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Hey Spliceheads,
I was submerged in some of the WIP material and wanted your thoughts, strategies, debates, devil advocates, advice and suggestions via on going discussion on protecting, surviving and if need be, strategically withdrawing a Great House that was discovered by NEXUS and is now facing: first wave Expendable Extermination Platoon followed in 5 hours by a Mixed Drone Platoon and in 12+/- hours, a twin Battalion, one from the North and the pther incoming from the South?

(Expendable Extermination Platoon consist of 50 troops, half are Ratbombs sent to pour into the stronghold, 30% Cable Snakes and the rest are Popper Mines.)}

(Mixed Drone platoon composition is 60 troops, half are Necrobots, 30% are Necroborgs, 10% Steel Troopers, 10% exterminator robots like Cable Snakes, Skitter Pods, Slicers and Sewer Prowlers.
Also one Flying Strike ship.)

(The Robot Battalion consist of 6 full companies (2160 troops), + 4 sentry towers and 3 Land Dominators.

NOTE: A typical robot company is composed of 4-6 platoons (160-360 troops), at least one which will be an armored platoon Assault Slayers and one air-recon platoon 60 troops (50% Flying Strike Ships and 50% Hunter-Searcher Probes)+ sentry tower and a squadron of Sky Fighters (55).

If your Great House's Haven/Seedling which is 50-1200 feet underground, 7 primary corridors with 12 minor ports, with a tropical Congo Lake 5 miles away (deepest depth is one mile deep with alien predator marine life) that leads 1760 miles out to sea and the nearest Preserve to your House is 16 miles away, and your Great House is currently locked in furious blood feuds with its neighbors in the Area. How would your house survive the onslaught?

100,000 total House populace.
Great House militia composition:
7% Archangels
5% Biotics (.5% Metamorphs)
2% Deliverymen
9% Dreadguards
7 Engineers
3 Librarians (1/3 succumbing to megalomania)
1% Falconers
2% Gardeners (1% have mature Gardens of 1-3 sq. miles.)
7% Outriders
5% Packmasters
18% Roughnecks
3% Saints
1% Scarecrows
3% Skinjobs
1% Swarmlords
2% Technojackers
4% Other OCCs
30% Non-combatants

Warmounts: 8% Abominations, 10% Behemoths, 5% Black Talon warhawks, 5% Dracos, 16% Gorehounds, 18% Grendels, 7% Leviathons, 1% Kamikaze Missiles, 5% Mantis Cannons, 8% Striders, 7% Tunnel Rats/Wild Weasels and 10% Zephyr.

ummmm... are there assumed to be more forces coming along behind that? or perhaps the house does not have all their troops available to defend?

because that army the machine is sending is way too small to be a serious threat to the house you've described. for example, you have 5% packmasters, which means you have ~5,000 packmasters and therefore a minimum of 15,000 gore hounds. now, gore hounds are one of the weaker types of warmounts comparatively speaking, but against only 2,000 robots at a time, many of which are the weaker types of robots, the gore hounds are going to win assuming they've actually been given some form of ranged weapon. then you add in that the 5,000 pack masters are also going to have weapons, and that force alone could easily take down the army you've got coming.

never mind the 7,000 outriders, 18,000 roughnecks, 9,000 dreadguards, 1,000 swarmlords, and 5,000 biotics available for front-line combat, plus various other characters of varied capabilities, particularly the 2,000 gardeners. heck, you literally have enough technojackers to hijack the entire army just about.

now, don't get me wrong... as a player character, 2,000 robots is a scary thing. but if NEXUS is serious about taking out this seedling, she's going to send more than that. lots more. because what she's sending right now is really more or less going to be little more than a nuisance.

in any event, in the long term running isn't really much of an option unless you've got some way to move engineers and librarians that i haven't heard about. even then, you're going to suffer horrific losses if you're trying to march everyone off with limited supplies and no MDC protection.

as awful as it may seem, my first idea would be to try and find some way to make it look like the community is much much smaller than it really is, seal it off except for a small portion, and look for volunteers to essentially die valiantly while "failing" to defend the location (but still do your best to evacuate people further from the site if possible. based on the army NEXUS is sending, she clearly thinks this is just an outpost. don't do anything that might persuade her otherwise. if she realizes this is the heart of your community, i'd say you can expect 10-20 times more than what you've listed, so do a damned good job of hiding the community, and collapse the caves and tunnels the machine is using on yourself so that she's firmly convinced nobody is able to live there. from that point on, try your best to make sure your currently living saints turn into engineers elsewhere, and see what you can do with the gardeners to set up alternate homes, because the machine knows you had a base there at some time, and she may decide to check it again later. if that happens, and she realizes what's *really* there, everything goes horrifically wrong.

alternately, if you meant to imply that the machine definitely knows the nature as well as the location of the seedling, abandoning ship really is your only option, in spite of how devastating it would be; you'd be screwed over royally, but NEXUS will kill you for certain if you don't run. defeating the presented army should still be trivial. the real problem is how do you evacuate that many people before the machine kills you all, and without the machine identifying where you've run to? ideally, you should still have other outposts. even more ideally, your engineers and librarians are spread out between the various outposts (or at the very least, the engineers; they should at least be able to keep making the stuff the librarians have sent instructions for in the past, which is better than not being able to make anything at all). hopefully, you can travel by tunnels; most warmounts have good tunneling speed, hopefully you've made use of that to create someplace to run to in advance. do everything you can to cover your escape, as noted before; once again, volunteers to die will most likely be necessary, these volunteers will be responsible for concealing your exit points so that the machine can't just tunnel after you.

