#infiltration protocol

[askvectorprime]

Dear Vector Prime,

How much weight does a Phase Sixer pull? Black Shadow could apparently aterilize worlds but the DJD took him down with a half-dozen elite bots. Are they just very destructive but not as ultra-deadly as they tend to think they are?

Dear Phase Phinder,

The Phase Sixers were powerful warriors indeed, and armed with a variety of incredibly lethal weapons, but ultimately they were just one cog in Megatron’s overall war machine. Ordinarily, the Phase Sixers were only dispatched to planets that had progressed to phase six of the Decepticon infiltration protocol, and been subsequently marked for destruction—meaning that the local Decepticon cell had already turned the planet’s inhabitants against each other, captured or neutralized strategic arsenals, erected impregnable planetary fortifications, and generally ensured that neither the local sapients nor any Autobot operatives had a chance at mounting an organized counterattack. Phase Sixers could indeed sterilize planets… but only because many other Decepticons had carefully maneuvered everything into place so that they could deliver the killing blow.

The Decepticon forces could simply have used one of their many battleships to incinerate a planet’s atmosphere and achieve largely the same effect, but the fact of the matter was that the Phase Sixers relied heavily on psychological warfare. A rumored legion of invincible, unkillable super-warriors capable of singlehandedly breaking worlds kept the lesser Decepticons in line and the rank-and-file Autobots on their guard.

However, loyalty through fear has its downsides. Many resentful Decepticons soon realized that they were doing most of the hard work, only for Black Shadow, Overlord, and Sixshot to take all the credit. It didn’t take long before resentful Decepticons began referring to the Phase Sixers as “glorified janitors”, “J-class soldiers”, and other such derogatory appellations—though only when the Phase Sixers themselves were well out of earshot!

[pluralsword]

Queer Wargaming with Cards

Yeah we do wargaming.

With cards.

Extremely gay cards.

You know, the Transformers Deck-Building Game XD

It's a wargame in the sense that we've collected a bunch of expansions (we have the core autobot game, the core decepticon game, infiltration protocol expansion, and the war for cybertron core game) that would together enable 4v4 gameplay... we calculated that would mean having a card matrix (the battlefield as it were that gets flipped over to reveal allies, enemies, gear, friendly or enemy strategies, bosses, and locations, and battles resulting in defeated enemies leave ruins) of 6 x 6 (36 cards, with one starting polity) cards, and a 21+21+21+5 deck containing the bosses and more polities... (note the game rules go up to 2v2 or 3v1 or 4 player coop/team competitive but if one wants to get in more content and players you just increase the matrix from a 4 x 4 for four players to say, 4x5 for five, and add two cards to boss stacks, going from a 11+11+11+5 to 13+13+13+5, and so on for more players)

as a deckbuilding game, a core mechanic is collecting cards from the field and adjusting your deck and buffing cards and the like, all actions you take are with cards, whether repairing, attacking, blocking, assisting, recruiting, commanding, damaging, and so on. So inevitably you end up collecting a bunch of blorbos, tactics, and gear...

so it's completely unlike any other wargame in that every player is a sort of mass effect style commander who brings their team of blorbos (including humans and non-transformer aliens), gear, and tactics with them to wreck or charm opponents, lead polities, repair the tolls of war, collect relics, take down enemy leadership, protect each other, complete war goals, along with defending ones own leaders...

which is a very transformers premise, come to think of it, but it also feels a lot like ancient war stories, and very gay equivalent, both because of all that and because well, transformers has been very same-gender love uwu intentionally since 2012 which shows no signs of halting, and hit a gender expansive aspect too (the deckbuilding game so far only has sword arcee and overlord but we are sure more will turn up)... so suffice to say that uh we are glad this is the board game we decided to collect for-

its also a lot cheaper than wargames typically are for army building or what have you, and has a built in cooperative or solo mode if you don't want to fight your friends! for reference the amount of money we've spent on the game to now have a vast number of gal characters who would appear on the board is around the cost of a single Manticore missile tank from a certain grimdark game... (although that series is infamous for being much more expensive than other wargames)

speaking of women:

With the cards we have there are 11 different options for playable characters (the leaders of your decks) who either were introduced as gals (Arcee, Elita-1, Slipstream, and Windblade), have at least one gal iteration (Starscream, Skywarp, Ironhide, and Optimus Prime) or would have been canonized as gals but either that was turned down at the time or character cut from a continuity budget (Ratchet and Jazz respectively). If we had the Dinobot expansion that would put us at 12 since Swoop is a gal in Cyberverse.

