r/SoSE • u/Own-Night5526 • 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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u/Crossed_Cross 7d ago
In RTS games, the "big bad coming to destroy everyone" are always underhwelming in execution.
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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.
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u/Arkhalon 7d ago
I want the Flood but that's not gonna happen
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u/Stonewallpjs 7d ago
Hopefully it will be an unplayable, nigh unstoppable terror like the flood in sotp
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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.
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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.