Zombie
Alert
Resource
Type
Power to Come Back
Revives Ships Every Regroup
After any warpfall, use this power to revive all of your ships.
Special Offer: Revive all of your opponent’s ships for 1 influence.
Legacy: During warpfall, the invader revives all of their ships instead of one.
Thousands of years after attaining immortality, the Zombies have come to realize that living forever in the same body can be a real drag as long as entropy is a thing. Eager to gain new power to restore the youthful vim of their bodies, they have thrown themselves in the vague direction of Cosmic dominance. And they’ll keep doing so as long as entropy permits.
Any: Warpfall
Mandatory
Wild Flare
Whenever one or more of your ships is destroyed, you may discharge this flare to rescue one of those ships.
Any: Any
Super Flare
As an actor, during combat, you may discharge this flare to make your ships impervious this encounter.
Actor: Combat
Modifications
- The original power simply prevents Zombie’s ships from going to the warp, which prevents Zombie from gaining compensation and doesn’t embody a Zombie as well as I’d like. Changed to match Jack Reda’s elegant fix that modifies the timing of the power to let Zombie gain compensation and make the power more thematic.
- Changed from the power of “immortality” to the power to “come back” to better match the mechanics.
- Original Zombie has the same special offer, but original Cosmic doesn’t have influence. Since my deals can revive ships at 1 for 1, Zombie can give its opponent a bargain deal, incentivizing negotiation with Zombie when low on ships.
- Modified the super flare to give Zombie its original power, preventing it from losing bases.
- Zombie’s legacy gives everyone the original power on a delay, giving everyone a personal Warp Key. Aliens can be more liberal about their ship use, but they still need to make sure their bases are protected. This legacy really hurts aliens like Cudgel and Gambler who value leveraging ship advantage, while really helping aliens like Macron and Masochist who value every ship. Original Cosmic has no legacies.
Tips
- Zombie can always send the maximum number of ships into an encounter, as any ships it loses will be retrieved shortly after. Zapping Zombie is mostly worthless, as lost ships will be regained the following encounter unless Zombie gets disconnected.
- Zombie never has to worry about losing ships, but it does need to watch its bases. Losing three bases still causes Zombie to get disconnected, and after losing the third base it won’t be able to revive its ships the following regroup phase.
- Zombie can be an attractive ally since it can always send four ships. This also means it will be maximizing its bounty as a backward, so be careful not to overfeed it.
- By losing ships, Zombie can more easily transfer them between bases than most aliens. Instead of having five planets with four ships apiece, it can have three planets with six apiece, with two to place wherever.
Development Notes
- My original proposal to fix the issues with Zombie involved raising the alert level to make it more complex. The idea made it more of an invasion-gaining type in the same vein as Machine and Lightning. If Zombie loses by 10 or less, it can make another attempt, sending more ships and keeping the existing ones in the system. In essence, Zombie doesn’t die; it just keeps coming. The only way to defeat it is to defeat it by more than 10, dealing enough damage to “destroy the brain. The more Zombie loses, the more ships it can add, making it harder to survive the longer things go without smashing it. I like the idea, but the simplicity of Zombie’s base power isn’t one I wanted to part with so easily. Zombie remains the go-to “ship protection” standard that all other aliens of a similar type compare to. Because of Zombie, any other alien whose only power is to preserve ships is almost certainly going to be an inferior version, which is why Bulwark needed a change.
- One of my main issues with Zombie’s power is the lack of interesting choices it produces, both for the user and others. The user doesn’t need to think much about how many ships to send, since the ships will come back, almost guaranteed. Essentially always having 16/20 ships isn’t particularly threatening to other aliens either. In CEO, ships were placed automatically, so being able to choose where ships go in my version does make Zombie’s power more thoughtful, especially when powers like Assassin and Bully are brought into the mix.
- The change made to Zombie’s base power lets it more naturally work with other powers without having to deal with “doesn’t go to the warp” rulings. Healer works normally, Void works normally, Fungus works normally, and Warpish works normally. Zapping Zombie is less effective with my version, as it no longer prevents ships from becoming “dead”. It just stalls how long it takes for them to revive, which usually doesn’t matter unless Zombie loses many ships at once.
- Original Zombie has a handful of effects that allow it to “share” its revival ability, such as its super flare and special offer. In the interest of helping it stand out more from Wormhole and Observer, I opted to make Zombie the “selfish” one, while keeping the special offer as an additional option to provide a bit of leverage to negotiate.