#breakpoint

Lore: aliens invaded. It's you. you're the aliens. What species? Lots of different ones. There is a lot of species that really want this planet. How do they solve this? They send a bunch of engineers and soldiers to the ground in a competition of who can use the planet best.

Gameplay: split in three parts.

1: design a vehicle/mech. This is a really, really complicated part of the game. There are so many different ways you can build your thing. It's not sliding a bunch of parts together to build a machine like C.A.T.S, you can do stuff like design your own tread pattern for tires (that actually affect traction) design the mechanisms for your weapons ( flamethrowers, plasma, magnetic slugs, melee, lingering explosives, etc) and figure out how and where to put things like the battery, cockpit, armor, cargo storage, and munition storage.

2: resource hunting. You only start with so much stuff. This is based on the species you start as, with some giving you more material, some giving you better starting technology, some having better resistance to certain terrains, or different starting weapons. (E.G, humans start with glass cannon presets, weird squid things having cloaking, and the knife squirrels having high movement presets) you can neither naturally collect the resources from the planet, or you can go hunting for other players to steal their resources and vehicles. If your vehicle gets destroyed, you'll lose the resources you had and that were required to make it. If you completely run out of stuff, your home planet's government will bail you out, but you go into debt and need to send them resources in the future. The more successful you've been, the more they'll bail you out, but the more debt you'll have

3: reverse engineering. Once you bring your raw resources back to base, you gotta chuck them into the processors. For most stuff you find from the planet, this is pretty easy. Check your rocks into your smelter, your Biomass into the genebay, and once it's processed, you can send it back home to trade for materials you need more for your mech.

But where it gets interesting, is enemy mechs.

You can just throw them into the scrapper, but then you don't get their technology.

All your weapons, armor, mobility, scanners, defenses. You have to make them yourself.

Or you can rip them out of other people's mechs.

You can steal each other's technology, but you'll need to rip it out.

Here we bring in some mechanics from hardspace: shipbreaker. You have tools, you can use your tools to rip each other's vehicles apart and find their presets. If you wanted to, you could reverse engineer the entire thing. But you'd reverse engineer the damage. Your preset would have the damage It took, and you wouldn't be able to use the individual parts.

You can't copy over the gun, because you don't know how it works without the rest of the ship. You gotta break off the pieces you want, and then the rest of the ship can be scrapped for parts.

In my head, this is kind of like a team extraction game. You have your base and your base can't be touched by other players. (Narratively due to treaties or something) but once you go in, it's kind of up to you how it goes.

Do you start out as a scavenger? Picking up the pieces bigger and scarier players left behind fighting each other?

Do you go as a glass cannon, and throw yourself into the big guy, hoping to take out a chunk?

Do you pick out resources from the world, Negotiating with an enemy or separate team from your species for better technology?

Do you scorch the earth, not to get a foothold, but to kick everyone else in the shins?

I don't control that anymore.