ON THE FUTURE OF ALIEN STRAINS
With the impending release of Rising Tide, I've been pondering the future of the mod. There's major challenges ahead, which put on hold the greater plans I had for Alien Strains before the expansion was ever announced, fixing the affinity quests issue aside. There's also the fact I've had a new job for almost a year, and my free time has been substantially reduced.
The lesser challenge is having to come up with two alternative strains for each of the new aliens: the Scarab, Ripper and Makara. I'm not sure the Hydracoral would benefit from alternatives, given how it's almost terrain.
The greater challenge, however, is the mere task of adapting Alien Strains to the expansion, considering aliens now have biome-specific textures. And given there's like five biomes now, for starters that would quintuple my graphics work, and on the other hand it becomes much harder to devise properly distinctive colour combinations suitable for the strain in question and the nature of the biome. Disregarding biome-specificity is an option, but would be jarring as it would clash with the new look of the base aliens.
So embracing biome specificity seems unfeasible from both workload and conceptual standpoints. The alternative is playing around with unit sizes, amount and formations, but it's not ideal as it makes it harder to identify aliens at a glance.
Anyway, those are my thoughts at the moment. Can't be more precise without the expansion and its files in my hands.
As always, opinions are welcome.