Basically a 1 player version of the aliens adventure game.
Runs on the Astero ship engine, also the text engine more generally.
The basic gameplay is an alien invasion of a spaceship that slowly spreads from 3 points, gaining abilities as it takes over certain rooms and combining them when its pieces meet up. All of your actions take some amount of time, which gives the alien force more time to spread and evolve, so being efficient is key.
You have a limited number of people you can "spawn", and they all have different abilities which makes their ability to do certain actions take less time or gives them starting items or whatever. You can only have one person alive at a time and have to return to a Life Node (or die) to swap them out.
You lose if all your people die, and you win if you fully eradicate the alien presence.
The AI isn't super advanced or anything, it just spreads kinda randomly and evolves randomly -- however actions you take on it will definitely alter certain variables which makes it focus on different things.
Spaceships are randomly generated, as are the locations of the cloning vat starting location (however it's always on an edge and by itself with exactly one exit) and the location of the three alien seeds.
Each alien starts out in some room and has control over it. These should be neutral rooms -- I guess neutral rooms get assigned in addition to fixture rooms, and then the aliens get dropped into there afterwards.
Whenever alien forces (starting out there's 3) get a turn, they can:
each alien node can spread to one adjacent unaliened room.
aliened rooms can strengthen their alien presence
they can try to take over the room (if it's fixtured) to sabotage it and gain access to its technology tree.
they can evolve abilities that they've learned from tech in rooms.
they can strengthen evolved abilities, including natural ones such as action speed.
they can withdraw to adjacent rooms that they also control, which strengthens their numbers there but pulls their control out of the existing room.
if they spread to an aliened room with another alien presence they can join with it and merge their abilities. This does however take a lot of alien actions so they won't do it if they're being attacked. Even if the aliens are split after this point it'll be two copies of the more powerful one.
They can recover their strength in a room if they're only partially defeated.
they can attempt to penetrate room gates so they can spread in those directions -- Containment is a valuable player strategy, and alie ns can work to get past barriers, though this is action-intensive. The more turns they can't spread but want to, the more this will be weighted however.
The weights of these actions change according to player actions and also start out a certain way. Both of these should be pretty random for each node, though spreading past the starting conditions a couple times should be pretty universal (a conditional spread based on the number of nodes).
Like the above, it makes sense that aliens that get blocked from their preferred path will weight certain actions more, like that or like being unable to evolve abilities they don't have causing them to become more explorative.
There are three types of energy weapons, and each alien node has one resistance. There are also more traditional weapons and aliens don't have resistance to them (except they can modify strength I guess) but they take consumable ammo.
There are several Armories scattered around the Ship. Finding them should be a priority. Military characters will also start with a weapon.
Explosives can be made from various things and are a pretty good tool. You can also lay traps.
