[TrashMan]

any post-Capella campaign would face one problem to the common sense/logic of it.

How to make shivans a really BIG threat? Since the GTVA now KNOWS how to seal the nodes, I bet the'll have node-collapsing ship just waiting for hte next time the shivans come.
Then it's just pull back and seal the node, and wait for them to come again. Kinda hard to make a good campaing, for how many missions could it have (given that the node-collapser is ready and the node would prolyl be down within hours of hte shivan sighting).

so you somehow must go around that obstacle.
How? If you make the shivans not-node dependant (give them some portable portals, super-jump drives or dimensional rifts) then how the hell would the GTVA stop them? Making the GTVA superior and actually defeating the shivans is...well..

One possilbe way would be if the shivans come fast and hard from more then one direction. But even then the systems could still be closed, only the GTVA losses would be bigger.

any thoughts?

[Nuclear1]

so you somehow must go around that obstacle.
How? If you make the shivans not-node dependant (give them some portable portals, super-jump drives or dimensional rifts) then how the hell would the GTVA stop them? Making the GTVA superior and actually defeating the shivans is...well..

See: Derelict.

Frankly, Shivans becoming a big threat post-FS2 isn't difficult.  It is trite, however, to have a campaign that says "lol the destroeyrs haf retunred we will kill them oh no we r screweedd lol."  Having the Shivans as rampaging destroyers who are aimed at the complete destruction of the Terrans and Vasudans really does get old after FS, FS2, and the countless FS2 mods related to the return of the Shivans. 

To make it interesting, one typically has to make his own rules for the Shivans, or really stretch some details from FS2.  For example, giving the Shivans something to be afraid of, such as another, larger race, adds something interesting and a plot twist to a new campaign, but violates what we can deduct as the Shivans being the Great Preservers; now, instead, they are a terrified little race of bugs that has a giant can of Raid aimed at them.  You can stretch some things from canonical FS, such as the Ancients not being entirely wiped out, ETAK being used to manipulate and control the Shivans, or the Shivans not being the race that had wiped out the Ancients. 

Basically, what we know about the Shivans restricts creativity along canonical lines; we're told the Shivans are a race that destroy spacefaring races when they go too far, and will relentlessly pursue their goal.  Unless someone can add subplots or other facets of the Shivans that would make this interesting a third time, I think we may be at an end of what we can do with the Shivans so far as a full-fledged campaign is concerned.

This doesn't limit historical campaigns, however.  Having a campaign set during the FS/FS2 timelines is more acceptable, seeing as how it doesn't create a Third Great War, but simply elaborates on the first two.

[TrashMan]

Interesting..but I was refering to the threat shivans pose to the GTVA.

not "how do you make them scary" but "how do you make them dangerous to us since we can close nodes"

Maby if they strike fast and hard and reach a system the GTVA can't afford to lose.. or attack a heavily populated system, so the GTVA "must" wait with the node-closing untill the civilians are evacuated...

[Snail]

Or maybe the GTVA closes the node... And to their horror the Shivans deploy a new ship which can traverse unstable or destroyed jump nodes by stabilizing them temporarily...

[Turey]

"how do you make them dangerous to us since we can close nodes"

They don't need to be dangerous to us. They make us work for them.

For whatever reason, the Shivans seem to have a tendency to restrict subspace use by other species. I can see a campaign where the Shivans continue attacking one system after the other, and Command keeps closing off nodes, until we realize that we've trapped ourselves in a cage of our own making. We will still be able to use subspace between the systems left open to us, but we won't be able to reach any systems beyond the few we have inside our "cage." As long as the reason Shivans are restricting our subspace travel is because of our expansion via subspace (A theory that ties in nicely with the Ancient monologues), and not because of something else like the wear and tear subspace travel puts on subspace, this would effectively solve the Human/Vasudan problem for the Shivans.

[Nuclear1]

Interesting..but I was refering to the threat shivans pose to the GTVA.

not "how do you make them scary" but "how do you make them dangerous to us since we can close nodes"

And that's exactly what I was referring to.  FS, FS2, and every major post-Capella campaign has shown the Shivans as rampaging through GTVA space with an unstoppable force (Juggernaut fleet, Derelict fleet)) or seemingly invincible ship (Lucifer).  Since Shivans don't pose as much of a threat when deployed in single cruisers or groups of smaller warships, the only way to really make them effective or a threat to the GTVA is to deploy massive warships or large concentrations of warships.

