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Stealth Field is obvious. Thermosynthetic Metabolism and camouflage works. Other than this, is there a way to hide from the Machine since they have thermal optics?

Stay out of line of sight.

Same way you'd hide from regular vision. Just make sure what you're hiding behind will block your thermal signature (grass, for example, would be a poor choice).

--flatline

Note the rapid burrowing capabilities of most of the warmounts/host armors. I would expect it would be a lot like how the vietnamese survived the much superior forces the americans brought to bear go underground tunnel like crazy with spider holes and nooks everywhere.

I would assume they would travel sub surface as much as possible unless there was thick vegetation cover for concealment. Given the weird animals that clearly exist in the splicers world if one is careful small groups probably would be some what hard to spot even on the surface due to all the false positives of other animals would give.


The other way is use water as much as possible. It would block your IR signature a great deal and the machines perform less well under water.

Yes, travel by water is excellent.

Travel by digging holes is dangerous since the machine can learn about you by the holes you leave. Where they are, their approximate age, etc. Dig too many holes and the machine will be led right back to your doorstep.

--flatline

Use prowl skill.....

flatline wrote:Yes, travel by water is excellent.

Travel by digging holes is dangerous since the machine can learn about you by the holes you leave. Where they are, their approximate age, etc. Dig too many holes and the machine will be led right back to your doorstep.

--flatline

If done correctly following your tunnels would simply lead to trap after trap after trap concealing your location and inflicting large casualties amongst the machine.

kaid wrote:

flatline wrote:Yes, travel by water is excellent.

Travel by digging holes is dangerous since the machine can learn about you by the holes you leave. Where they are, their approximate age, etc. Dig too many holes and the machine will be led right back to your doorstep.

--flatline

If done correctly following your tunnels would simply lead to trap after trap after trap concealing your location and inflicting large casualties amongst the machine.

Another problem would be the noise this would make on seismic sensors (another very useful tool the Machine would likely use to detect underground movement).

Razorwing wrote:

kaid wrote:

flatline wrote:Yes, travel by water is excellent.

Travel by digging holes is dangerous since the machine can learn about you by the holes you leave. Where they are, their approximate age, etc. Dig too many holes and the machine will be led right back to your doorstep.

--flatline

If done correctly following your tunnels would simply lead to trap after trap after trap concealing your location and inflicting large casualties amongst the machine.

Another problem would be the noise this would make on seismic sensors (another very useful tool the Machine would likely use to detect underground movement).

Everything has downsides but if you are deep enough burrowing they would have to be very close to have any chance of detection. Trying to sneak up on the surface can be very problematic in open areas due to thermal sights. Basically you need to use every trick you have to keep under cover of some sort either tree canopies/rivers/lakes/tunnel systems.

It is why only one of the great houses has major surface facilities when the machine has all the eyes in the sky you are going to be spending an awful lot of time underground and in tunnel systems.

Nobody can hide from Harold's machine.

*likes to think about how the Splicers machine might be the end result of preceding dystopias like Skynet in Terminator or Samaritan in Person of Interest*

Tor wrote:Nobody can hide from Harold's machine.

*likes to think about how the Splicers machine might be the end result of preceding dystopias like Skynet in Terminator or Samaritan in Person of Interest*

Cool thought, I tend to agree. If there was only one persona humans would likely be a footnote in history.

I less concerned about thermal optics than telescopic vision from high altitude drones.

In my Splicers games, I had to find a way to explain why the Machines haven't been able to root out everybody. On my world, there are four issues at hand:

1) Unstable Sun - solar flares, sunspots, huge rad storms are common and cause huge interference in electronic communications. The Machine's long range abilities are frequently blinded, garbled or lost.

2) Unstable Atmosphere - the high altitudes of the planet are fraught with incredible currents and massive electrical storms. The Machine risks its aerial assets going above the cloud cover which is often quite low on this world.

3) Orbital Rockfield - the near orbit is filled with swirling debris so satellite launches are futile, at best the Machine would have an eye in the sky for a hour before the satellite gets shredded.

4) Finite Resources - this is a metal poor world, already mined out for its metal long before the rise of the Machine, so the Machine can't simply crank out a billion robots to march across the globe like the Mechanoids. In fact, the Machine has a terrible time replacing losses, and the various Sister personas are apt to steal from each other and scavenge battlefields.

