User:Studenterhue/Martian

The Station Under the Martians

The tests were considerably less grandiose than the suggestions. In the first tests, there were no motherships or cruisers from which Martians could teleport onto the station, though there was one test where some of flying saucer (pictured above) was used, although it was not much more than a reskinned Space Pod with phasers and disappeared within 10 minutes. Instead, an Admin would simply spawn few Martians, detailed below, and a device that would convert people into Martians, also detailed below.

Conversion

To convert the humans they killed into fellow Martians, the Martians would place the corpses adjacent to this pink grody thing that looks like a fumarole. After a sort period of time, the gross clump would absorb the corpse and spit out a Martian of a random class.

The time requirement was only temporary, for there were explicit plans add a "biomatter" resource that would be replenished by corpses and consumed by new Martian spawns (and later other things), so that players had more agency over when they could get more Martians. Likewise, the random class selection was coded as quick convenient hack to facilitate testing; later on, players would get to choose.

Classes

All Martians had one hand slot, one ear slot, and one head slot for hats, which, just as it is now with the Martian "body type" available from Diplomat and Merchant spawns, looked quite ridiculous on them. Unlike those Martians, they could perfectly understand English. However, they still couldn't speak to other humans, because all their words went to a communal "telepathic hivemind" heard (?) by all Martians.

Each Martian also had two abilities:

• Teleport: Teleport to square of choice, regardless of any obstacles or solid objects in way.
• Psyblast: Inflict 20 BRAIN damage, stun target for about five seconds, and make them drop whatever items were holding.

There were three classes of Martians available:

• Warrior - Had the exciting prospect of not one, but two hand slots.
• Soldier - Had a "Psychokinetic Blaster" slot that did piddling BURN damage but could hit any tile of choice in the line of sight and recharged fairly quickly.
• Mutant - Had a Psychic Stare ability that could gib a target within seconds...if the target or Martian stayed within line of sight.

Does this sound like the same Martians available through Admin critterization shenanigans? Because it pretty much was.

There was also a Martian sapper class , though players could not become it through the converter, and it did not see much use. Based on the current unused NPC Martian sapper, it might have had (or was planned to have) the ability to plant bombs that could convert station turf to their Martain equivalents or spawned cute lil' Martians that beat the shit of humans.

Epilogue

Though the mode was warmly received by players during test rounds, coding the classes proved immensely difficult, particularly in the addition of new abilities. Rather than grapple with the alien, possibly extraterrestrial monstrosity that was critter code, the main coder behind it, Cirrial, decided to create his own class of mobs that would be easier to work with. The game mode has been abandoned since, and from this new class of mobs came the Flockmind.

Though the Martians managed to land a few of their troops on SS13, most of their forces were lost in transit. Supposedly, the Martians sent another warfleet, but it apparently took the wrong turn at a moon and, after a horrifying ordeal through a hyperspace lane, landed on a shitty desert planet being claimed by hairless apes in giant suits.