Killing the Xiticix?

[The Artist Formerly]

Chemical weapons, conventional bombers/artillery and Skelebots backed with PA and high mobility bots.

The bugs all have their super senstive antenna powers. Bombard them with a varity of chemical scents to confuse them and disable their ability to coordinate their defenses then just tear them appart.

[Mike Taylor]

After reading through all of these posts, I have to conclude that there is excellent groundwork here for a CS-based campaign. Introducing heroic CS characters would be less problematic than in other Rifts games which normally rely on the AWOL, ex-CS trope (which could also be done here). You have an in for getting characters to interact with Doctor Bradford or someone who worked with him at Lone Star as well as divulging the truth of the Xiticix Killer's origins. A successful reconnoiter of the inside of a hive could reveal the fact that the Xiticix only feed on that special fungus. The element of ZK-12 that makes it deadly could be tailored specifically to the Xiticix. (Perhaps the job of the PCs is to oversee the delivery of the "tainted fungus" to a relatively "easy" hive to test its effects in the field.)

[Sentinel]

Make more Janissaries. Have them do it.
I'm all for any plan that encourages heroic in-your-face action, over long range saturation bombing, and stuff where the action is reduced to push-button warfare.

[Killer Cyborg]

If all the Xiticix on Rifts Earth were to line up and walk past you, the line would never end.

Yeah, but you could just shoot them as they walked past... and if your energy rifle is hooked to a nuclear power supply, then you'll never run out of ammo...

[Mech-Viper Prime]

I wonder if it be possible to start a war between hives

[Blue Eyes]

i would send in rambo armed with a knife, bow and some explosive arrowheads and then wait for the xiticix to flee in terror

BE

[dmart11]

don't know if this has been said,but just get an army of earth elementals and cave in the whole hive.

[Captain Shiva]

Raid. Lots and lots of Raid.

[Greyaxe]

Make more Janissaries. Have them do it.
I'm all for any plan that encourages heroic in-your-face action, over long range saturation bombing, and stuff where the action is reduced to push-button warfare.

What are Janissaries?


I vote for the extermination of their food source, at a minimum you will degrade there ability to make war with limited food suplies.

Bilogical and chemical warfare as well make great sence, and skelebots lots fo skelebots to deliver the fungal sprays and chemical agents, follow up with psi stalker raids supported by frontline troops and dog boys. It is doable it will just take a huge ammount fo resources.

[Metathiax]

What are Janissaries?

From one of the rifters they are MDC humans with super martial arts and awesome weapons created by Desmond Bradford.

Interesting Idea to be sure but nothing I would ever use.

[Pepsi Jedi]

There's an adventure in one of the books. I think it might be the bug book itself which addresses some of these things.

The group in the adventure has come up with some "Raid" That they think will work. You escourt them in and get them close to the hive. Find out that the super RAID spray works ok, but nothing like they THOUGHT It would, and it's pointed out clearly in the adventure that THAT was the best shot at the chemical weapon out there and that the CS and what not were like a decade BEHIND the raid that failed... so it's not going to be a chemical.

These guys arn't ants. They're huge honkin' MD alien critters.

Personally I'd bomb the towers till they collapsed, then send in Skelebots till they went out of style. People always look at the bots as if they're push over stormtroopers from StarWars, but if you have an inventive GM you KNOW how dangerous these things are. If nothing else, 20 laser rifles all shooting at you at the same time.. SOME of them are going to hit. Now multiply that by different large factors and it gets scary.

THe bug hives DO seem to be what the Skelebots were expressly built for.

Instead of sending people in though, have a few remote drivers in every skelebot platoon. Some guy 100 miles away with a VR Helment seeing though his bots eyes and playing Starcraft in the VR Rig cordinating the robotic troops as you take out the Zerg.. I mean the Xitichic.

If you've bombed all the escape routes shut, the only way for the queens to escape is though your invading army of robotic soldiers, and they all shoot and shoot and shoot till they literly are ripped appart.

Sure it'd cost a mint, but as pointed out, the bugs arn't the magic users or mavericks of Tolkeen, they are pretty much straight forward fighters like the skelebots.

Both units "Swarm" and destroy. It'd just be a matter of numbers. Sadly the Xitichic have more, but they're playing different games.

