Re: [SGII] Suppression of Alien Races

Los wrote:
>
> in SST, It's mentioned time and again the willingness of the
> arachnids to sacrifice untold numbers of bugs, workers warriors or
> otherwise, in their wave attacks. (where they close to close range ,
> ranged weapons or not, unless as a warrior bug you're ging to burn
> through a hundred workers with your beam to kill the trooper assuming
> you could see him in the masses.)
> 
> Which gets back to the original question of Morale rules for bugs.
This
> seems to be a matter of, there's a limited amount of warriors per
> workers, and the SST's could usually only tell them apart by not being
> killed by them. So how to handle suppression in a race like this? I
say
> let natural selection deal with it. If the player looses all his
> warriors by rash moves, he will loose the match. If they take a few
> close calls, and he wisely moves them to cover, then you get your
> supression result albeit temporarily.

Actually, it was even worse, since often the Workers didn't react even
when you were killing them.  However, a lot of games do not require
suppression or reaction tests for robots which are under remote
control.  Heinlein hints that the Brain bugs are remotely directing the
Warriors telepathically (thus the mention of the Esper Corps, which was
presumably attempting to eavesdrop on or jam the enemy).

Maybe Bug Warrior morale would be dependent on the terms of the
scenario.  You could use normal suppression and morale rules for
Warriors operating in independent groups on raids, or far from the
nearest nest/city, or if the controlling Brain has been neutralized
somehow.  However, Warriors acting under a Brain's direction in a
nest/city defense would be immune to all such effects.	Then it's just a
question of whether the controlling Brain is bright enough to know when
to cut its losses (same question for the AI's in Planetstorm/LOS).