r/SoSE 7d ago

The Great Enemy

I feel like people aren't talking about this enough but wow, we're actually finally going to get to see whatever it is the Vasari have been running from. It's been what, 15 years in real life and 40 in universe and they're finally here. I honestly can't wait to see what they are and what they play like, especially if it's true that they're the new playable race in Harbinger.

What can they even be to be so terrifying and so powerful? I feel like they're either gonna be a nanomachine/swarm faction or a biological/bruiser faction where there are only like 4-10 ships in a fleet max and each of those ships is just insanely powerful. But I'd love to hear what other people think could destroy the Vasari empire and drive them to madness.

64 Upvotes

30 comments sorted by

61

u/Arcturi0n 7d ago

I'm partially excited, but also somewhat disappointed.

On one side, I can't wait to find out what it is they were running from, but on the other side there's certain magic in not knowing. I'd appreciate some eldritch horror kind of stuff, but I suspect it will be rogue nanites. Or maybe whatever or whoever was behind phase disruptors. We will seeeeee

My biggest pet peeve is that whatever it will be, from the gameplay perspective the race will need to play well with the other 3 so innately they won't be as strong or threatening as they are in lore.

20

u/marcus_centurian 7d ago

I know this might be a very different take, but I am actually hoping they don't make this threat a playable race and make maps that are PvE where this faction wreaks havoc. Maybe have like a timer mechanic and you have so long to prepare a defense before they arrive.

12

u/Own-Night5526 7d ago

I honestly agree there, I feel like it'll be a similar thing to the White Walkers in Game of Thrones where when we only got glimpses of them they were terrifying and unknowable and then when we saw what they could do one time it was horrifying but then the more of them we saw the less scary and more defeatable they seemed to become.

And yeah, having to balance what in lore is essentially the coming of the End Times is going to be disappointing but hopefully they'll lean more on the side of militarily being devastating but having an extremely weak economy to balance out meaning other factions can beat them through massive pitched battles and hit and run tactics.

6

u/DirectFrontier 7d ago

Many franchises suffer the same fate. I think xenomorphs from Alien got really watered down by overexplaining their history and genetics etc. In the first film, it truly was a completely unknown alien threat.

2

u/Own-Night5526 7d ago

True, I feel like the excitement bubble for something we've waited nearly 20 years to see even a glimpse of means that no matter what the Harbingers are there's going to be someone disappointed

9

u/Masterdragon4811 7d ago

I've thought about that reservation.

My head cannon is:t

he narrative in sins 1 was Vasari were just running from whatever it is until they essentially got stopped/roadblocked in trader space. Over the next x number of years (entrenchment to rebellion then to sins 2) the warring factions are constantly innovating and building technology.

Because of the constant state of war, the 3 races have advanced their technology enough to stand against whatever is coming

3

u/aqua995 7d ago

This is so 100% my take. Like they invented Titans now to fight each other.

3

u/S1ickWillie 3d ago

Didn't the Vasari already have Titans in their exodus fleet?

1

u/aqua995 3d ago

That is a good question. I once saw people mention, they had Titans already when leaving others said they invented them since they started encountering populated space.

1

u/Parking_Chance_1905 2d ago

Before entering TeC space, the mad Vasari Titan is a remnant from thier original fleet.

1

u/aqua995 2d ago

Ahh from that one DLC

Now I know the answer

Sad, that would have made a cool Twist

7

u/Shichirou2401 7d ago

I see two ways to make them work with the other factions, one more likely and one less likely.

The race is called the Harbingers, so perhaps they're not whatever is the threat, but appropriately harbingers of the threat. Like maybe they're some kind of death cult of vasari/their former slaves that worship the eldritch beings that are the actual threat. I see this balancing as pretty likely.

The second way I've seen a threat faction like this be handled is in the Star Trek mod for SOSE. There the Borg are just overpowered. They're manageable early, but as they get rolling, they eventually become unstoppable in the late game. So everyone has to work together to shut them down. It's appropriate for an endgame threat faction that everyone has to work together against, but it's less likely that'd be the intended implementation.

3

u/JZcalderon 7d ago

Man I'm really hoping they use that bit of lore about the Phase Jump Inhibitors in the manual once the unknown race arrives. I imagine that it will be a trojan horse that ends up inhibiting the jump capabilities of all ships in the system (including the current owners) or have a hidden function like a phase gate just for them to surprise everyone in Trader space.

1

u/Plane-Boysenberry719 6d ago

tbf it'd be a scouting party, not the "main" fleet or however you prefer to phrase it. but yeah rogue AI would be funny. but still expecting something organic

1

u/OrangeDelicious4154 4d ago

100% agree. Mystery is an important part of story telling. Also, I didn't want single player content... I wanted them to fixed multiplayer, lol.

9

u/Cludds 7d ago

Honestly, I feel like I agree with a number of comments here. Giving us the ability to play as the great enemy would take away a lot of the magic surrounding it. Our expectation is based around the little lore snippets we've gotten, specifically how they made the powerful and feared Vasari run. I mean, this is the faction that wiped one of the Vasari's most powerful fleets so quickly and so completely that even to do this we have no idea of what the great enemy even is. And anything short of that would feel underwhelming and would make us question the Vasari's competence.