The bugs would be playing "DEFEND THE QUEEN, DEFEND THE HIVE"

The bots on the other hand have ONE PURPOSE. Infiltrate the hive, kill all queens and all eggs at all costs. The warriors are just speed bumps. You don't need to kill them all. Just the 10 or so queens and the eggs.

The warriors will last a generation with out the queens to make more.

So the bots are doing deep incertion sorties with a very specific target set. When their comrads fall in battle the bots just step over them and keep going. Even if every milimeter of the hive is carpeted in destroied skelebots, the next one in line just steps over the robotic corpses of his fellows and takes one more step in, unloading every weapon he has till he falls, then the bot behind him does the same...


The real TRICK to this plan, is effectivly sealing all the holes. If the queens duck out the back door, you just wasted alot of bots.

[Captain Shiva]

If I remember correctly,you can sneak into a hive by covering yourself with the scent of other hive members or some such. Now coat a whole bunch of skelebots with this stuff, let them walk up to the queen, and then open fire. Sure, they'd get torn apart bythe rest of the hive,but you could get the most dangerous hive member first.

[Pepsi Jedi]

Part of that is that SMALL NUMBERS can try it. Anything past 4 or 5 people will get noticed even if they have the scent gland trick going on.

4 or 5 skelebots, unless they're hand carrying nukes into the egg chamber arn't going to kill a queen,

and the "smarter" bugs are down around the queen too. the smarter hunters and what not will look at you and kill you even if you smell like one of them.

[Colt47]

Alright, how would I go about killing the Xiticix? The same way I stated in the last thread dealing with the killing of the Xiticix. Take a leyline walker to Africa, open a rift into the Xiticix hatchery in the path of a marching swarm of Driver ants. The driver ants would strip the hatchery of everything SDC in about 20-30 minutes give or take a bit. There's up to 22 million ants with soldiers being about 1.5 cm in size and workers .5 cm in size. The ants are so numerous and small the Xiticix wouldn't be able to kill them all, and eventually they would march out to another hatchery and eat that one up, too. This prevents the hive from producing extreme numbers of bugs and enables the forces of the CS and Lazlo to actually eliminate the Xiticix by killing off their number one by one. The Driver ants can't stop the colony from functioning completely, but they can hinder it enough to make it vulnerable to other forms of attack.

Fewer grubs = fewer warriors = dead Xiticix. The only thing the insects had going for them was numbers anyway.

Now, to be frank I really think that the driver ants are more dangerous than the Xiticix to adventurers so I'd let the guys in environmentally sealed armor suits do the dirty work.

[Colt47]

Give the techno-wizard some ant repellent and things would work out wonderfully.

[Roscoe Del'Tane]

Take a whole butt-load of skelebots and specially arm them. Give some of them the skills neccisary to fly SAMAS suits, and replace the rail guns with heavy energy guns, so they can take out any warriors that fly out to defend the hive.

The rest get a whole bunch of particle and plasma guns, all hooked up to their power cores, and all weapons slaved to one target. Give each both two rifles, laser eyes, and two shoulder weapons, and that equals one dead bug thing.

Before you send them in however, get a bunch of long range mortars, rail cannons, longe range plasma missles, etc. and just bomb the bajeezuz out of the hive for several minutes. Have a bunch of skilled marksmen with heavy duty sniper rifles set around the perimiter to tag any that escape the kill zone, and several squads of roaming heavy PA and tanks for back up. Once you take out the first few waves of bugs, though , yer gonna have to go down into their domain, so give those skelebots a bunch of flamethrower and sonic type weaponry.

[rat_bastard]

personally I think the answer lies in the Napalm-P fuel for plasma Flamethrowers from juicer uprising. Just use it to make napalm bombs that flow down stream, and make a bunch of bomb, artillery shells and missiles. Use precision attacks to fill hives with liberal amounts of napalm-p and light it up. Handle the air war with frag missiles, grenade launchers and fragmentation artillery shells.

[Greyaxe]

Skelebots are also alterable, it would be nothing for the cs to make a batch that look like the bugs, scent glan them and send in their infiltrators with orders to detonate their own nuclear power packs when they have reached their targets.