The only other canonical method that the Shivans can be effective against the GTVA is their knowledge of subspace.  The end of FS mentioned that the Shivans could rebuild nodes, and the end of FS2 showed that they had a destructive control of subspace as well.  Even Derelict's Nyarlathotep, for instance, was able to stabilize nodes with a portable Knossos.  If you want to look at other user-made campaigns, look at Boomerang--the Moloch's tactical subspace jump from one point to another in a battle.

So, really, there are your two best weapons for the Shivans:  massive numbers or subspace.  The massive numbers bit is a little overdone, so if you want to make them a threat to the GTVA or really awe the player, have them do something really over the top with subspace--have them jump to a system that the GTVA could never reach, then reappear right on the GTVA's doorstep in Beta Aquilae or some other core system. 

Going beyond subspace and a massive force tends to either be ridiculous or noncanonical.

[G0atmaster]

I remember there being something about the Shivans possibly being exiles, which is (possibly?) the reason for them exploding the Capella star, I.E. making a super-subspace jump or something to return home.  Perhaps whatever made the Shivans exiles shows up. 

I just thought of something when reading the above posts.  It's only loosely related to the above paragraph.  Perhaps the whole collapsing-nodes-when-shivans-show-up tactic was one the Ancients employed.  Then, realizing they were caging themselves in, this became motivation to develop the Knossos device.

Also, I just thought... perhaps the ginormous (three-system-deep at least) nebula that's occupied by the Shivans, is really the remains of other exploded stars.  Note on the ending cinema, you can see a huge nebula in the background, which one can theorize is the remains of Capella.  Maybe this was done to the Ancients?  Maybe this was more attempts by the Shivans to "go home?"

Perhaps there was some ancient race, even before THE "Ancients" existed, that fought back against the Shivans so strongly, they cut them off from their own homeworld?  Perhaps there's a few scattered remnants of this race on scattered planets? After all, the Shivans focused on controlling nodes rather than worlds or installations or resources.  Usually they just blew those up.  However, the only planet they destroyed in FS1-2 were the whole of the Capella system and Vasuda prime.  To my knowledge, all other planets were left completely untouched, in terms of Canon.

Most of it is way out there in terms of Canon, but I thought it sounded pretty decent.

[NGTM-1R]

This all assumes that the Shivans are all in contact with each other, something which the Lucifer makes kinda suspect.

Future actions against the Shivans may not take the forms outlined; instead it may be dealing with Shivan expeditionary fleets similar to that of the Lucifer, which, while impressive, really couldn't hope to take on the whole GTVA. (Derelict had some trouble sustaining itself in this regard IMO.) While such actions do not lend themselves to epic storytelling or great drama, they do offer a reasonably balanced situation for which to have a couple of GTVA battlegroups and a Shivan fleet duke it out.

[aldo_14]

any post-Capella campaign would face one problem to the common sense/logic of it.

How to make shivans a really BIG threat? Since the GTVA now KNOWS how to seal the nodes, I bet the'll have node-collapsing ship just waiting for hte next time the shivans come.
Then it's just pull back and seal the node, and wait for them to come again. Kinda hard to make a good campaing, for how many missions could it have (given that the node-collapser is ready and the node would prolyl be down within hours of hte shivan sighting).

so you somehow must go around that obstacle.
How? If you make the shivans not-node dependant (give them some portable portals, super-jump drives or dimensional rifts) then how the hell would the GTVA stop them? Making the GTVA superior and actually defeating the shivans is...well..

One possilbe way would be if the shivans come fast and hard from more then one direction. But even then the systems could still be closed, only the GTVA losses would be bigger.

any thoughts?

You're assuming the GTVA could identify all the nodes the Shivans could use, that the GTVA can easily mass-produce meson bombs, that the Shivans wouldn't be better prepared to destroy the collapser ship, that the GTVA has enough spare destroyers following Capella to use them in this way whilst avoiding a rout, and that the Shivans can't repair nodes.

After all, in FS1 the Shivans simply popped up all over the place - even apparently to get past blockades ("Somehow, the Shivan forces have circumvented our blockade at Antares, and now control the Deneb system").  Put a Shivan force right into Beta Aquilae and suddenly destroying nodes itsn't such a good tactic (it's like amputating diseased flesh - sooner or later you run out of all flesh if you keep cutting).

