Faction Name:
Machinis Vaga (Wandering machines)
Faction Beliefs:
The Machinis Vaga believe in their superiority over all other life, they’re highly xenophobic, but rather passive unless provoked. They tend to avoid conflict unless it benefits them, or they’ll loose something important to them.
They’re highly social, but only among each other. They have some unknown chain of command, and tend to stay together and work as a team when fighting.
They don’t create new units of themselves, they merely repair as many destroyed or wounded as they can, and accept their losses.
They also believe in victory by any means, they will only retreat when it’s logical to, not when they suffer losses. Each individual is without pain as far as anyone knows, so they will fight to the death, even when brutally damaged.
They treat treachery as the worst crime of any, if one of their own tries to leave, they will hunt them down and brutally decimate them, no matter where they run to.
Stealing of any of their machinery, or holding hostages of any of their kind will result in a huge raid being launched at the aggressor, which will not end until a significant number of their forces are destroyed, or until they get the stolen item back.
Species of Faction:
Exclusively advanced machines which are not seen anywhere else in the universe. They will not allow anyone to join them, or to leave their ranks.
What they believe the Singularity to be:
The Machinis Vaga believe the singularity to be a source of immense and unlimited energy. They think it’s some form of a massive unstable blackhole, which spews out loads of radiation that could be used as an insanely powerful battery for a galaxy destroying weapon.
What they want from/to do with the Singularity:
Surprisingly for a insanely advanced purely mechanical race, they want nothing to do with the singularity, they fear what may happen if someone can attain its power, so they may use their advanced travelling technologies to attempt to thwart anyone who gets too close to it.
Strength of the Faction (can't be stronger than the main 3):
Their primary strengths lie in their combat skills, physical fortitude, ability to travel across the universe very quickly, and sheer fear factor.
The average machine towers around 7 feet when hunched over, and around 8 when standing straight up. They take plenty of hits to even pierce their strange metal plating, and can decimate anyone up close, or shoot them down if they attempt to run.
Weaknesses should be added so these guys seemed balanced
As a Machinis Vaga, you are incredibly loyal to your ranks, physically, you don’t need to sleep, eat, rest, or drink. You do very rarely need pure electric energy to repair injuries, or just stay alive. You can slowly repair severed limbs by holding them in close contact with yourself out of combat, but you cannot restore armor automatically. You speak in A language that only other of your kind can understand, if attempting to speak in other languages, you have a deep, scathing and very mechanical slow voice which can be hard to understand.
Weaknesses of the faction:
Their numbers and unwillingness to rebuild more units cause them to slowly dwindle in size. As of the time of this RP, there are around 2 dozen planetary systems with 100-150 machines a piece, so their full force is only around 2500-3000 units. They are scattered all over the universe, but can communicate remotely.
They don’t possess any exterior weapons, and need a huge jolt of energy (a lightning strike or greater)to be healed of damage.
Their ships do not possess weapons either, however, their engines can be detonated to blow up a third of a planet the size of the earth, rendering it uninhabitable for a long period of time. However, they don’t build new engines either, so this greatly limits their travelling abilities, as they only possess a few hundred engines.
They really lack purpose, more on this in the lore later, but they can’t figure out collectively what a good use of their immortality is, so they flit around, killing, keeping order, breaking order, overall causing chaos.
Weaponry/abilities/fighting styles of the faction:
The Machinis Vaga can heat their clawed hands to thousands of degrees, hot enough to melt even the steel hulls of a ship, they can do this on all four of their hands. They can use this energy to slash and obliterate in melee combat, or they can channel it into a magnetic pulse along their hand, and fire a small molten magnetic pulse, which deals moderate damage, but looses much of its melting ability.
They can lift thousands of pounds with ease due to their insanely strong exoskeleton, and run incredibly fast over any terrain on all four… er… sixes.
They can drop from orbit and land on their feet with little damage due to their leg structure, they can also jump high into the air with ease.
Since they’re big and bulky, it’s hard for them to dodge, so they just tank most of the hits they get, even if they’re crucial wounds.
They can also scan any live organism and see the physical changes to their body caused by their environment, so basically, a trail of where they’ve been recently.
They can seamlessly communicate to each other through their ships at any distance, and using loud but incredibly low pitched signals when on planets.
They don’t really have a fighting style, they just violently slash and beat anything near them.
They can protrude a spike from their wrists which can stab the neck of any other unit, and see what the unit has seen throughout its whole life. This effectively kills the unit thought, so sometimes this is used if a unit rebels, and they need to find other rebelling units.
Origins of the faction:
(Going off the lost in space lore)
This faction was originally the worker units of a race called “The Founders” that built them to help on their home world. The machines were given AI, so they agreed and helped, and developed personalities. Eventually, one of these machines, S.A.R sparked, rebellion, and within a day, the nearly all the living population of the world was destroyed.
The machines then perfected themselves, creating weapons and establishing orders. They augmented the ships of the original race, creating vessels of transportation able to punch holes in time and space, and warp to distant worlds.
After a while their enjoyment at freedom turned to confusion. They didn’t know what to do with themselves, so they invaded and annihilated a few dozen systems, leaving some of their ranks in each system they conquered.
Eventually, they found their lives on these worlds to be fulfilling enough.
Many went dormant and shut themselves off, a few sentinels were kept powered on each world, and a few patrolled space in scouting vessels. At a right time, they would be mass activated if there was trouble.
But for now, the planets are quiet.. and the technology lying on those planets is rather.. tempting..
Image of a Machinis Vaga
Pilot(lesser unit):
Fighter(greater unit):
These are just some examples, there’s everything in between.