Souicide skelebots, i love it

[speedy_petey]

Nuke them till there's nothing left but a parking lot, then nuke them some more just to be safe.

[asajosh]

In a high power campaign I once used a godling with temporal magic knowledge to slow down time, walk past all the little bugs and slay the queen in a one on one

[Kesslan]

Far as I know there is no such disease that simple antibiotics can cure. Could be wrong though but I'm pretty sure dealing with such things is a good deal more involved.

And, even if that were an answer. That doesnt mean it would be guaranteed to either a) work or b) have the desired effect. Especially when dealing with things like insects.

[CS John]

the best way to deal with the xiticix is diplomacy

[Library Ogre]

I do think it would be interesting if someone could, say, cover themselves with xiticix scent (to keep the xiticix off their back), cast sanctuary (the one that makes everyone peaceful), and then descend down and cast tongues on a queen an talk to her. To our knowledge, this has not been attempted... the only ones people have tried to talk to are drones, which is like trying to talk to someone's toe.

[jedi078]

As I stated in another thread: Use tactical nuclear weapons to topple the spirals of the Xiticix hives, next use a nerves gas that is heavier then air, so that it seeps into the lower portions of the hives. Then send in troops to mop what remains.

[CS John]

This would be a good idea. It could be the beginnings of a joint cooperation between the CS and Xiticix, the department of diversity and acceptance or some such.

I think it would be interesting if someone could, say, cover themselves with xiticix scent (to keep the xiticix off their back), cast sanctuary (the one that makes everyone peaceful), and then descend down and cast tongues on a queen an talk to her. To our knowledge, this has not been attempted... the only ones people have tried to talk to are drones, which is like trying to talk to someone's toe.

[Library Ogre]

Lazlo, maybe... the CS wouldn't really be able to pull off the two spells necessary to do it.

This would be a good idea. It could be the beginnings of a joint cooperation between the CS and Xiticix, the department of diversity and acceptance or some such.

I think it would be interesting if someone could, say, cover themselves with xiticix scent (to keep the xiticix off their back), cast sanctuary (the one that makes everyone peaceful), and then descend down and cast tongues on a queen an talk to her. To our knowledge, this has not been attempted... the only ones people have tried to talk to are drones, which is like trying to talk to someone's toe.

[Shadyslug]

I do think it would be interesting if someone could, say, cover themselves with xiticix scent (to keep the xiticix off their back), cast sanctuary (the one that makes everyone peaceful), and then descend down and cast tongues on a queen an talk to her. To our knowledge, this has not been attempted... the only ones people have tried to talk to are drones, which is like trying to talk to someone's toe.

Would tongues really work? I mean...they don't actually speak to each other...they communicate through chemical scents...

[Killer Cyborg]

I do think it would be interesting if someone could, say, cover themselves with xiticix scent (to keep the xiticix off their back), cast sanctuary (the one that makes everyone peaceful), and then descend down and cast tongues on a queen an talk to her. To our knowledge, this has not been attempted... the only ones people have tried to talk to are drones, which is like trying to talk to someone's toe.

Would tongues really work? I mean...they don't actually speak to each other...they communicate through chemical scents...

I don't think it would work.

[Library Ogre]

I do think it would be interesting if someone could, say, cover themselves with xiticix scent (to keep the xiticix off their back), cast sanctuary (the one that makes everyone peaceful), and then descend down and cast tongues on a queen an talk to her. To our knowledge, this has not been attempted... the only ones people have tried to talk to are drones, which is like trying to talk to someone's toe.

Would tongues really work? I mean...they don't actually speak to each other...they communicate through chemical scents...

Look at the target I gave for the tongues spell.... not the wizard, the queen. Make her understand you. You can likewise be affected by a tongues spell, so you can understand the audible part of Xiticix speech (their speech isn't entirely chemical, just a few "shouts"), but the main point is to talk to the queen.

[Library Ogre]

What about the Fact that its a maze underground?

Maybe; depends on your spatial abilities. I'd suggest this be done by someone like a dwarf, gnome, or kobold, who will be able to maneuver well underground.

[Library Ogre]

Planning is the key to any campaign.

Heroes are the bait for close air support.