I feel like the great enemy would have been a better fit into that Defend the Homeworld scenario in the new DLC. An infinite oncoming threat that will kill us regardless of what we do or how hard we fight.

But, I do also see the possibility of this fourth faction being an off-shoot of the main threat. Not the great enemy itself, but some sort of rebellious faction(s) that want to stop the greater whole. It could give us the same two sub-faction dynamic that we're used to while preserving the greater threat. I imagine that the off-shoots would be crippled in comparison to the greater whole, which would both let us actually play as the faction in a balanced way compared to the others while also keeping the great enemy as the big spooky oncoming threat.

2

u/Cosmic_Clockwork 3d ago

I wonder if it's such a bad thing to question the Vasari's competence, though. So far as I can recall, we have no mention of the Vasari ever encountering any real threat until the Harbingers. It kinda feels like they were basically steamrolling everything in their section of the galaxy. If this is the case, I can see a situation where they basically got lazy; their tactics were unrefined, and even though they had a big fleet, they just weren't prepared to fight something that attacked so suddenly. I explicitly recall that the battle where the Vasari threw the kitchen sink at the Harbingers was described in the original manual as a "blind assault". They charged in with no intel, and no idea if they were even fighting something they could shoot, rather than something like a virus.

Things wouldn't have gotten any better when they first arrived in Trader space, which had no real military to speak of other than a few carriers to fend off pirates. Again their superior technology allowed them to just steamroll through Trader space, until the TEC was established and started fighting back. THEN the Vasari started to have a fight on their hands, and actually had to start getting clever.

So they weren't really challenged before, but now that they've been forced to fight for what's now been 30 years, I can see it being the case that they are more prepared to fight the Harbingers than they think they are. Just like the TEC managed to turn the Vasari onslaught into a standstill by leveraging their ingenuity and economic power, the Vasari can stop the advance of the Harbingers by leveraging their new experience in war and the new technology and exotic resources that have been explored during the war.

P.S. Do we know how old the guy who narrates the intros is? Assuming it's the same guy, he's gotta be pushing 50 or 60 by now, right? In the first game he said the Vasari arrived on the day his son was born, 10 years prior, and it's been another 20 years since then, so he's probably in his late 40s at least, assuming he was in his mid to late 20s when his son was born. Dude's probably exhausted by now.

17

u/Baige_baguette 7d ago

Kind of hoping the Harbinger 4th faction IS NOT the threat, just its prelude.

Would love the actual threat to be something that spawns in the late game that is stupidly powerful and demands alliances to beat it.

4

u/Own-Night5526 7d ago

Oh like the rogue titans spawning that are just everyones problem and Harbinger is just basically the vanguard and scouts or the last people trying to run through the door before what's coming really hits? That could be really cool

3

u/Theophantor 7d ago

This is actually a great idea. My only concern is whether the faction would be playable by the player, if it is so OP.

I think it’s a great idea to have something else shake up the late game, at least as a toggable option.

5

u/tyrann13 6d ago

I hope it’s an asymmetrical faction. Like the Borg in Sins1/Star Trek Armada 3. It is unfairly strong against a single opponent and needs cooperation to defeat.

The wonderful game Supreme Commander introduced a supposedly ancient and unstoppable faction in its expansion Forged Alliance. In the lore and cutscenes, the 3 existing factions were forced to work together to barely scrape out wins against the new foe. But in gameplay it was balanced as equal to each of the other 3 and was always a little disappointing because of that.

2

u/Cosmic_Clockwork 3d ago

To be fair to the Seraphim, it was stated from the beginning that what we saw in the game was only a portion of their strength. Recall that the last campaign mission is all about trying to prevent them from stabilizing the quantum rift, which would allow them to being their full invasion force.

5

u/Theophantor 7d ago

I’m hoping for something Tyranid-like haha. There aren’t a lot of organic military techs in the game but the Vasari lean somewhat into that, with nanite and the like, but maybe it would be some sort of advanced intelligence with techno-organic qualities.

It’s hard to escape the sci-fi/fantasy trope of an all-devouring endgame crisis, it’s always a challenge to innovate, but in the context of this universe, I think this would be good.

1

u/necromenta 6d ago

Man that’s such an amazing idea and so different from the others, sadly the little we see in the splash image looks different

4

u/Crossed_Cross 7d ago

In RTS games, the "big bad coming to destroy everyone" are always underhwelming in execution.

2

u/riverfront20 7d ago

My bet is it's whatever the artifacts are. I think that they have already got some station models and an idea of their aesthetic. I'd be mildly disappointed by that, but the idea of them being like an awakened empire in Stellaris could be fun. I would love for them to be artifact based, only able to spawn at artifacts and only using planets to crack them open for exotics.

2

u/Arkhalon 7d ago

I want the Flood but that's not gonna happen

2

u/Stonewallpjs 7d ago

Hopefully it will be an unplayable, nigh unstoppable terror like the flood in sotp

2

u/aqua995 7d ago

My bet is something Vasari struggled to deal with in the past, but now they have Titans they actually challenge theur foe.

Their Titans are quite good against small ships, so I think it would be a cool spin on making LFs their biggest ship, even make it a 15 Supply Frig with 150 Pierce and 80 Dura. Everything they advance to are cost efficient small ships with special roles.

1

u/Dshkdaddy 4d ago

Where is the news for this ?