Mechanoid hive

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Mechanoids - Autonomous intelligent robots built for domestic, industrial or military purposes. Only available to advanced cultures because such complex AI is needed to control them.

Mechanoids are deadly autonomously intelligent robots that form a faction called a Mechanoid Hive.

Agrihand east.png

A small mechanoid designed to sow and harvest crops. While it is better suited to labor than combat, it can fight with built-in cutting blades if necessary.

ApocritonAncient east.png

A mechanoid commander designed to coordinate and motivate other mechs during long extermination campaigns. Its most obvious power is its ability to resurrect recently-killed mechs by supercharging their self-repair processes. Less obviously, it is intelligent and psychically present, radiating hatred into the minds of anyone in a wide radius. It can also move quickly with its built-in jump launcher.
While all mechanoids have a dim psychically-present intelligence, only the apocriton and a few others truly feel hatred for their victims and understand the suffering they inflict.

Auto charge turret.png

A self-powered turret mounted with a charge blaster. It cannot sense targets at very short ranges.

Auto inferno turret.png

A self-powered turret mounted with an inferno cannon. It cannot sense targets at very short ranges.

Automortar.png

A self-powered, self-loading, automatic mortar. It can hit targets at any distance, over walls, but is quite inaccurate.

Centipede east.png

Heavy combat mechanoids that glide on dozens of tiny legs. Their thick carapace and firepower makes them very effective against bunched-up static defenders. They are somewhat vulnerable to mobile hit-and-run tactics.

Centipede east.png

Heavy combat mechanoids that glide on dozens of tiny legs. Their thick carapace and firepower makes them very effective against bunched-up static defenders. They are somewhat vulnerable to mobile hit-and-run tactics.

CentipedeBurner east.png

Heavy combat mechanoids that glide on dozens of tiny legs. Their thick carapace and firepower makes them very effective against bunched-up static defenders. They are somewhat vulnerable to mobile hit-and-run tactics.

CentipedeGunner east.png

Heavy combat mechanoids that glide on dozens of tiny legs. Their thick carapace and firepower makes them very effective against bunched-up static defenders. They are somewhat vulnerable to mobile hit-and-run tactics.

Centurion east.png

An ultraheavy mech with a built-in shield bubble generator. The centurion carries a point-defense bulb turret capable of firing while the mechanoid is moving.

Cleansweeper east.png

A light mechanoid designed for cleaning. Lacking a ranged weapon, it can make only weak melee attacks.

Constructoid east.png

A small mechanoid designed to perform construction tasks. It can perform blunt melee attacks if necessary.

Diabolus east.png

An ultra-heavy mechanoid with an ultra-powerful hellsphere cannon. Made for siegebreaking, its hellsphere cannon takes time to charge up a shot, but can melt concrete and vaporize bone. The diabolus dissipates the hellsphere cannon's waste power in a heat column mounted on its back, which can pulse to ignite flammable objects nearby.
This mech's name comes from a thousand-year-old poem written by a Haspian monk who survived the erasure of his monastery. His religiously-tinged work describes a razor-bodied fiend pulsing with flesh-searing heat as it crushed scorched bodies under massive claws. The few who have faced a diabolus and survived tend to agree with this depiction.

Fabricor east.png

A small work mechanoid designed to craft all manner of manufactured objects.

MechanoidLancer.png

Fast human-sized combat mechanoids built for medium and long-range combat. Their bodies are light, making them vulnerable targets at close range - especially in melee combat.

Legionary east.png

A combat support mechanoid with a wide-range bullet shield and mid-range needle gun. Designed to support other mechanoids, the legionary is vulnerable to anyone who can get inside its shield.

Lifter east.png

A small mechanoid designed for hauling. Lacking a ranged weapon, it can make only weak melee attacks.

Militor east.png

A small combat mechanoid armed with a low-powered mini-shotgun. Roughly four feet tall, militors lack the power, range, and toughness of more senior combat mechs. However, it is cheap to gestate and maintain, and so is often used as a rear guard or swarm attacker.
In war, mech armies are known to send militors into urban ruins to hunt down survivors after breaking the human defenses. For this reason, they are considered by some to be the most cruel of all mechanoid patterns.

TurretMechMini.png

A self-powered defense turret mounted with a weak but long-ranged slug-thrower. May explode when damaged.

Paramedic east.png

A small mechanoid designed for non-violent emergency situation management and medical care. The paramedic can rescue the wounded, fight fires, treat the sick, and even perform surgery when a more-qualified human is not available. Its built-in jump launcher allows it to jump into, and out of, emergency situations, and its built-in firefoam popper can quickly extinguish fires.

MechanoidPikeman.png

A clunky multi-legged combat mechanoid specialized as a long-range weapons platform. While effective at distance, it is weak in close-range fights and in melee combat.
Veterans of mechanoid wars know that often, the safest place to be around a pikeman is touching it.

Scorcher east.png

A close-approach war mechanoid that specializes in incendiary attacks. Its flame burst attack has little reach, but once it closes on a group of defenders it can ignite and disrupt them with blasts of searing flame.

Scyther east.png

Fast, spindly, human-sized combat mechanoids specializing in rapid approach and close-range combat. Their bodies are covered in points and blades, but they mostly use their two arm blades to lop off limbs or gut their victims alive.

Termite.png

A medium-sized mechanoid. Termites specialize in burrowing, digging, and breaking through defensive structures. Defenders need to decide whether to try to eliminate the termite before it can dig through their defenses, or take it where it emerges.