SharkForce, you hit everything on the nail! See, 2000 machines sounds like a small regiment but if enough resistance trumps this initial onslaught in good fashion, then surely that would indicate to NEXUS that the larger, desirable targeted prey must be nearby and needs to be ferreted out. Thats when the larger companies and dirty tactics come in to play. How much does one fight without giving away too much in order to preserve the Great House's long-term longevity is the trick that you have revealed. Winning the primary battles is the surface level plot that you cracked open. Its the aftermath that threatens the Great House thar gets the juices going. I really think you devised a clever way of providing a temporary solution with the smaller community mirage idea, to this inevitably growing problem. Biotic suicide squads might have an immediate drafting process. BTW, if the material we submitted is approved, there will be a way to relocate your Engineers, though it is still a difficult and risky thing to do, and highly viewed as a desperate last resort. Librarians, snicker, they will find a way...

The other issue which you nailed is the challenges of successfully evacuating your Great House to live and fight another day. Such intriguing obstacles I fear.

I will say however, maybe the initial waves are too small, but I figured it would build incrementally if the Machine confirmed a location of a sufficient haven. For that reason, lets increase the following wave to robot division and from there a typical army with the following wave twin armies before a selah. That is "IF" NEXUS deems this area infested with Splicers, what say you, if haven is confirmed and located?

BTW, there is a good amount of Tunnel Rats to assist.

I had to find this thread during a rare quiet time at work didnt I!

having multiple exit strategies is important for any House of considerable size, as it would be quite difficult, if not impossible for one and only one exit to work; so scattering the House in many directions increases the odds of at least some surviving
travelling underground wherever possible is imperative
unfortunately, a sacrificial force is necessary to make sure at least some of the remaining House escapes and survives to fight another day.

Tunnel rats could easily create large sink holes everywhere around the House, rigged to cave in once the Machine ground forces begin to converge.
Gardeners could slow down ground force advancement considerably in other areas if they grew significant defensive plants
artillery is always important

Question: would a Librarian going megalo be bold enough; feel invincible enough to take on the Machine?? if so, and members of the House have noticed the changes in the Librarians behavior, maybe it can used as a scapegoat, the sacrificial force

the kamikaze would be a key element in the strategy

id like to keep going but my patient has arrived

It would also sort of depend how exact is the positional location the machines have on the target. With as many gardeners as listed even sporadic emplacements here and there you could make a good 20-30 mile area around the base be a total robot grinder of defensive structures. Mature photon infuser plants have pretty huge range capabilities so air dropping troops would be problematic unless the machine troops flew in very high and then para dropped on the target.

Slogging on foot even without any splicers active intervention the initial force listed would be hard pressed to even get to the base let alone see anything inside of it. If they don't have an exact location of the base you could play tag with probably 10 or 15 times the listed forces without them ever being able to find the exact entrance. And if they do know exactly where the base is and are clearly making a straight line for it I am not sure there is a lot of reason to play to coy with it. Best play at that point would just be collapse all the tunnels over the seedling if it actually is at the max depth 1000+ feet down chance of the machine finding it would likely be very low. All engineers/librarians should be in the seedling anyway or at least a good percentage of them so their immobility should not be to much of an issue.

Have those who cannot fit in the seedling start the evac boogie having pack masters/swarmmasters/gardeners play tag with incoming forces to lure them into trap after trap after trap after trap. fighting gardeners on land they have had a couple months to prepare would be a great way of throwing a whole bunch of robots down a black hole.

Eventually you could clear the area or just arial drop mass quantities of fire but that would not be a fast process and in all that time most of your forces likely could slip away any lake monsters likely are less overall dangerous to the evacuees than the robot forces are.

I would also expect given the digging capability of most warmounts/host armors/gore hounds other bio organic things most of the area around the base likely has a significant amount of tunnels similiar to what was seen in vietnam or even more extensive as the biggest problem splicers would have is unfriendly eyes in the skies. Rooting all possible evacuation tunnels/defensive bunkers would be problematic and time consuming at best.

If you the nearest house is an enemy another possiblity would be send expendable forces to lead a fighting retreat from the collapsed base to lead a very noisy loud fierce battle straight at the holdings of the enemy house. Let the robots think that is where the true threat is once they start encoutering those forces while the remnants of your house slink away to start fresh elsewhere while the seedling goes about its maturation safe and sound with a core of your people/engineers in safety. If they are not discovered in the first few weeks and if the robots have a plausible enough reason to think they have the real target elsewhere with the enemy house the core from the seedling may even be able to redig their own way out and reestablish the original base in a year or so.