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Mechanoids. Being able to run away doesn't win you a fleet battle.

demons they are tricky and also have vast numbers, MAGIC, and are qyite often immune to fire&heat, most mechanoid weapons are plasma or laser. can't win a war vs enemies you cannot hurt. example sure you can beat a vamp up with a woden bat, try it with an aluminium bat and you get eaten.

Lasers don't count as heat weapons, at least in Palladium.
And the mechanoids use a lot of particle beams too.
And missiles.
And psionics.

And melee. With uncountable numbers.

Define "vast numbers". Because (as has been pointed out earlier), the Mechanoids have taken over so much of their home universe that they roll whole galaxies at a time. Strategically they don't think "Okay we'll nail this species next", they think "Okay we've reached a new galaxy, let's go to town on every single humanoid race in it simultaneously". And then they win. Over and over and over again.

If we're talking a Mechanoid force about the same size as the Demon Fleet then it's gonna be pretty dicey for the Mechanoids. But if it's the Demon Fleet vs the entire Mechanoid civilization, then it won't be a war so much as an insultingly easy genocide.

they swarm thats their only strategy. not that impressed with such a basic strategy. also they lose track of stowaways on their continent size ships. avoiding direct combat AND stealthy sneakiness are demon trademarks. demons for the win.

The combined might of the Mechanoids (if it existed in the Phase World setting) could go to war with every major power in the Three Galaxies at the same time and win, without even considering it all that big a deal because they're conducting similar operations at the same time in other galaxies scattered across the universe. If the entire demon fleet infested the Mechanoids it would be like giving an elephant a scalp infection. Mildly annoying, but hardly the end of the world for the elephant.

EDIT: Not to mention that there's the question of what demons are supposed to do after they've stowed away among the Mechanoids. The race is basically impossible to corrupt (what with them being all wanting the same outcomes as each other, and the way they purged their genepool and their collective psychic headspace of independent and potentially aberrant behavior, and the way the're all in psychic communication with each other, and the way the rest of the species will gleefully exterminate any Mechanoids who show signs of being compromised), so that's one traditional demon hobby that's not gonna yield any returns. And meanwhile they could sabotage or destroy a whole fleet and a buttload of Motherships without making any meaningful difference to the Mechanoids' capabilities.

so a demonic techno wizard could develop a psionic computer virus and hack them?

anything in vast numbers is deadly. getting hit with a pillow cute getting hit with 20 pillows at the same time would be painful, getting hit with 20000 pillows would kill you. mechanoids are pillows.lol

Hacking them might be tricky, since almost all the technology the Mechanoids use is made from cybernetic organisms. And Mechanoid spaceships tend to be sentient, psychic, hyperintelligent cybernetic organisms.

Yeah, when the it's more of a creature than a computer, it's difficult to "hack" them.

As opposed to what? -- Love your empty criticism.

LS: "And here's a spell to screw with the Mechanoids: Sanctuary. If you drop out of Invisibility Superior with a Sanctuary spell up, you could immobilize practically the entire ship."



So you're arguing that one person couldn't take over a mothership? Gee, you are insightful.

Newsflash: multiple demons (eg. thousands) would be casting the spell in strategic places.

So that's one mothership down, one thousand galaxies worth of Mechanoid battlefleets who observed and learned from the demon fleet's tactics to go. You'll have to pardon some of us if we don't share your optimism about the demons winning.

With the general size of the mechanoids fleet, the demons would have to work to subvert them honestly.


PS i didn't think this thread was still alive, i started it along time ago.

Time works in weird ways in Mechanoid Space................

Soooooooo 3 years on.


The Demons would still get a whoopin

Just need to say I love this thread. Just a few points to make:

1 - Demons will always loose because they will continually backstab each other.
2 - If the Demons went to war against something like the Mechanoids you know the Deevils would just go to town on them. As long as the Deevils are around any war the Demons fight will always have a second front.
3 - Swarming is not the only tactic the Mechanoids use, just look at SB2 they can be very sneaky. It's just when you have numbers like that every attack looks like a swarm attack.
4 - Devouring swarm, 'nuff said.
5 - Finally everyone knows that the only people that can beat the Mechanoids are the Coalition States because they are the beings in the Megaverse that Kevin loves more then the Mechanoids.

Well, a Mechanoid mothership is as wide as North America.
So the first step in your plan would be to take a look at how many casters would be required to cover that area, for a start. Remember, this is the width, and the spacehip is a "planet-sized" 3D object, so this is just to get an inkling of the numbers needed to do part of the job.
North America has a surface area of 9.54 million sq miles.
Each square mile is 27,878,400 square feet.

