Tartarus

[Lunethex]

In Mission 15 of the NSDF Campaign, there is the Alien Ruins known as Tartarus. There is a radio call coming in vehemently suggesting not to mess with it but I destroyed it and nothing happened.

Was there something that should have happened in the original release or was it something cut?

[Lunethex]

You'd have to check the pre-mission voiceovers when you side with Braddock & the ISDF in BZ2 after the mission where you capture Burns and Shabayev tries to appeal to you to join the Scions. I believe he talks about what he did during the BZ1 war then and is most likely what the "Burns' Rebellion" instant action mod is based on.

[isanthraxbayad]

I still think that BZ2 basically makes both original BZ1 Campaigns non-canon though.

How did the furies reproduce to make the numbers we see in BZ2 if the majority of them died on Achilles? Were those just the Russian Furies, and the US furies were somewhere else?

How were the Furies created from the Black Dogs if the Russians killed the Black Dogs... With the Furies...

[Lunethex]

nono, you're misinterpreting methinks. I only mentioned FuryScout/FuryTank etc because that was the developer's jargon for it.

The Scions were the Black Dogs. The furies we know in BZ1 are wiped out with Achilles after the NSDF campaign.

[Novus Ordo Seclorum]

Originally posted by isanthraxbayad:

I still think that BZ2 basically makes both original BZ1 Campaigns non-canon though.

I like to think it's the other way around. BZ2 is non-canon because of the events that took place in BZ1. After destroying the furies and blowing up Achilles, a valuable lesson was learned. Sentient biometal beings are not desirable. Therefore it would be foolish to inject humans with biometal and create the scions. Such an event should never take place, you'd have to be a fool to think that injecting humans with biometal is a good idea after what happened with the furies! Should have seen that coming, it was blatantly obvious.

[Lunethex]

I thought Bio-metal is just that: a resource. The Furies were born of the specific Fury Relics which are collected on Io and they were developed right from those.

[isanthraxbayad]

Originally posted by SPORK:

Originally posted by isanthraxbayad:

I still think that BZ2 basically makes both original BZ1 Campaigns non-canon though.

I like to think it's the other way around. BZ2 is non-canon because of the events that took place in BZ1. After destroying the furies and blowing up Achilles, a valuable lesson was learned. Sentient biometal beings are not desirable. Therefore it would be foolish to inject humans with biometal and create the scions. Such an event should never take place, you'd have to be a fool to think that injecting humans with biometal is a good idea after what happened with the furies! Should have seen that coming, it was blatantly obvious.

Which is why I think Braddock did all that ♥♥♥♥ after the war, because he is a war-hungry psychopath and he was trying to conquer Earth.

Granted they might explicitly say something different in the BZ2 premission things but that's what I got from everything.

[Bobcat Betty]

BZ2 is confusing because it intended to be, the plots line up but you really have to cross-examine ♥♥♥♥ to see how. Braddock's team worked on Project Pedigree in an NSDF base on Europa as a new superweapon that was being developed alongside the Furies, not in place of them. The entire project was a secret from most of the NSDF and when the Black Dogs rebelled, Braddock labelled them "Furies" to cover his own ass and dodge any blame for their rebellion.

Go play Burns' Rebellion on the workshop, it does a good job of meshing BZ1's plot with BZ2's.

There's plenty of other reasons to hate BZ2's plot, like how it calls the Cthonians the "Sithonians" and how it insists that BZ1 took place in the 1960s (BZ1 starts in the summer of 1969). The Scions were one of the few good parts about BZ2, while their execution was lackluster in some areas they really aren't the thing to complain about.

[Bobcat Betty]

All this has very little to do with Tartarus, which should really be the topic at hand. We don't know a lot about Tartarus, but we do know that it was built jointly by the Olympians and Hadeans, that it is a prison facility of some kind, and that whatever is inside is something that warranted the facility having a defense grid to prevent it from being tampered with.

Now, I know what the automatic assumption is: this thing is full of Furies, right? That doesn't make sense, though. The Fury project began on Venus, was migrated to Io after the Venus base was destroyed, and then to Elysium when the Io base was destroyed. Then, from Elysium, the Furies invaded Icarus through the Pegasus tech, causing rapid and widespread destruction that prompted the Olympians and Hadeans to join forces to destroy the Fury Factories that sprouted on Icarus, setting off a chain reaction that destroyed the planet.

Now, I dunno about the rest of you, but I don't see any mention of Saturn or Titan in that story. Tartarus is the only relic even found on Titan. So what I'm thinkin' is that Tartarus is holding something else, it's not holding Furies.

Maybe it's an eternal prison for the guy who made the Furies, good ol' Nexus the Fifth. Maybe it's holding something worse than the Furies, who knows. BZ2 implies that the Cthonians made their own Scions at some point, not Furies but actual humanoids infused with biometal, and that it was these Chthonians that the Scions modelled themselves and their society after when they freed themselves from Braddock. Maybe those Chthonian Scions were as much trouble for the rest of the Chthonians as the Human Scions were for the ISDF? There's plenty of possibilities, let's speculate.

: 3

[ULTIMO GUERRERO MOSCOVITA]

Maybe, after their homeworld got wiped, some remnants of the Cthonians survived and used the prison as a shelter, but died anyways. That, or it was a prison world, never mentioned in the lore, but it would make it somewhat strange since it has a defense grid...

