective unit but was only enough to cause a stalemate with the force as the Reaper still did not have an effective way to deploy these monsters.

However help would be coming for the Reaper in the form of the Traveler. When the Scrin Queen collective did not receive word from the Reaper and its assault force they dispached their fastest and most knowledgeable queen in terms of forms of maneuvering through the different dimensions that the Scrin knew about. The Traveler decided that a worm hole would be the quickest way to find out what was going on on the planet and went through with a small recon force.

What the Traveler found amazed it. In the first time of all of the history of the Scrin they were losing a planet to it's original inhabitants. The Traveler quickly met up with the Reaper and together they worked on a way to deal with these people. The solution turned out to be a very simple and elegant one, the Blink Drive. With this addition the Annihilator was able to be teleported around the world very quickly, bypassing enemy fortifications and hitting their supply lines and general populace. Soon after the Travelers arrival the original inhibitors were wiped out and the planet was taken under the control of the Scrin. Using the Travelers Wormhole Technique they were able to continue normal harvesting operations and soon that planet was a dead rock floating in space like the thousands that had come before it.

The Scrin never forgot the lessons of that world though. They started developing technology that allowed their aircraft to not only survive those powerful Ion Storms, but also gain regenerative abilities from them and even create their own artificial storms for additional protection inside a planets atmosphere. They also found that the original design of the blink drive, while highly effective, took too much power from the unit. They remodeled the Annihilator with a modualer system allowing Queens the ability to modify their tripods to whatever function they wanted to focus on. This included taking the blink drive out and replacing it with a weaker, more instantaneous drive that is still in use today.


Gifts : The Annihilator Tripod can have the following gifts applied to it.

Armor of the Reaper :
- Personal Shield
- Living Armor (Regenerates HP)
- Hardened Carapace (HP increases by 20%)

Weapons of the Reaper :
- Q35 Modulation (More consistent and farther firing plasma weapons)

Lesser Gift of the Traveler :
- 50% movement speed increase (due to the design of the Tripod it moves like infantry)

Greater Gift of the Traveler :
- Blink Engines (short range teleportation)

Echo of the Vehicle :
- Tripod will spawn an additional "Echo" version of itself when built. This Echo will not have access to any upgrades from any other gifts.

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