also the alt modes are on the flip side, transforming is a key mechanic since you need your alt mode to move around usually (respectively, Ratchet: ambulance, Arcee: sports convertible, Elita-1: sports muscle car, Slipstream: fighter jet, Windblade: VTOL jet, Starscream: fighter jet, Skywarp: fighter jet, Ironhide: van, Optimus Primes: truck without the trailer, Jazz: sports car)

Dunno about you but that's a lot of options who are gals for any board game usually... and they vary vastly in capabilities, for example:

-Arcee (from the core/autobot set simply known as the transformers deck-building game) has a skill lay out that is built around moving quickly and gathering maneuvers to use selectively customize personal prowess while playing cards that, in our experience, tends to defeat/eliminate the most enemy npcs on the board (at least until the war for cybertron expansion). she also has strong synergy with her own npc card and the energy blades whose art of hers held by her from the same set.

On an obscure lore note, since the Matrix of Leadership card can be picked up by anyone who can play 8 power (having the power and the touch here doesn't seem to function on a morality basis but hey it doesn't always do that anyway), if you do it with her you can effectively play Arcana Magnus, which is close to the name that was considered for her if she had won the choose a Prime poll for the Power of the Primes toyline (for which she ran on a platform of giving up her career as a warrior, serving with honor, and focusing on reparations in the aftermath of the Great War)

-Windblade (war for cybertron bonus pack) can boost one of her cards while on a site (because of her cityspeaker thing) and can for 1 energon also teleport to allies / sites (another reference because of titans often having spacebridges, but also she's a flyer), and then draws a card she has card draw... on top of that for 2 energon she can recruit an enemy of 2-4 power so she can recruit from the start of the game without the matrix of leadership (which is the only other way to do this, from the core/autobot set)- so effectively politician Windblade has made it into the cardgame (which was so exciting to us), and she can also move allied players to an adjacent space when switching to alt mode, her team versatility is very different from Ironhide who is all about focusing on blocking attacks for teammates, or Ratchet who doles out assists and repairs like no tomorrow (this also uniquely positions Ratchet to defend friendly Autobot bosses)

-Slipstream (war for cybertron) is the first real starter sniper/gunship of the lot, she can give her starter cards +1 range and can also battle enemies not in her space with +2 range and +2 power which makes her a killer to rival arcee, and has card draw or can self heal 2 damage and in alt mode can choose a card from her discard to put on top of her deck so she is the deck engine blorbo (insert blue/red deck joke here)

-Elita-1 (war for cybertron) on the other hand has a sort of turn by turn engine because when she recruits an autobot they go on top of the deck for the next turn, so she can determine her next turn draw, and also can boost autobot cards- and most importantly, for each autobot she controls on the field in play, she can deal 1 damage to a target character, so um... Elita can completely mess up enemy players/teams, if she has five Autobots played on a turn she can hit someone in the same space as her for 5 damage... which means -10 points at the end of the game if not repaired! she is a menace even compared to the Decepticons in other other sets because of the amount of damage she can deal mid-late game. If one wants to reimplement the core game co-op/solo rule of a team loses when a character takes 5 damage, but instead do it as the player is taken out until getting at least a damage repaired (for the record we came up with this variant, but otherwise it's a death by a thousand cuts situation where you can keep racking up damage), this makes Elita extremely dangerous for shutting down opponents and also the ideal Autobot wielder of the Star Saber, since that card is in part for dealing damage to other players

-Skywarp (infiltration protocol bonus pack) on the other hand is all about scouting (Jazz from the autobot/core game bonus pack is even more so), utility, disruption, able to teleport upon transforming to altmode, flipping adjacent regions' cards face-up when playing a starter card for the first time on a turn, and able to either cause a friend to discard a hand and draw again -1 (which is handy if your pal does not like their hand and especially if they know what cards are next), or can do the same thing to an opponent to try to mess up their next turn or defensive actions they might take

-Optimus Prime's War for Cybertron variant is the strategic counterpart to her own (for clarification, Transformers Universe Optimus Prime and Yellow Splendid Convoy are she/her Optimi) autobot/core game card autobot card boosting and card draw/blcok capabilities and to Elita-1's guerrilla cqc style: this Optimus can block an attack from anywhere in the field against any player, while having the ability to draw a lot of cards or just build up victory points while on a polity

-Starcream actually has interesting counterplay to Elita in that she (she was a gal in the French dub of TFTM) can spend energon to give 1 damage dealt to her to a target player anywhere... and aside from this can also can battle Decepticons allies to gain their defeat rewards instead of adding them to her deck. Very Starscream

