Rescue Richard Baxton

[Neil]

A super rare Unity pod find should be to rescue the famed explorer Richard Baxton! In exchange for rescue he puts himself and his customized recon rover at your service! It comes with deep radar and anti-grav structs.

[Misanthrope]

This first rule of Richard Baxton is, we do not talk about Richard Baxton.

People need heroes.  They don't need to know how he died... clawing his eyes out, screaming for mercy.
The real story would only hurt sales.

...oh yeah, and also dampen the spirit for which it was intended.



Serious though, that sounds like a decent thing.  Some relatively game non-impacting upgrades that CAN'T be used for any sort of sustainable conquest seems like a pretty wizard idea.
Problem is (from what I hear) editing the game base code is a pretty tedious&/impossible thing, so IDK if this is even something that is worth a real (re)programmer trying to argue into the game base-coding.  Yitzi and BUncle would have better intel.

[bvanevery]

How do you rescue a dead man?  The Morganites tell us he clawed his eyes out screaming for mercy.  Then they puffed it up into a heroic saga.  Unless all the colonists were eaten / repressed / killed, and no actual colonist is alive today, then those colonists are surely witness to some portion of the event.  I know we're all interested in the lore of the game, such as Richard Baxton, but finding him alive is a pretty major change to the story.  And without some additional narrative thought and punchline, it's not nearly as amusing?  Except in a surrealist sense of oh yeah, everything you heard, it's all fake / unreliable.

Perhaps you could find his recon rover though.  "Richard Baxton's Recon Rover" could be a predefined unit.  I think I'd make it a 2-1-2 but set it to Slow, due to the mindworm damage.  You could change out the Unity Mining Drill for that, and thereby already have a unique game event ready to go, but it doesn't make a lot of sense that this would happen at the Unity crash site in particular.  In that case wouldn't the Morganites have talked about it?  Also, that would make it an early colonial event, but the Morganites talk about 'immediately' purchasing the manifests, indicating the event happened later in SMAC's history.

You could just replace the Unity Rover and have multiple copies of Richard Baxton's Recon Rover appear throughout the game.  But in that case I guess you'd make it a 1-1-2 and not Slow.

I wonder if the coordinate for the Unity Mining Drill can be changed / tweaked somehow?  Although, it would have to be on valid land somewhere.

[Neil]

The Morganites are lying - they admit as much. I choose to believe that Richard Baxton is alive, and my scout patrols won't rest until they find him.

I don't know what "Slow" means in this context.

The rover should have anti-grav structs to be cool and special. If it's just a slightly better Unity Rover, that's boring.

[bvanevery]

The Morganites are lying about what Richard Baxton did, not whether he's alive or dead.  Talking about Richard Baxton being alive is like talking about Bruce Lee or Elvis Presley still being alive.  It's weird conspiracy theory stuff.

"Slow" is an ability you can add to a unit.  I believe the effect of making a Speeder "Slow", would be to make it move only 1.  So, a badly beat up rover due to mindworm damage.  But it would still have a laser armament, so not different from the Unity Mining Drill as to what the vanilla game gives out.  Well, it might take an ECM penalty later, but that wouldn't matter early game.

Anti-grav makes no sense.  That's a very late game technology, and Richard Baxton's exploits come all the way back at Planetary Networks, a tier 2 tech.

The interest value of the original story is not the rover being special.  It's about Richard Baxton being puffed up beyond what occurred in real life.  I do think I'd make his rover a Trance unit though, since it's an early enough tech, and would help explain how he held off those 4 waves.

[Buster's Uncle]

I think it's a great idea.

[Geo]

Me2.

[Neil]

I envisioned this more of a fun little Easter egg, to give players a chuckle every few games. No need to overthink it. There are unity pods that can teleport or duplicate units through a dimensional rift and other crazy things so it's not totally wacky that Braxton found some alien technology he MacGyvered onto his rover. A slow rover would just be boring. Part of the fun is you get a cool though not overpowering unit.

The Morganites could have just been wrong, assuming his fate after losing contact once a boil was spotted. Not sure what you mean by conspiracy theories? The game is fiction and I'm just using my imagination.

[Buster's Uncle]

b's trying to be helpful, in his way - we're nerds, and just as well get the nitpicks addressed now.

[bvanevery]

I've mostly prided myself on remaining true to the original material's intent.  However where the material itself diverged, such as in different treatments of Miriam's character, I've chosen one and kicked the other to the curb.