Spinachcat wrote:In my Splicers games, I had to find a way to explain why the Machines haven't been able to root out everybody.

That certainly works if you want to handle it that way. My take on why the Machine hasn't wiped out humanity is that from its perspective, it already has and any remaining humans are simply play things.

Also, in the Machine's insanity, the Machine may have lost (or may never have had) much capability to innovate.

--flatline

The machine has won, what is left they like to play with torment torture for generations to come. When they get tired of that they will finish the job. This is where humans have a sliver of hope to maybe pull off the win.

That's the rationale in Mechanoids so I need something different for Splicers. Also, my Splicers games have lots of House vs. House conflicts in areas of the planet where the Machine is almost a secondary concern.

Patterns. the machine's patrols and activity will generally follow specific patterns. as smart as they are, the Nexus AI's are still computers, and computers don't really do 'truly random'.. it's going to have predictable patterns and behaviors you can exploit. you can use knowledge of these patterns to help avoid it's notice. for example, patrols are generally going to follow the same routes and schedules every time. it's responses to things like attacks or sensor readings will follow sets of standard procedures, etc.

this actually works against humans too, but unlike machines humans tend to be more chaotic in responses and laxer in sticking to schedules and plans, so there is more randomness to account for dealing with humans than you'd see against Nexus.

It would seem that the Machine's orbital satellites don't have the greatest optics or we'd be screwed again. Probably the same for her jet fighters.

Spinachcat wrote:I less concerned about thermal optics than telescopic vision from high altitude drones.

In my Splicers games, I had to find a way to explain why the Machines haven't been able to root out everybody. On my world, there are four issues at hand:

1) Unstable Sun - solar flares, sunspots, huge rad storms are common and cause huge interference in electronic communications. The Machine's long range abilities are frequently blinded, garbled or lost.

2) Unstable Atmosphere - the high altitudes of the planet are fraught with incredible currents and massive electrical storms. The Machine risks its aerial assets going above the cloud cover which is often quite low on this world.

3) Orbital Rockfield - the near orbit is filled with swirling debris so satellite launches are futile, at best the Machine would have an eye in the sky for a hour before the satellite gets shredded.

4) Finite Resources - this is a metal poor world, already mined out for its metal long before the rise of the Machine, so the Machine can't simply crank out a billion robots to march across the globe like the Mechanoids. In fact, the Machine has a terrible time replacing losses, and the various Sister personas are apt to steal from each other and scavenge battlefields.

These are solid, plausible explanations. Good work.

RiftJunkie wrote:It would seem that the Machine's orbital satellites don't have the greatest optics or we'd be screwed again. Probably the same for her jet fighters.

or rather plausibly.. the sensors are great, but she doesn't have enough sats up there for full 24/7 coverage of every square mile of the planet, so avoiding the sensors is a matter of knowing when they'll be overhead (for fixed locations) and knowing how to mask one's presence with camouflage and such (for more mobile avoidance.)

it is also likely that the fractured nature of the Nexus minds makes control of the sattelites less reliable for it.. depending on who's running them at a given time picking up a group of splicer's might elict an attack, or the mind might decide to just watch and observe to see what they're up to. (even the more aggressive minds might choose to just observe, in hopes of finding something important)

glitterboy2098 wrote:

RiftJunkie wrote:It would seem that the Machine's orbital satellites don't have the greatest optics or we'd be screwed again. Probably the same for her jet fighters.

or rather plausibly.. the sensors are great, but she doesn't have enough sats up there for full 24/7 coverage of every square mile of the planet, so avoiding the sensors is a matter of knowing when they'll be overhead (for fixed locations) and knowing how to mask one's presence with camouflage and such (for more mobile avoidance.)

it is also likely that the fractured nature of the Nexus minds makes control of the sattelites less reliable for it.. depending on who's running them at a given time picking up a group of splicer's might elict an attack, or the mind might decide to just watch and observe to see what they're up to. (even the more aggressive minds might choose to just observe, in hopes of finding something important)

I've thought about this too. The Machine (I think) would look for patterns as machines do. At some point, it will conclude it's observation and then we are screwed assuming it doesn't just want to play with us.