Some reviews of the game said it is lackluster with the lack of energon utility and having a lot near the end of the game- a rule was implemented in War for Cybertron capping the amount of energon one can have to 12, and also another rule (unsure if this was a rule before) established that cards spent to fight people could not have their move points be used after, so the game is now significantly more difficult hehe

We've played it a bunch of times with friends prior to acquiring War for Cybertron, it is easily one of our favorite games not just because of the intentionally queer-coded alien robots' art and personalities being all over the game, but also because the dynamic card synergy is enjoyable and the bosses can really mess you up if one doesn't have the right build. We aren't getting into this because we'd be here all day but the npc's personalities are certainly there: e.g. well known for her martial artist bodyguard iteration, Chromia (war for cybertron) helps players to gather maneuvers and to buff them in combat/diplomacy, along with having significant move and combat/recruiting capabilities herself (this could, for example, help Windblade collect combat and scouting cards, or enable Arcee to be even more deadly). There's other things we haven't tried yet, the Infiltration Protocol expansion comes with the eponymous six phases of Decepticon resource extraction invasion from IDW1 as a playable mode, and the bonus pack (which we have tried) came with Metroplex (who is an Autobot boss location rather than playable card), and also has a 1 vs team mode where the solo player is buffed significantly

anyway, we had to ramble about it because this game is cool as hell

[askvectorprime]

Dear Vector Prime, Can you explain the six stages of the Infiltration Protocol? It seems that even many of the Decepticons following the protocol were fuzzy on the details of phases three through five.

Dear Protocol Peerer,

Certainly.

Phase 1—Infiltrate: The first step, when Decepticons invade a world, is to build covert bases, locate useful technologies or threats, and determine what flashpoints they can leverage in Phase 2. At this stage, you'd be hard pressed to tell there were Decepticons on your world at all.

Phase 2—Agitate: By exploiting existing global instability through false-flag attacks and misinformation, the Decepticons orchestrate wars, terrorist strikes, and other crises that exhaust resources and set the invaded world's forces at each other’s necks.

Phase 3—Escalate: The Decepticons ramp up their influence, even revealing themselves to select agents. Before the passing of the Tyrest Accord, this often involved distributing Cybertronian weaponry to amplify hostilities, until the entire world is locked in a state of war, desperate for the Decepticons' aid to wipe out their enemies.

Phase 4—Penetrate: To secure their hold on the local population, the Decepticons engender complete dependency. They offer Cybertronian technology, which can be disabled at the push of a button. Using the same technology that allows them to create facsimile constructs (and often the same raw materials) they offer food to the organics—who take it, with the planet's arable land and industry already having been given over to battlefields and arms manufacture.

Phase 5—Dominate: At this stage, the natives cannot reject the Decepticons without bringing about total societal collapse. The useful population is enslaved, put to work extracting what resources the world has left, while the rest are slaughtered. If any meaningful resistance remains, Siege Mode is initiated, and an impregnable fortress is built as a symbol of total Decepticon supremacy.

Phase 6—Devastate: Once the remaining population's usefulness is at an end, Megatron removes any possibility that their descendants may one day rise up to take revenge, and the planet is slated for destruction. Against a people without weapons, without food, and without hope, he deploys an elite class of soldier, engineered to be unstoppable. At least, unless the Autobots can stop them.

[askvectorprime]

Sixshot's Ununtrium armor can withstand what yield top nuclear explosion？And Metroplex?

Dear Nuclear Nasty,

Phase Sixers are extremely strong and very difficult to damage thanks to their ununtrium-infused endoskeletons, but they are not invincible and just as susceptible to fission-based weapons as any other Decepticons. Indeed, during the Great War, the infiltration protocol involved degrading, undermining, and ultimately wresting control of strategic arsenals away from local populations well in advance of Phase Six in order to prevent any remaining military units from organizing a concentrated retaliation.

[lizwuzthere]

tinyironfist replied to your post: I know you talk about phase seven in the tfp universe a lot but I was curious as to your thoughts on how phase six and phase-sixers might work in tfp as well. Do you think any of that type would exist in the tfp verse?

Not to mention, no other aliens were ever seen in Prime. Aside from decapitated heads.

OH HEY THAT'S RIGHT! Airachnid is the one who went out destroying alien civilizations! Maybe Airachnid had her own infiltraion protocol :U ...Though considering her character the entire thing probably only consisted of Phase Six.