Villainous Competition XVII: It's Alive!

[remetagross]

I could not wrap my build together, but I'm glad someone picked up the idea, too. I was going for creating Ultron (as per the Avengers 2 movie), a self-replicating villain. But I didn't know about the Mind Seed power to allow Ultron to create not only new bodies, but also new minds. To get around that issue, I was going to aim for an Effigy Construct of a human, to get a base creature with the lowest possible CR (1 I guess), and then Spell to Power Erudite 5/Metamind 10/Erudite 4. My plan was then to resort to the cheese of Metamind 10 + Temporal Reiteration power to gain infinite power points and to make any powers and effects permanents.
The one original trick I'd found was the idea of using Schism multiple times, since the power now has an unlimited duration, and each Schismed mind can manifest Schims after this. So the idea was that as soon as Ultron reached Mindbender 10, he would undergo an ascension and instantly duplicate his mind billions of time. After that, he would craft the cheapest intelligent construct available, like Force Golems, use Spell to Powered Humanoid Essence to make them targetable by mind-affecting abilities, and then Mind Switch (made permanent by the Temporal Reiteration trick) one of his Schismed minds into each Golem. At the end of the day, Ultron would have gotten as much himselves in Force Golem bodies as time, exp points (I didn"t think of Thought Bottle abuse) and gold would allow him.

But not only was this build not online before CR 19, it also relied on some powerful cheese. And also, if the original Ultron was destroyed, all the Schism would instantly stopped and thus the whole army would be disabled in one stroke. This meant I could not achieve to emulate the greatest strenght of Ultron, which is to be able to survive as long as only one of his replicas is still working, and to start over replicating from there.

My second idea was then to emulate Skynet. This would have been an unmoving Effigy Master, sending at the PCs ever-improving cyborgs: first various effigies, then Simulacra, and finally Ice Assassins. But I didn't get the time to iron it out.

On an unrelated note, Technetium43, your idea of devising your own Elder Evil by using the Marru Abomination and the Crawling Apocalypse as its servant is crazy good, and I would have loved to see your build competing! And the campaign story your wrote really flows with the idea, and you even used the Marrutact Wisdom! Very clever reinterpretation of the Sandstorm backstory

I'm a bit disappointed not to have submitted a build for the theme I proposed myself, but I'm very glad to see how inspirational it turned out to be

EDIT: about the question of the Awaken and Elite array interaction, I'd go with overwriting the elite array with the new stats as you suggest, Troacctid, since things should go in this order in the history of the creation of the creature; rather than adding a +0 mod to all mentals stats (or +8 for a Maximized Awaken Construct) to the elite array as you are suggesting, Thurbane. It seems to me that Awaken goes this way for animals, since it overwrites the animal's Int score with a flat 3d6.