Tesseron east.png

A medium-range combat mechanoid. While it is fairly vulnerable to attacks, the tesseron's sweeping beam graser attack is so deadly that few opponents can get shots off against it.

Tunneler Mechanoid east.png

A heavy mechanoid built for mining in treacherous locations. While intended for excavation, the tunneler's gigantic power claws and ultra-thick armor makes it a dangerous force in combat.

Warqueen east.png

An ultra-heavy mech with a built-in mech gestator. Fed with appropriate resources, the war queen can form small war urchin combat mechs within its massive carapace and deploy them into combat. Even more than other mechanoids, the war queen resembles a giant, living insect. All war mechs can be terrifying, but humans tend to find the war queen disturbing on a deeper level.

War urchin east.png

A small, deployable combat mechanoid usually manufactured inside an ultra-heavy war queen mech. War urchins are expendable fighters designed to swarm-attack enemies. They are mounted with short-ranged spiner guns and have a non-rechargeable power source.

Summary

Mechanoid forces are specialized by their unit types, with each unit performing a single role. Basics summaries are available here, see the individual pages for further details and analysis.

Scyther

The melee boogeymen of Mechanoids. As they're fast and extremely dangerous up close, large numbers can and will surround and overwhelm single enemies. Melee blocking, use of chokepoints, and focus fire while they close are useful tactics. Mechanoid raids consisting entirely of large numbers of scythers are fairly common - this can be a boon to prepared colonies as significantly simplifies defensive needs, but devastating to the unprepared.

Lancer

Armed with charge lances, they make up for modest DPS with the chance to insta-kill pawns by destroying body parts. This is fairly rare, but long term presents a significant risk. Thus exposure should be limited and lancers eliminated with extreme prejudice. As they fight best against pawns at medium to long range and cannot fire when engaged in melee, melee combat is very effective if the distance can be safely closed.

Centipede

Centipedes are tanks and crowd controllers. They are extraordinarily durable and their heavy charge blasters do respectable damage in massive bursts, while inferno cannon light fires and force ignited pawns out of cover. Having your pawns spread apart and behind cover is a great strategy to dealing with their blaster. Mortar Fire and melee combat are decent options for actually damaging the centipede due to it's slow movement speed and large size. Alternatively, a psychic insanity lance against a charge blaster centipede turns a danger into a significant asset, likely to both get killed itself and take several other mechanoids down with it. Don't target inferno cannon wielders for this however, as they will not be able to damage their fire-immune brethren.

Pikeman

Acting as the sniper, they aren't terribly good at their job. Their main role is to allow mechanoids to engage at range - use bends in chokepoints to force them into range, or simply advance and kill them.

Termite

While not particularly dangerous on their own, their thump cannon can destroy most walls in a single shot, leaving your colonists open to damage from other mechanoids. Depending on the exact strategy employed against the raid as a whole, these might be the highest priority, or of negligible concern.

Lore

Killer machines of unknown origin. Hidden in ancient structures, under mounds of dust, or at the bottom of the ocean, mechanoids can self-maintain for thousands of years. This group of mechs seems to be unified in purpose, but not well-coordinated in action. While local scholars believe they're autonomous weapons left over from an ancient war, tribal legends describe them as the demonic servants of a sleeping god. - Faction description.

In the lore, Mechanoids are autonomous intelligent robots built for a variety of purposes. The technologies required to build them vary based on the complexity of the resultant mechanoid, with Spacer-level[1] urbworlds[2] being able to construct more simple mechanoids for companionship, combat and labor use, while only glitterworlds are capable of constructing the more advanced, quasi-conscious versions.[1] Others still are constructed and utilized by archotechs. [3][4]

In-game however, only combat mechanoids from a single, somewhat mysterious source are ever seen. There are some indications that the Mechanoids seen in game may have been built by, or otherwise allied with, an ancient army, perhaps that of the Ancients faction.[5]. Whatever the case however, they have since lost any allegiances they may have had and are now hostile to every other faction.

Defoliator ship parts are usually associated with orbital-drop mechanoid armies.[6]

Insectoid ecosystems were genetically engineered to fight Mechanoid invasions[7] and thus the two factions are always hostile to one another.

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 Cryptosleep Revival Briefing
  2. Backstory of Markus 'Keuneke' Keuneke
  3. Backstory of Ang 'Codex' Gao
  4. Quest descriptions
  5. Orbital mech cluster targeter description
  6. Ship part (defoliator) description
  7. Megascarab description

Pawns

Pawn Type Image Combat Power Armor (S/B/H) Gear Health (%) Avg. Gear Quality Weapon Budget Available Weapons Age Range Move Speed Additional Info
Scyther Scyther east.png 150 40% / 20% / 200% 100 - - Melee (Blades) Any 4.7 c/s -
Lancer MechanoidLancer.png 150 40% / 20% / 200% 100 Normal 9999 Charge lance Any 4.7 c/s -
Centipede Centipede east.png 400 72% / 22% / 200% 100 Normal 9999 Heavy charge blaster / Inferno cannon Any 1.9 c/s -
Pikeman MechanoidPikeman.png 110 40% / 20% / 200% 100 Normal 9999 Needle gun Any 2.5 c/s -
Termite Termite.png 110 56% / 22% / 200% 100 Normal 9999 Thump cannon Any 2.1 c/s -

Trivia

  • Although all mechanoid-only weapons are 'Spacer' in terms of tech level; the hidden mechanoid faction itself is actually 'Ultra' tech level - one above 'Spacer', and the second highest tech level in the game, below 'Transcendent'.

Version history