The Empress (An evolution for the Queen)

[Kel-the-Oblivious]

Summary (a quick, 2-3 sentence summary): Add the ability for Queens to evolve into an Empress, improving their combat ability, while sacrifice the ability to expand the hive.

Benefits (How this will benefit the server and game as a whole): There reaches a point in every hive's life where the queen sitting around, laying an endless amount of eggs, and squirting out royal jelly has passed. The hive is on the war path, and they need a leader. The Empress, the term used for a queen who has reached a certain age and become far greater than a queen, is the flag ship of the xenomorph assault. She is the strongest member of the hive, and she should be able to fill that role, but sacrifice other aspects. Becoming an Empress forces the queen to forgo her abilities to foster a hive, and turns them into a murder machine. Forces the marines to find her early and take her out before she becomes even worse, or grants the aliens a mighty weapon if the hive has suffered a grievous blow, and she wants to go out in a blaze of glory.

Details (Description of how you think this would work, the benefits, etc):

First, why add yet another xeno evolution? Because the empress is canon, and it'd be a nice addition for those of us who play Queen regularly, knowing that if we survive long enough, we'll have the chance to make or break an invasion or hive defense.

Second, what does an Empress lose? Her ability to lay eggs, squirt jelly, sculpt resin, and reduces her plasma storage and capacity. Why reduce it? Because the plasma that would normally be going to support her egg generation is now working to maintain her titanic frame and might. This makes the use of screech all the most strategic, as you will have a considerable wait between uses. In addition, the increase the hivemind's recovery time for her death, forcing them to choose wisely if evolving for the assault could really screw over the hive if it fails.

Third, what does she gain? Increased strength (Ravager?) Spitter style acid, improved speed, and some bonus health/armor. Improve her all around, while giving her access to an acid spit to help catch those pesky marines she can't reach.

Fourth, why go Empress? Perhaps it's time for the final assault, and infection is no longer a concern. Perhaps the hosts are breaching into your inner chambers, looking to destroy all that you have build, and you want to go out in a blaze of glory. Perhaps you have spend the last two hours producing so many eggs and jelly pools, you don't NEED to produce any more, and you'd like to speed things up a bit in the round, and take the fight to the humans as the pinnacle xenomorph.

Finally, why even bother giving the queen a warform, she's already powerful? The queen is strong, yes, but she is not the strongest in the hive, which she canonically should be, but for balance can't be. Ravagers out damage her, crushers have a weaker, if cheaper AoE stun, Hivelords build hives faster, and sentinels have a monopoly on acid spits. The queen is supposed to be the best xenomorph around. The fact that once you have tier threes, she is outclassed by one strain or the other. As it stands, a queen can walk into a group of marines, screech, and fall back to cower and let their vocal cords refresh, because they can't chase anything, and have no means besides screech to drop the much more nimble marines.

Implementation (Optional, if you have an idea how to implement it):

Give her a huge cost to evolve. Something like 2000 jelly, a bit more than twice the cost from a larva to go to tier three timewise, and use pre-existing xeno code to create her stat block.

[MrJJJ]

First, why add yet another xeno evolution? Because the empress is canon

This line made me crack up hard

On serious note, neutral, i want to see this, but i don't think its the right time for it

[Kel-the-Oblivious]

I know there are plenty of far more vital gameplay alterations to work on, but I checked the suggestions, and didn't see a thread about this, so I figure I'd see if anyone felt the same way.

And yeah, poor choice of my first point for it existing... Canon is a poor choice for gameplay at time, but still, be fun.

[MadSnailDisease]

Seems well balanced and smart, but doesn't quite work in lore. The empress generally was just an older queen who had won in battle against another queen. it's a very well balanced idea and was thought out, but doesn't quite fit in lore (in my opinion)

Neutral

[Adjective]

Empress as of right now is pretty much just admin made and we have a series of different variations of it depending on who made it. It would be nice to have an Empress, but our original empress is the one that meets your description best and it is "OP as hell". If this were to be implemented it would require a lot of balancing.

[Boltersam]

Suggest replacing the 2000 plasma cost (Queen has a max of like, 500 plasma) with the jelly evolve time. About 1000 jelly time to evolve.

[Kel-the-Oblivious]

Thought I added that note. Fixed it.

[Azmodan412]

Admin only, I believe.

[Adjective]

Well the reason that it is Admin only tends to be for the specific reason that an Empress is ALWAYS made OP and tends to be reserved for events.

[qDan]

Neutral as other ppl because no idea how to balance Queen after evolution. But, if she'll become just an upgraded version of Praetorian with slightly increased speed and armor, everything gonna be fine.

[Edgelord]

From a purely logical perspective what kind of hive would sacrifice its ability to reproduce?

[DesFrSpace]

Been here for about over 3+ year on SS13, and EMPRESS is mainly RP. With that being said, I have in mind Admins who make good Empress.

[DesFrSpace]

Change of mind, I think the EMPRESS make a wonderful MOTHER for the Marine, in the case of said the Queen SDD and had to log out.

[MadSnailDisease]

Change of mind, I think the EMPRESS make a wonderful MOTHER for the Marine, in the case of said the Queen SDD and had to log out.

The queen mother makes more sense for that, since they sustain everything through telepathic abilities that can work across the entire galaxy, or something insane.

[Egorkor]

well if we go with the queen mother, she'll need palatines, and then it's a gg for marines.

[DesFrSpace]

The real Empress is gigantic, and having one on the field is not beneficiaries unless it a Admin's event.

[Adjective]

Queen Mother is the Admin equivalent to CentralCommand for Marines. It's what we use to give Queen's and Xeno's guidance. It's more metaphorical over anything else.

[MadSnailDisease]

Queen Mother is the Admin equivalent to CentralCommand for Marines. It's what we use to give Queen's and Xeno's guidance. It's more metaphorical over anything else.

That's what I was saying, yeah

[DesFrSpace]

In the near future, I think the CM server might have a MOTHER speech that is CO's speech size, announcing in hive mind of Staff's decision.

Empress's nickname: The One, Chosen One, Benevolent One, First Born, High Ruler, Moma's Mom.
^That was just thinking.

Too bad, peoples are not reading this kind of post and giving feedback, I mean they are missing out decisions and ideas that we could have used.

[MadSnailDisease]

+1 for Momma's Mom

[Xenomorph Dominatrix]

I don't know how I feel about this because the Empress is meant to be THE queen, it would mean either a new backstory be worked out with how the hives on various planets are directed to put themselves on ships and things, or this new thing to have a different name, I don't know. There's also the option of a generic hive mind but that doesn't fit with the lore and has been done with just about every kind of "creeping infection" type alien organisms in stories so would be a bit cliché, whereas aliens having the Queen/Empress is one of the original things that they actually created back in the 80s when they were making the "new" Aliens film and wanted to work out a way that there could be so many more aliens than the first film, so it'd be a shame to change from that probably unless there was a really good alternative, I don't know.

[forwardslashN]

Queen can now evolve into an empress.