Topic on Talk:Demonic Spiders

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It's regarding Terror From the Deep, the second game in the original series. The entry is regarding Bio-Drones.

I think the entry got in there because Bio-Drones are basically a rehash of Cyberdiscs from the original (UFO: Enemy Unknown), which most certainly qualify for Demonic Spider status. There are a couple of problems with the analogy, though: 1) Cyberdiscs are mostly scary because they show up really early on (potentially as early as the first month), while Bio-Drones only show up from month 4 onward, 2) TFTD is harder than UFO - much harder - and I feel that raises the bar.

Bio-Drones are not really a weak enemy - they've got a ton of health and they do have a gun - but they don't have armour/damage resistance combinations that render whole swathes of weapons useless (Lobster Men, Triscenes and Xarquid all do), they don't have psionics to take over your soldiers from anywhere on the map (Tasoths and Aquatoids do), and they don't have the instant-kill-and-spawn-a-copy attack of Tentaculats. They also only show up alongside either Lobster Men or Tasoths - which both also have a ton of health and guns of roughly equal power, in addition to the nasty attributes mentioned above. The only unique attribute of Bio-Drones is that they explode when killed, which would be really nasty if they showed up early - but armour totally negates the damage (armour is damage reduction in old X-Com), and you probably have armour by the time they show up (they also don't explode if killed in melee, which is the big place you'd worry about them exploding anyway).

(Also, the entry on the X-COM/YMMV page consists solely of them allegedly having high reactions and perfect Accuracy. They do have perfect accuracy on the highest difficulty (although Triscenes do as well, and lots of other aliens come very close), but Bio-Drones' reactions are in fact the worst of any alien in all of TFTD.)

I wholeheartedly agree with the mentions of Lobster Men and Tentaculats as Demonic Spiders in TFTD; I'd not have objected to Tasoths, Xarquid or Triscenes either. Bio-Drones... I'm just not seeing any reason you'd ever be scared of them specifically (the missions they show up on are really hard, because they're full of Tasoths or Lobster Men, but that's not attributable to Bio-Drones).

The entry I was talking about fixing is Chryssalids from UFO: Enemy Unknown - the entry said they had 60-80 Time Units (11-16 squares of movement before an attack), while in fact they have a much scarier 110-127 (23-28 squares of movement before an attack). Obviously, this doesn't undermine the rationale for them being Demonic Spiders. Magic9mushroom (talk) 08:21, 6 August 2020 (UTC)