No Longer Human-Consortium Faction Pack
It's been...well, more than half a year. This project admittedly took a lot longer than I thought it would have, but I'm here, right now, with an actual finished product this time, and that's all that matters. I am overjoyed to present you fine people with the second major installment of No Longer Human:
No Longer Human: Consortium.
It's finally here. I have spent about 8 months drawing anthropomorphic animals for hours on end every day, and I have had to have [i] numerous [/i] conversations with my bewildered family about how it's For A Project and nothing else and they shouldn't suspect anything all so I could bring this to the Workshop. The sheer amount of Red Bulls I have consumed are enough to kill a god. It doesn't matter [i] which [/i] god I speak of. My ambition has now surpassed whatever grasp on reality I had left. While you were out partying, I was studying the Kkaetl, and I don't regret a single second.
"Look upon the night sky, brothers, for together we shall seize it. Every star your eyes can scry is OURS. Some...just don't know it yet."
-Th'res Liin, last of the Wyrmbloods
[b] So...what's this faction all about, anyway? [/b]
Well, when I was at the mid-point of Warhives development, I thought long and hard about what the next enemy faction would be like. It, like Warhives, would have to be very distinct from anything else in the game, and I also wanted it to just generally be bigger and more ambitious now that Warhives was bound to be released, I've finally got the hang of modding and it was my first large-scale mod-which made it the perfect stepping stone.
I finally decided on the idea that the next army I create would be a "war-machine" kind of race. A true evil empire, an overwhelming threat that asserted dominance not through sheer numbers and barbarity, but discipline, resources, and scale. I had 2 options to choose from here-after all, there are 2 types of stock sci-fi armies like this. Huge, hulking alien warrior races and cyberpunk megacorporations.
[b] So why not both? [/b]
The concept has definite historical precedent-"warrior races" in history were as much traders and diplomats as they were killers and plunderers. Arabic coins were found in Norse graves. The Mongols only took as much territory as they did so they could control the Silk Road, and all the burnings and slaughterings were effectively them cutting out all the middlemen. Who's to say a galactic merchant state can't work the same way, taking the phrase "trade empire" very literally?
What if the next faction [i] was [/i] a megacorporation, just more...honest? One who could give a damn how the market sees them, because they know they're still going to be rolling in silver. What if our megacorporation was...everything a "megacorporation" isn't? One with all the flashy tech and PR stripped away, leaving bare for the galaxy to see what every megacorporation is at the end of the day-a war machine. An army of monsters obsessed with power and technological advancement who are damned proud of what they are.
They'd be space Orcs, no doubt about that, but Orcs in the Tolkien sense-ruthless industrialists who care little for anything other than themselves, their profits, and their power. It is this eternal pursuit that has robbed them of what little human element their species has left in their DNA-and you just know the bastards [i] celebrate [/i] that fact. And, of course, everything they make has to reflect this-they would be a culture that only takes from the universe, and everything they create must be created [b] barely. [/b] There's no art here. No humanity. No [i] soul. [/i] Only tools, stripped to their most base functions, mass-produced for the express purpose of taking more and more and more.
Everything given shape in their twisted factories should look inhuman. Unnatural. Like a crime against anything and everything considered sacred.
I took inspiration from an aesthetic not commonly seen in science-fiction: organic-industrial. It's the sort of odd pseudo-dieselpunk look the Kett from Mass Effect: Andromeda and the Grineer from Warframe sported. There's also a bit of Stellaris's Toxoids in there to round out the general "look" for this faction. The name "Consortium" sort of came from the aesthetic-it's a word with industrial connotations, but the literal meaning is just "a company." Perfect for the kind of faction that mostly sells tanks to armed militants, but also makes mascot plushies and vacuum cleaners.
As for the Lahlit-the race that would man our Consortium, they had to be...primal. Maybe prehistoric, kind of like how Halo's Brutes were based on earlier hominids. What if we...went back even further, from early hominids to early mammals? Weird leathery lizard-cat people? These are orcs, after all, they need to have [i] some [/i] form of tusks.
I also liked the idea of adding in a race with a similar gimmick to the Dragonborn from D&D-the ability to rapidly evolve, adapting to any environment that they find themselves in. And Tolkien's Orcs were said to be made up of hundreds of different breeds, some more Hobbit-sized, others being almost as tall as humans. It was too fitting to [i] not [/i] be done, and you all know how much I love over-designing things.
As for gameplay...they'd, like the Oksarzj, have to be very different from anything else in the game, and my new goal was to make a more mechanically in-depth army. How about...we do the exact opposite of Warhives? Instead of hordes of screeching bug-people who die in 2 hits, this faction instead fights with strike teams of heavily armored "alien Space Marine" type enemies like Cabal or Grineer? And of course, this is a [i] cyberpunk [/i] megacorporation...meaning the Lahlit would be borged as all get out, every single one of them being chipped with stuff the Grineer [i] wish [/i] they had. It's a fun concept for a RimWorld faction-the base game enemy armies are all pseudo-human wave fights. Warhives just took that to 11. Now Consortium's here to completely do away with that.
And, of course, they'd have to have a mechanic exclusive to them to [i] really [/i] make sure they're distinct. Lahlit armor is made solely with efficiency and cost-effectiveness in mind. It's not pretty, and it's also not very durable. You can very well break Lahlit armor. Skilled colonists can shoot the exo-suits right off them.
[b] And then they get angry. VERY angry. [/b]
Please don't think there's something wrong with the mod when you boot it up for the first time and see that there's a whole bunch of armors that "don't have recipes". They're not supposed to. Those errors correspond to breakable Lahlit armor that powers a berserk mechanic. If the player was able to craft these armors, it would break the game and cause loads of debilitating balance issues. There is reinforced armor you can craft that works like armor instead of a combat mechanic, and you craft that at a special table like you do Rimsenal's equipment.
And the name generator isn't broken-it's actually way more in-depth than most of my mods because Lahlit names have lots of hard consonants and sounds that aren't in English, so I had to take extra care in making the names [i] not [/i] come out as slop. For example, whenever you see "DD" in a name, you pronounce that like the Welsh letter, and whenever you see "OE" in a name, it's pronounced like an Ö.
Also, no lore drop in the desc this time. [i] I said the scope would be bigger. [/i] There is simply too much lore to fit on a mod page this time, you're going to need to play the mod to find out all that juicy stuff.
