The ancients are a hybrid race of cyborgs. Battle hardened automatons that have the unique ability to reconsitute themselves from their pieces if they have been destroyed incompletely. Its hard to keep them down and its hard to stop their slow, powerful advance.
Most ancients have 4 ap per turn, and ancients cannot use CP or interrupt. This does make them a slower, almost plodding faction, but a few units do get 6 ap per turn. Facing the ancients in battle is a two-waved onslaught, led by faster teleporting units and followed by numerous shoulder-to-shoulder gun-toting robots.
Ancients can be deployed as blips or be purchased with points, depending on the mission scenario. When purchased with points, the majority of the units available are quite cheap and easy to build up plentiful forces with. There are a few notable exceptions to this though, such as their capital units and the wraiths, both of which have some very useful unique abilities.
Wraiths can teleport two spaces for two AP. Its the same cost as walking, but saves them the ap of opening doors, and the shot of overwatch from crossing spaces. They also shift out of phase when struck, giving them an additional roll to save when about to be destroyed.
Ancients also have a unit that increases the likelyhood that units around it will be able to regenerate the turn after they are destroyed.
They do however, know the better part of valor. If over three quarters of their forces are destroyed, they will teleport out and escape combat. The player controlling them loses if this happens.
nethulk
Hunters are a quick moving, elusive breed of warrior. They are equipped with cloaking devices that keep them safe from ranged attacks over 8 spaces away, and make them nearly impervious to melee. You can’t hit what you can’t see.
They move with 6 AP each, and can use CP.
They are accomplished with melee combat, but can carry weapons as well. Their unique weapons include a pack of flying discs that can be made to return to the thrower for a few ap, and a netgun which can immobilize an opponent and drag it around. They can also dash across several spaces at once quickly, and be immune to fire while doing so, making them agile and suited for advancing across overwatched hallways and corridors.
nethulk
The Aliens inhabit the floating hulks and hivelike nests. Packed with close combat units and optionally longer ranged weapons, the aliens are a quick moving army well suited to overtaking opponents and overwhelming them with numbers.
They are almost always deployed as blips.
Close combat aliens have 6 ap each, others are limited to 4 ap. Aliens do not use CP and cannot interrupt.
Aliens can be selected as three different sets of blips; Standard, Expanded, and Maximum.
- Standard - All blips contain 1 to 3 of the standard close-combat unit. Balance is usually better if more blips per turn are given to the alien player choosing the standard configuration, as the strategies for playing this style are typically mass-and-overwhelm.
- Expanded - The expanded set includes both standard close combat units and aliens using ranged weapons. Blips that spawn as standard can have 1 to 6 aliens. Ranged weapon blips are single aliens carrying toned-down versions of weapons available to other armies, such as rocket launchers, miniguns, plasma weapons, and can spawn as aliens with psionic abilities as well.
- Maximum - This set of blips contain new weapons that include the expanded set with multiple aliens per expanded blip, and add weapons such as spike launchers, gas area-effect weapons, and much more. These are very powerful and should usually be taken into account as an advantage, and afford extra points to the opposing army.
nethulk
With a layout oddly reminescant of old roguelike games, google’s experiment with keyboard shortcuts should save ‘homerow’ style typists a large amount of time going through search results.
Here’s the scenario I envision for this: You’ve gone to the google hompage to start a search, the cursor automatically focuses onto the search query box when the page loads, so you can start typing your search keywords right away. After hitting enter to start the search, do your fingers drift back to the ‘home row?’ Those ASDF and JKL; keys that mavis beacon and so many other typing tutor programs (and perhaps keyboarding teachers) drilled into your head? I know mine do, its second nature.
With your fingers there, as your eyes scan down the page for the most relevant site or article in the search results, your index finger on the ‘J’ key will select the next result in the list. It will also scroll the page down to the end if you keep going. The ‘K’ will go back a result, also scrolling the page. The ‘Enter’ or ‘O’ keys will go to the URL of the currently selected item.
I’ve been able to very quickly locate what I want in the results with this, and without taking my hand off the keyboard and reaching for the mouse. It may not seem like a huge energy saver if you’re a hunt-and-peck typer or if you prefer to use the mouse to select things, but it is for me. I do many google searches in a day, and as a programmer I am a quite accomplished typist, if I must say so myself.
Keywords, ENTER, J->J->J, ENTER and I’ve found what I want. I had no idea that this feature was ‘missing’ until I found it. A big congrats to the developers at our favorite search engine for thinking of these small things that make life easier. Way to go!
Head on over to Google’s Experimental Search to try it for yourself.
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