Now, a 50' radius circle covers about 7,854 square feet, so in order to cover 1 square mile of surface area, you would need 3,549.5 caster levels.
If you're assuming that each caster is first level, that's 3,550 casters required to cover 1 square mile.
If you're assuming that each caster is 15th level, that's only 237 casters.
Let's just assume that each and every demon that you'd have casting the spell is 15th level, giving the demons an insane amount of benefit of doubt.
At 237 casters per square mile, they'd need around 2,260,980,000 15th level spell casters, all casting the spell at the same time, just to take out a 750' slice of a Mechanoid Mothership.

Your calculations are a little off because the circles will need to overlap if you want the entire surface covered. I'm too lazy to sit down and do boring-assed geometry, but at a guesstimate you're probably one or two hundred thousand 15th level spellcasters short of what you need to blanket a surface the size of North America with Sanctuary spells.

Excellent point.

Not sure it matters.

Finding 237 15th level spell casters, difficult.
Transporting them to precise pre-planned positions on a planetoid sized ships at the same time, impossible.
237 mages casting a high level spell, uninterrupted, aboard a ship with millions of hostile psionic cyborgs, forget about it.

237 or 500 it is just as impossible and you would have to do that for every single mother ship. Also like to remind everyone that the last time the Mechanoids were seen before the new style ones came back they were on a starship than Jupiter (SB2, page 32) so how do they get that taken care of?

I have to say looking over all of these posts that I think the deevils with tactics similar to Phase World and Heroes Unlimited would actually do better against the Mechanoids.

I think the Demons would have this one.
The main reason is the fact that the Mechanoids don't care about Demons, they aren't on their kill list. so if a war were to break out, it is because the Demons started it. The Demons have numbers and capabilities enough to make their initial first strike a devastating one - if they play things smart, the Mechanoids would be at a significant disadvantage before they even knew they were at war.
Even if the Demons screwed up and their initial assault didn't go as planned, unlike most (all?) of you, I think a battle of attrition would fall in favour of the Demons.
Demons can't be killed by Mechanoids - you have to kill them in their home dimension to make it stick and the Mechanoids have no means to do so. With a 0% casualty rate, the Demons cannot possibly be defeated by the Mechanoids.
Sure the Mechanoids re-build fast and maybe the Demons don't initially have the numbers to destroy Mechanoids as fast as they can re-build but over time, that would have to change. Demons can make Phase Demons even easier than Mechanoids can make new Mechanoids. If the Demons went all out on Phase Demon production, their inability to die plus high population growth would eventually get them to a point where they can kill Mechanoids faster than they can reproduce and once it hits that point, the Mechanoids are all but done.

The vast majority of types of demon we've seen so far have been humanoid, and the handful that aren't seem quite happy to work alongside humanoids and take orders fro humanoids, so the Mechanoids do care about them. They care enough that if they ran into the Demon Fleet they'd shoot first and ask questions never.

Also, have to remember that when you "kill" a demon in another dimension it takes decades for them to be reborn & return. It is not instant. Clones in cyborg shells, that is pretty close to instant. Also, as we have seen from the recent minion war the demons are there own worst enemy. Still say they loose as much to their own back stabbing as to Mechanoid tech.

Not to mention that ships and machinery tend to stay blown up for good no matter which dimension they get blown up in, and the soldiers and crew of the Demon Fleet aren't going to be much threat if they come back a few years after their first defeat and findout that the Mechanoids have slagged their infrastructure and reclaimed it for scrap.

The deevils then step in after the mechanoid fleet is finishing off the demons and they open dimensional rifts to the demon realm and the mechanoids go in after finding out the demons are there as well and they destroy for good all demons.

Many people are forgetting the deevils here, they would find the mechanoids the perfect saps to help them obliterate the demons. They use trickery more and shapeshifting, not too mention when the demons have a good plan or something set up you are going to have deevils either alert the mechanoids to it or they will attack or sabotage the demons.

they will make sure the demons never get any sort of advantage and all they have to do is manipulate the mechanoids to do their bidding. Which is exactly the way that they like it and is their strength.

I think you're underestimating the level of insane hatred the mechs have for any humanoid life form.

Just out of curiosity. There have been several mentions here about the Mechanoids conquering whole galaxies, and the like. Where is this mentioned in the books? I am aware that they had a solar system sized base, and a dozen + motherships, but I am trying to find where they got moved up to 'nigh infinite in number'

They never got "moved up to it." They were like that since their first books. You'll have to look in the Mechanoid Trilogy book and maybe SB2 to see that info now.

So.....
The Race was pretty much wiped out hundreds of years ago. There can be as many 'survivors' or 'new generation' as the plot calls for then. But it would seem pretty clear that the horde that 'swept galaxy after galaxy' is dead.