Anyways, sounds like a good plothole for a community campaign, don'tcha think?

[Ded10c]

The Scions in BZ2 are different to the Furies seen in BZ1. The Furies are pure Strain III biometal ships that assimilated their human pilots. The Scions are humans with biometal augmentations.

Battlezone 2 was originally supposed to have three factions - "human", "fury" and "alien". The alien and fury factions were merged to form the Scions, and there are still some elements of this left over; asset names (fvtank) and one particularly problematic mistake in one of the Scion campaign debriefings.

Battlezone 2's manual - for the few of us that have physical copies - has a pretty obvious case of unreliable narrator. It's not subtle about that. What it is subtle about is that every time it says "fury", you should read "scion"; remember that the manual is written from Braddock's POV and that, as a result, he wants you to hate the Scions. What better way to accomplish that than to invoke the Furies?

Originally posted by isanthraxbayad:

I still think that BZ2 basically makes both original BZ1 Campaigns non-canon though.

[...]

How were the Furies created from the Black Dogs if the Russians killed the Black Dogs... With the Furies...

1) See above.
2) There are several separate groups of Black Dogs. One column is deployed on Titan against the CCA and is wiped out by the Furies, Harris' 4th Platoon are ambushed by the CRA on Ganymede, and Shaw's platoon are the player's faction in Rise of the Black Dogs. These cannot all be the same group.

Originally posted by isanthraxbayad:

Originally posted by SPORK:

I like to think it's the other way around. BZ2 is non-canon because of the events that took place in BZ1. After destroying the furies and blowing up Achilles, a valuable lesson was learned. Sentient biometal beings are not desirable. Therefore it would be foolish to inject humans with biometal and create the scions. Such an event should never take place, you'd have to be a fool to think that injecting humans with biometal is a good idea after what happened with the furies! Should have seen that coming, it was blatantly obvious.

Which is why I think Braddock did all that ♥♥♥♥ after the war, because he is a war-hungry psychopath and he was trying to conquer Earth.

Granted they might explicitly say something different in the BZ2 premission things but that's what I got from everything.

(Nested quote because I'm replying to both of you)

Project Pedigree is dated as 1960s; the destruction of Achilles occurs in 1971.



Regarding the Tartarus, to throw a spanner in the works - Forgotten Enemies has a Tartarus IV, containing a massive Hadean superweapon. Where are the others, and what would they contain?

[catfood]

I had assumed that Tartarus was a prison for the humans who were waiting to be stuck into furies. I never thought about how far away Titan was from the rest of the fury plot though.

My best guess is the developers wanted you to learn more about the humans being used in experiments at this point of the campaign, but the other bits of the plot had you too far away from where the furies were developed for it to make sense so it was _mostly_ dropped.

[DustRider]

Originally posted by Frenchox:

Anyways, sounds like a good plothole for a community campaign, don'tcha think?

Thats a fine point! That little uneventful mission takes place in quite the location. A high security fort built by both the alien races has to be foreboding. Along with a small (Research?) depot and the scattered remnants of a platoon that was stationed there with a recycler. I believe it serves as a fine plot device. And Romeski returns from the dead with the 11th workers tank battalion. They could have done so much with the mission. Im going to start tackling lua. This is just too juicy

[Michelin Man]

Originally posted by The Deus Ex:

\BZ2 implies that the Cthonians made their own Scions at some point, not Furies but actual humanoids infused with biometal, and that it was these Chthonians that the Scions modelled themselves and their society after when they freed themselves from Braddock. Maybe those Chthonian Scions were as much trouble for the rest of the Chthonians as the Human Scions were for the ISDF? There's plenty of possibilities, let's speculate.

: 3

You know one thing I never understood about BZ 2 is not only how, but why would the Chthonians, an organic race I presume, create not just one, but 2 planets made almost out of biometal? Now that you stated that the Chthonians made their own Scions, this makes a little more sense. Perhaps these Chthonian-Scions had the same problem the current Scions have, so they might have built or "terraformed" these two planets in order to save themselves. The reason the Dark Planet wasn't hospitable to the Scions yet was because the Chthonian-Scions didn't finish building or terraforming it yet, and the Alchemators are sort of like the "on" switch for the planet.
However I'm not sure what happened to them. Most likely they probably got wiped out by the Furies like most of the other Chthonians were. Either that or they fled somewhere else and either created more biometal planets or died out.

[Sk-8080]

Doubt greatly that there was something as mere "hybrid humans" in Tartarus...given that in the greek mythilogy is where the titans were imprisoned. My guess is that there was something far more dangerous than the furies down there, with a remark in that it was a prison built by both factions of the Chthonians to keep it locked.

[Michelin Man]

Originally posted by Sk-8080:

Doubt greatly that there was something as mere "hybrid humans" in Tartarus...given that in the greek mythilogy is where the titans were imprisoned. My guess is that there was something far more dangerous than the furies down there, with a remark in that it was a prison built by both factions of the Chthonians to keep it locked.

Perhaps it might have been some sort of "special" Fury that was particularly more destructive than the others.
Or maybe it might have been some sort of eldritch space abomination they found and decided it'd be best if it was kept in the most secure prison imaginable. Basically their version of Cthulhu.