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Randel
2009-11-29, 09:18 PM
"Tom, listen to yourself, then listen carefully to me.
If you replace the working parts, you get a different machine.
The man who turns the wheels, they will follow
Anywhere he leads."
Albert Wily - The Protomen "The Good Doctor"

"Ah, that vigorous Albert. He's going to be so disappointed when he realizes how little that machine is suited for mining."
Thomas Light - MSPaint Masterpiece strip 71


Bit of an idea I got after listening to The Protomen and wondering what exactly The City was supposed to look like. Then I got an idea for a good villains plot to Take Over The World (or city or whatever).


Step 1: set up a system to build robots (or constructs, monsters, or undead)

Step 2: design lots of robots (or undead or whatever) suited for performing mundane tasks like cleaning, mining, or construction but also build them with the potential to attack people and serve as mooks or troops in battle.

Step 3: Mass produce them and sell them to people to perform their stated tasks. Like a good engineer, avoid sticking on obvious weapons and instead incorporate the combat potential into its overall design. That way you can make more of them for cheaper and its less likely that anyone will catch onto your plan to Take Over the World.

Step 4: Also work on dedicated fighting robots in secret (using the money you get from selling the first robots).

Step 5: Once you've got enough robots set up and your various pieces are in place, initiate "order 66" and have all your robot mooks subjugate the populous, attacking whoever would threaten your power.

Step 6: Roll out the actual robot army to deal with any soldiers loyal to the old leaders or any scrappy bands of heroic misfits who are busting up your 'mining robots'.

Step 7: Declare yourself ruler.

Step 8: Have all the robots go back to keeping the place clean and working as normal, but with you in charge.

Step 9: ???

Step 10: Profit!


So, the real question is: What sort of Trojan constructs would you manufacture that both have a pretty decent utilitarian purpose (enough to justify you selling them and them being everywhere), while still having at least enough combat ability to keep people busy while you roll out your huge army and take over the place? If you can build a really good fighting robot and sell it on the open market without people wondering why their secretary-bot is sporting twin flamethrowers then good for you.

Keep in mind that when your attack starts then its likely that all your utility robots would be standing where they would be expected to be working... so all the lumberjack robots with chainsaws for hands are probably out in the woods somewhere and would have to jog a fair distance before they come across any strategically important place to chainsaw.

They can be either a robot for a futuristic setting, a construct or undead for a fantasy setting... or pretty much anything else. (The clone army from the Star Wars prequels is a sort of example of this... the Jedi should really have seen this coming when they found that they were all the clones of the Bounty Hunter connected to trying to assassinate Senator Amidala)

Examples:

Washout
Description: A big mechanical truck equiped with brushes for cleaning the streets and a series of water hoses (including a high-pressure nozzle on a turret on its top).
Utility: Cleans the streets by brushing and spraying water. Can use its powerful top-mounted nozzle to clean the sides of buildings or to help fight fires. It can refill its water tank by plugging into fire hydrants.
Combat: Its powerful brushes cause massive damage to anyone unlucky enough to get run over by it (it has guard plates that prevent this when in utility mode). Its powerful nozzle can spray into crowds or knock opponents down. At its basic, it can block streets and provide a barrier.


Cleaner Gecko
Description: A lizard-like robot equipped with four suction-like arms, two arms for scrubbing windows, a cable for securing it to the building, and a head that sports a powerful camera and a nozzle that sprays window cleaner.
Utility: It crawls along the sides of buildings and cleans up windows using its spray and cleaning tools. The cable on its back it latched onto the roof or some other secure area to keep it from falling onto someone if its suctions fail.
Combat: Its powerful camera can turn around to spy on people in the city below, to gather intel or search for trouble makers. Its spray nozzle is designed to use a powerful cleaning agent dilluted with water, when it switches to combat mode it sprays a burning detergent at people that may blind them like pepper spray or at least fog up any goggles they may be wearing. Its climbing ability lets it crawl into windows or along ceilings.


Skeleton Ratcatcher
Description: An undead creation used to combat the large number of rats and other vermin in the medieval world. It is the animated skeleton of a rat after its disease-bearing flesh is stripped off using acids.
Utility: The Skeleton rat crawls through nooks and crannies until to finds a living rat or other unwanted vermin, it kills the rat and drags its corpse back to a cage where it can be sent to a necromancer and animated into another skeleton rat. Its also skilled at cleaning up hard to reach areas (including dragging out bones from destroyed skeletons) and can leave lost jewelry or coins in a place where the buildings owners can get them.
Combat: Skeleton Rats can form into massive swarms and be directed to attack people the necromancer directs them towards. They can also work together to loot areas of small items and are excellent at combating other swarms of vermin.

The_Werebear
2009-11-29, 09:43 PM
Well, there are always the mining bots being told to "Mine all Organics" a la KoTOR II, though that is probably one of your inspirations.

For your secretary bots, they can spray blinding swaths of ink and stab people with sharpened pen nibs.

Baker and Chef robots are expected to have constant access to knives, fire, and several ingredients that could cause distress if applied to the eyes. Read- an oven charges you, while throwing knives and hosing you down with peperspray.