I'm missing what you're referencing.

If the entire mechanoid race was wiped out in the combined events of the Mechanoid Civil war, and the 'sacrifice the race to power the doomsday device' then there are not countless trillions of mechanoids. The original premise that the mechanoids would win by dint of sheer numbers only holds up if...they have those numbers.

The original horde of Mechanoids was killed down to a relatively small number.
After the surviving Mechanoids got a cure, and created new designs for their bodies, they spent decades "creating new legions of clones," and were (as of SB2), " ready to blanket the universe with their mission of destruction.

And we know from SA2 that the Megaversal Legion got chased off by the Mechanoids invading the planet that they were defending.
And we know from CB2 the Poseiden was unable to stop the Mechanoids from killing a planet of him worshippers.
And we know from SB2 that Mechanoid bots such as the Thinmen and runs "are manufactured in the billions." Not "were," but "are."

They may or may not have the numbers that they did before they disappeared, but they certainly seem to have enough.

There are levels of 'enough' though

Are we talking one or two of their continent sized ships or a few million of those ships
Its important, if they only have a few ships and their soldiers then it would be possible to fight them, if they have millions or billions of those ships and their soldiers then yah, if they get D-travel reality is screwed.

As a side note ALL those references could easily be one world ship.

It would be very improbable that they only had one ship.
Remember, the Mechanoids retreated to a giant silver disc larger than the planet Jupiter, and that disc disappeared along with as many Mechanoids as it had, including all the Mechanoids from the 12 motherships that had been guarding it.
That's a LOT of mechanoids, and (as pointed out) they've been building up their numbers for decades since them.

FYI. Since no one seems to want to look it up. Even if this thread is a little old...I thought I would post this from SB2:



Hope that help alittle

R.

Mechanoids are a universal but not THEE universal power. And since demons have been around since before time, I am gonna go with experience on this one. And while nearly game unbalancing by themselves psionics can be beaten. Since his first defeat by the Mechanoids Cutter has raised an army of Algor Delphi Juicers. He also has developed connections with an unknown shadow pantheon and an Asgardian Demigod of slow mind and stout body. So far nobody supports his declaration of war. Most kinda laugh and wander off saying things like suice mission and fool.

Nice.
What page?

You'll find the info on page 81 in the SB2.

Thanks.

NP. I was surprised no one remembered that section of SB2. There is no way the Mechanoids could have taken on whole galaxies at once with the population numbers given even when the where at their most powerful, IE 8 billion Mechanoids with 240 billion robots backing them up.

I wonder how well those number jive with the original series. The way people talk about the mechanoids, I would have assumed that in their prime, their numbers would have been at least 2 orders of magnitude above that.

--flatline

The 8 billion and 240 billion were their prime. Says so in the SB2 that I have quoted. They were and are beyond dangerous to any humanoids they attack and could destroy whole star systems to fuel their war machine. I don't think its numbers as much as people think. If your attacked they send down the swarms just to play. At the same time they carve up your planet as you are fighting for your life. Who could fight against that?

Those number are of the new Mechanoids from SB2. Not the numbers that they used to have. Going off of the numbers from the MT book, a single Mothership had an assault force and crew of at least 1,004,060,000. I say at least because 10,000 of that were Spider Fortresses, and I don't know if the crew for that are included in the other number. If it isn't, that number becomes 1,007,710,000.

So those two number consists of Wasps, Brutes, Runners, Brains, Mantis, Diggers, Thinmen, Runts, Skimmers, and Spider Fortesses (larger number including the SFs' crews if not accounted for already). It makes no mention of Oracles, Overlords, Tunnel Crawlers, Weavels, Transport Vehicles (not sure if they're robots or not), Octopus, Seeker Pods, Exterminators, Assault Probes, Black Widows, Cargo Freighters, Hauler Types 1, 2, and 3, and the Battle Cruisers.

Each Battle Cruiser has a max Crew & Strike Force of either 170,600 or 171,330, depending if the 2 SFs' crews are included in the first number or not.

What I haven't been able to find are any hard numbers such as how many Battle Cruisers accompany each Mothership, how many total Motherships there are, or what a Mechanoid fleet consists of. The only hard number is that 12 Motherships guard the doomsday sphere that's three times the size of Jupiter. For perspective, 1,321.3 Earths fit inside Jupiter, and Earth's population was 7.046 billion back in 2012.

So just off of the 12 Motherships, you're looking at a population of 12,048,720,000 to 12,092,520,000 total Mechanoids, whereas SB2 says there's currently 32,000,000,000 Mechanoids in their universe, and that number's at best 10% of what they used to be. That would leave at best 307,907,480,000 Mechanoids to conquer their galaxy while the rest guarded the doomsday weapon.