[Qwer]

My personal point of view on Shivans case is that Shivans didn't want to destroy GTVA during Capella. IMO they had more important things to do. That led me to assumption that Shivans will:
- return after they deal with "the more important stuff" and destroy GTVA
- return after some time, but in much more complex situation
- won't return.

[Agentbolt]

FS2 seemed to go to great lengths to indicate how arrogant GTVA command is.  "Oh look, a space portal with one Shivan destroyer in it, now that we've killed it we've proven we're better than them"

The post-Capella campaign I imagine is the GTVA reopening the node with what they learned from the Knossos device, running into another LARGE Shivan fleet, and wiping it out with some new Colossus-type ship or weapon.  After wrecking the Shivans and declaring themselves masters of the Universe, the GTVA runs into some fourth species, whatever species originally exiled the Shivans from their own home.  The new Species can have whatever trick deemed neccessary to make them unbeatable (Much larger ships, some kind of Interdictor spaceship that makes subspace travel impossible, making it impossible for us to escape them by jumping out and sealing off nodes, whatever)  I think the Shivans as a mortal enemy are played, they've been around for thousands of years and we managed to match them in technology, we just got stumped by far superior numbers.  The next step should have us trumping them in technology, but then running into someone much worse. 

[aldo_14]

FS2 seemed to go to great lengths to indicate how arrogant GTVA command is.  "Oh look, a space portal with one Shivan destroyer in it, now that we've killed it we've proven we're better than them"

The post-Capella campaign I imagine is the GTVA reopening the node with what they learned from the Knossos device, running into another LARGE Shivan fleet, and wiping it out with some new Colossus-type ship or weapon.  After wrecking the Shivans and declaring themselves masters of the Universe, the GTVA runs into some fourth species, whatever species originally exiled the Shivans from their own home.  The new Species can have whatever trick deemed neccessary to make them unbeatable (Much larger ships, some kind of Interdictor spaceship that makes subspace travel impossible, making it impossible for us to escape them by jumping out and sealing off nodes, whatever)  I think the Shivans as a mortal enemy are played, they've been around for thousands of years and we managed to match them in technology, we just got stumped by far superior numbers.  The next step should have us trumping them in technology, but then running into someone much worse. 

Ummmm..... I'm not sure quite how the Shivans can be inferior or equal in tech when FS2 shows them having the ability to supernova stars and mass-produce ships superior to the one that the GTVA took 20 years to design and build.

[BlackDove]

I think it is safe to say that through the story, Shivans will always own your ass, no matter which iteration of the game you whip out.

[Qwer]

Aldo - Shivans aren't that superior. It took one hundred Juggernauths to nuke it and lots of them overloaded their powergrids in process. Their warships also aren't so much superior.

[aldo_14]

Aldo - Shivans aren't that superior. It took one hundred Juggernauths to nuke it and lots of them overloaded their powergrids in process. Their warships also aren't so much superior.

Yes, because it's piss easy to supernova a star using a hitherto unknown subspace 'weapon'.

[BlackDove]

I just did it yesterday as a matter of fact.

[Agentbolt]

Having 100 Juggernauts doesn't impress me all that much.  The Shivans have been trolling around space for thousands of years.  THOUSANDS.  Humans have been puttering around for 300 years or so.  From what we've seen, the Shivans won simply because they've been cruising out in outer space for long enough to have had time to build up a sizeable fleet.  I'm not sure where you're getting that they "mass-produced Juggernauts" when it's just as likely they've been adding slowly to their fleet over hundreds or thousands of years. 

[BlackDove]

And rookie mistake 101, you tried looking at the Shivans from the human perspective.

You fail.

[aldo_14]

Having 100 Juggernauts doesn't impress me all that much.  The Shivans have been trolling around space for thousands of years.  THOUSANDS.  Humans have been puttering around for 300 years or so.  From what we've seen, the Shivans won simply because they've been cruising out in outer space for long enough to have had time to build up a sizeable fleet.  I'm not sure where you're getting that they "mass-produced Juggernauts" when it's just as likely they've been adding slowly to their fleet over hundreds or thousands of years. 

You're assuming they only have 100 juggernauts and no more or no larger.  A bit like the same mistake made with the Ravana......

[IceFire]

Also assuming they can't just replace the SJ's at a relatively quickly rate. Sure the GTVA took 20 years to build the Colossus but whose to say that the Shivans can't pump them out every year or so.