Construction robots would have access to nail guns, hammers, and welding torches.

icefractal
2009-11-29, 09:47 PM
Tunnelbug
Description: A suitcase-sized caterpillar-like robot. Has a powerful drill in front and various "legs" on the sides to clear rubble. Has a hatch on top with an electric connection and appropriate manipulators.
Utility: Digs tunnels for laying pipes and cables. For greater efficiency, it can splice into existing power lines to recharge.
Combat: It can burrow into most buildings, and in numbers can even undermine the foundations. The drill and legs are potentially deadly weapons, and can disable vehicles, although it isn't very fast. By splicing into power lines, it can cut off power to an area, electrify metal areas, or even electrify itself for added deadliness.

Edit: Semi-ninja'd. This is similar to a mining robot, but the emphasis on cable-laying would hopefully put it right in the middle of urban areas.


If you want to fight really dirty ...

Smart-o-Clave
Description: A smart autoclave, for hospitals. Looks like a normal autoclave.
Utility: In addition to sterilizing instruments, it saves and scans the infectious material, looking for anything unexpected like MRSA. On finding this, it will immediately report the potential outbreak.
Combat: It continues to store the most infectious material after scanning it, and on the signal (given prior to the main robot war), will start applying it to the items it cleans.


And a magic one:

Harvest Helper
Description: A large (turkey-sized) zombie frog.
Utility: Patrols the fields for crop-eating insects, kills them with necrotic breath (not dangerous to anything bigger than a mouse), and swallows them.
Combat: Sneaks into the house at night, finds an isolated sleeping person, and kills them through prolonged exposure to necrotic breath. Repeats as much as possible. When cornered, explodes, animating all the insects it's swallowed as an undead swarm.

Asbestos
2009-11-29, 10:13 PM
Harvest Helper
Description: A large (turkey-sized) zombie frog.
Utility: Patrols the fields for crop-eating insects, kills them with necrotic breath (not dangerous to anything bigger than a mouse), and swallows them.
Combat: Sneaks into the house at night, finds an isolated sleeping person, and kills them through prolonged exposure to necrotic breath. Repeats as much as possible. When cornered, explodes, animating all the insects it's swallowed as an undead swarm.
Hmm....

Cane Toads are still worse.

Also, I don't want necrotic energy on my plants!

Roupe
2009-11-30, 02:07 AM
Or just have the robots gain monopoly on something crucial for the society to exist, or for the people to be content. With monopoly or influence established -demands or actions to subjugate are started.


For example providers of food.
Robotic mill for wheat
Robotic waterpump.

Warcraft3 had the undead used the food shipments to spread and subjugate.

Randel
2009-11-30, 08:31 AM
Or just have the robots gain monopoly on something crucial for the society to exist, or for the people to be content. With monopoly or influence established -demands or actions to subjugate are started.

Yeah, but then again the mark of a classic Evil Overlord (not all these new list-reading ones) is to have a big army of various robots to keep the long fight to his stronghold interesting... and how are the heroes going to overthrow somebody who has a monopoly on food and probably has self-destruct mechanisms in all his food-making robots in case he gets killed?

Besides, at the very least you have to admit that when The Rebellion starts launching attacks against your factories and compounds, then their fight against a robotic threshing machine would be much more interesting if the threshing machine knows how to fight back! Sure, you could just have robot guards do all the attacking... but that's boring! Give them at least a little variety when half the farm equipment simultaneously gets up and starts whacking at them.

Lunix Vandal
2009-11-30, 11:17 AM
There's a couple good ideas in the old Java game Urbanoids (http://www.javaonthebrain.com/java/noids/). Basically, the corporations have integrated largely-innocuous robots into most aspects of city/suburban life, and all is well ... until a server-side glitch overwrites their programming with a nice, gory FPS. Hilarity ensues as you (the "there goes the neighborhood" fat ugly guy) try and disable your new robot overlords before the government firebombs them to oblivion at nightfall.

The highlights (which are largely of the if-I-remember-correctly-because-it's-been-eight-plus-years-since-I've-played-this-and-I-don't-feel-like-blasting-through-Stenchburg-right-now-to-check variety):
* The "Home" - class is entirely unarmed. Doesn't mean that the Roomba-esque security cam or the autoplunger are any less inclined to pummel you to death, though.
* The "Yard Work" - class 'bots have tools designed for, well, yard work. But which can promptly be put to nefarious ends. The lawnmower even has the nickname "Cat Killer" to prove it. The hedge trimmer (AKA "Fire Hazard") has lasers.
* The "Construction" - class has variably-powerful weapons ... including a stronger welding laser, a gigantic sledgehammer (for pile-driving), and an electrician with a portable generator. That third one's the best of the lot, oddly enough.
* The "Police" - class consists of just one robot: a riot-stopping model, complete with head-mounted taser. Suspiciously similar-looking to the Spider (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/DSD1_dwarf_spider_droid) Droids (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/OG-9_homing_spider_droid) of the Star Wars fame ... except this came first, so nya.
* Finally, the "Military" - class has the overtly-weaponized robots, and what they're doing in suburbia is beyond me: one is essentially a uni-motorcycle-mounted pile of machine guns, the other is a Monstrous Centipede (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/monstrousCentipede.htm) with a grenade launcher (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FrickinLaserBeams).