While improbable a well supplied and prepared planet of Supers (did this already) would be able to defeat the first mothership at least.

320 billion hardly seems like enough to conquer a galaxy let alone 6 average (even smaller then average sized)galaxies. It wouldn't be hard to imagine it happening over a course of 50,000 years. But a force that size laying waste every humanoid world it comes across will eventually be noticed. The question is. Di they rape worlds and move on? If so it would be a slow process since they like to play with their food so to speak. A sweeping move like that would have to be pretty quick for it to be too late for the natives to notice

800 million currently not 32 billion. At least that's what my copy of SB2 says.

800 million, which is about 10% of what they were before. That becomes 8 billion. I added to that the 24 billion robots, which is 32 billion. One could argue their robots number less than that in the past, or that the number is also about 10% of what they were before. So I will remove the robots from my numbers (even though I think they should be included, because Mechanoid robots don't like me).

A single Mothership has a minimum of 24,050,000 Mechanoids. This number is just the Wasps, Brutes, Runners, Brains, Diggers, and Mantis. We know there were 12 Motherships guarding the doomsday weapon, so that becomes 288,600,000. That would have left 7,711,400,000 Mechanoids to spread across their galaxy, plus robots. All of whom are programmed on the genetic level to exterminate all humanoid life forms, and are armed.

To put that in perspective, the US military is almost 1% of the population of the USA, and not every soldier is a combat arms MOS. They're support, which means they're not going to be as good at taking the fight to the enemy as the combat arms soldiers (especially National Guard and Reservists, who only do the one weekend a month, two weeks in the summer deal).

"But that's what nukes are for!" Yeah. Go to this link: http://www.carloslabs.com/node/16 and enter your zip code. Then select "Tsar bomb" (largest nuclear device ever detonated) and hit "Nuke it." Then start scrolling out. When you get out to all of North America stop, you just reached the size of one Mothership (surface area of 16,400,000 square km).

Fleets need a place to repair/resupply their ships. The Mechanoids bring their planet along with them.

I have to agree with this.

There are so many things the Demons could do with magic that the Mechanoids wouldn't have a chance. Also, the nature of demons is to corrupt others. Given the comparative simple-mindedness of the Mechanoids, I'd think the demons could corrupt them to the point that they wouldn't have to fight them at all.

Magic beats tech any day, somebody call Tolkeen tell them they're not all dead. NGR also needs to figure out that Operation Sea Storm was total disaster and the Gargoyles are about to eat them all. And somebody needs to tell the Lords of Magic from Dweomar that the planet of followers they had, the Mechanoids didn't destroy it, they just misplaced it.

Come on what little of the Demon fleet there is can't even take on the barely organized forces of the Three Galaxies now try an army of billions.

Can you please tell me where on Earth or Hades you get this?

The leadership of the Mechanoids has IQ, ME, MA in the 25-30 range, with a nice +4 to +6 save vs. magic bonus so good luck on that end. How on Earth do you corrupt a clone? Promise him women? Eternal life? Political power? The only method of "corrupting" the Mechanoids is how the AbM did it originally, by science and genetic alteration which is something that is way beyond the demons ability.

There is no historical precedent for anyone being able to divide, trick, or demoralize the Mechanoids in any fashion other then what the original AbM Oracle did hundreds of years ago and the normal bag of tricks the demons employ are useless.

However, there is plenty of precedence of the Demons being divided, tricked, & demoralized by each other, gods, and of course Dyvilians. If any demon lord or general ever managed to get the upper hand on the Mechanoids their rivals in Hades or enemies in Dyval would tear into them. Whatever the limits to the numbers, tech, and psionics the Mechanoids are unified in a way that few species are. The very nature of demons is to attack and conquer each other as much as anyone else. Just look how badly the infighting has screwed up the Taut Offensive and the minion war in general. Sorry folks, this imaginary matchup goes to the Mechanoids.

I don't believe Tolkeen would've fallen to the CS. Kevin wrote it that way, but I don't think its realistic.



Again, that's how it was written by Palladium.



Again, that's how it was written by Palladium. Just because Palladium choose to make a storyline go in a particular direction doesn't mean that's how it would actually play out if it was real, or in an game.

Also, how many demons do you think there are? 1000? 10,000? 1,000,000? I'd say they probably number in the billions too.



Because you can do more with magic than you can with technology. Technology can't even detect magic and magic-using forces could easily cause catastrophic damage to non-magic-using forces.



We'll have to disagree on that.



No historical precedent? So what? Does that mean it couldn't happen because it hasn't happened yet? "640k of memory should be enough for anyone." -- Bill Gates, 1981



Why? Because you say so?



I don't agree.