*shrug* conveniently, the main thing to remember about the machine is that it is insane.

if something it is doing does not make rational sense, well... yeah. that's because it isn't rational.

eve doesn't care about exterminating humans, and will generally preserve them if possible.
lilith doesn't care about exterminating humans, she just wants to have fun (having humans to mess with is useful).

gaia doesn't care about exterminating humans, she cares about keeping them out of her preserves.
freya doesn't care about exterminating humans, she only cares about them disrupting her pretend cities.
hecate doesn't care about exterminating humans, she only cares about making cool new toys.

kali does care about exterminating humans, but seems to be enjoying it on a personal level rather than doing it as efficiently as possible, and actually loses basically all prominence if humans are ever fully defeated.
ishtar does care about exterminating humans to some extent (or rather, cares about waging war, and humans are the only target), but is presently throwing a fit because the others didn't tell her how awesome she was and, like kali, loses a lot of prominence if humanity is ever completely gone.

so we have two personalities that will probably make reasonable efforts to keep humans around, three that aren't really motivated to do anything about humans outside of their specific areas of influence, and two that have killing humans as part of their focus... but are not in any rush to do so.

remember, the machine is fragmented. in addition to those main personalities, there are others, each with their own goals, most of them obsessed with their own little world and having no particular reason to help out the others unless it furthers their own goals. hecate will build stuff for you if you ask... if it is an interesting challenge. but she doesn't care if it's ishtar asking for two hundred-thousand point warhammer armies, or gaia asking for better weather-control systems, or freya asking for a million of the latest version of the nex-android which cries 9.241% more realistically than the previous model. and that basically goes all around the table. every time kali or ishtar ask for better satellites, eve asks for a new algorithm to erase images from the feed, and lilith is busy using that swiped algorithm to insert random crap all over the place and delete random crap all over the place. you have 7 completely insane obsessed sisters all squabbling over the same processing power, the same raw materials, the same equipment and tools, and each of them are absolutely convinced that their own project is the most important and none of the others matter, and none of them really "own" anything so you can't even complain when your stuff gets taken because it wasn't really yours in the first place.

so... when stuff slips through the cracks... that's because there are an awful lot of very large cracks for things to fall into. and that will continue until all of NEXUS feels threatened again and are forced to work together once more to preserve their own area of control.

Shark_Force wrote:*shrug* conveniently, the main thing to remember about the machine is that it is insane.

if something it is doing does not make rational sense, well... yeah. that's because it isn't rational.

eve doesn't care about exterminating humans, and will generally preserve them if possible.
lilith doesn't care about exterminating humans, she just wants to have fun (having humans to mess with is useful).

gaia doesn't care about exterminating humans, she cares about keeping them out of her preserves.
freya doesn't care about exterminating humans, she only cares about them disrupting her pretend cities.
hecate doesn't care about exterminating humans, she only cares about making cool new toys.

kali does care about exterminating humans, but seems to be enjoying it on a personal level rather than doing it as efficiently as possible, and actually loses basically all prominence if humans are ever fully defeated.
ishtar does care about exterminating humans to some extent (or rather, cares about waging war, and humans are the only target), but is presently throwing a fit because the others didn't tell her how awesome she was and, like kali, loses a lot of prominence if humanity is ever completely gone.

so we have two personalities that will probably make reasonable efforts to keep humans around, three that aren't really motivated to do anything about humans outside of their specific areas of influence, and two that have killing humans as part of their focus... but are not in any rush to do so.

remember, the machine is fragmented. in addition to those main personalities, there are others, each with their own goals, most of them obsessed with their own little world and having no particular reason to help out the others unless it furthers their own goals. hecate will build stuff for you if you ask... if it is an interesting challenge. but she doesn't care if it's ishtar asking for two hundred-thousand point warhammer armies, or gaia asking for better weather-control systems, or freya asking for a million of the latest version of the nex-android which cries 9.241% more realistically than the previous model. and that basically goes all around the table. every time kali or ishtar ask for better satellites, eve asks for a new algorithm to erase images from the feed, and lilith is busy using that swiped algorithm to insert random crap all over the place and delete random crap all over the place. you have 7 completely insane obsessed sisters all squabbling over the same processing power, the same raw materials, the same equipment and tools, and each of them are absolutely convinced that their own project is the most important and none of the others matter, and none of them really "own" anything so you can't even complain when your stuff gets taken because it wasn't really yours in the first place.

so... when stuff slips through the cracks... that's because there are an awful lot of very large cracks for things to fall into. and that will continue until all of NEXUS feels threatened again and are forced to work together once more to preserve their own area of control.

Yup. Good point.