The SoH Villains

On January 20th, we did a livestream with Neith, and we thought you might like to see and hear a bit more about that, and about progress with the enemy factions in Ship of Heroes.
One of our devs summarized what he heard in the livestream here, on the forums.

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The Nagdellians want to invade the ship, kill everyone aboard, and either take it over or destroy it. They want to remove one of the strongest ships in the sector from human control, or even transform it into a Nagdellian vessel. To that end, they frequently launch raids and invasions aimed at seizing a beachhead on the ship, or sabotaging key systems, or even stealing critical supplies. Other enemy groups will often drop whatever they are doing to beat back invading Nagdellians. One of the Nagdellians’ powers is that the lieutenants can call in reinforcements if they are losing a fight.

The Prometheans do not want to cripple the ship itself, or to kill any civilians; instead, they aim to forcibly convert everyone aboard into more Prometheans, especially mages and engineers. Their leader, Dr. Cornish, helped build the Justice when he was still human, and he views the ship and its non-super-powered crew as belonging to him. The Prometheans are just as evil and uncompromising as the Nagdellians, but they’re unique to the FHS Justice. Other hero ships don’t have any Prometheans to worry about, though they may have other enemies that the Justice doesn’t!

The Red Sigil is a secretive, revolutionary subgroup within the much larger community of magic-users aboard the Justice. While they tend to favor old-fashioned and formal clothes, the Red Sigil has no uniform; any mage could secretly be a member. The Red Sigil is rich from trading in both legal and illegal magical goods, and they want the non-mage heroes to become their lieutenants in a new political system that prioritizes training more mages, and gives mages more respect. They’re arrogant, and often callous about the lives of others, but they aren’t aiming to enslave or kill everyone; they just want to change the power structure aboard the ship and rule over the crew. The Red Sigil has a particular hatred for the Prometheans due to their opposed ideals – delusional populism versus ruthless meritocracy – and the two factions go out of their way to target each other.

The first goal of the Yekus mercenaries is to get paid. But they also want to fight, to improve their abilities, and to make a name for themselves. The Yekus emphasize tactics more than the other factions, so their men are trained to ignore most taunts and attack the healers in any party, and they possess a powerful energy drain attack that other enemies do not have. The Yekus are the most sympathetic of the enemy groups aboard the ship, to the point that they do recruit volunteers from the crew on occasion.

In the livestream, you can see our latest technical progress in bringing the game to life. We’re showing some things for the first time, including enemy models for the different groups. We’ve upgraded the Nagdellian models, and you can see how the different types compare. The Yekus mercenary models are also notable; they’re looking pretty good now.

Some of what we show is just for fun, and not necessarily a core game feature. Towards the end, we come across a pair of impromptu testing arenas where one of our coders was working on a bug fix. We thought you might like to see many of the various powers we’ve created, working together on a single target. Should hero power FX look weaker? Stronger? Are there other cool powers you’d like to see? Join the discussion on our forums.