Talk:Overspawn (Apocalypse)

The overspawn seems to be a vehicle, if you look at the hostile VEHICLES pane when one is released. If it were a UFO, it could basicly be recoverable once badly enough damaged? Unnamed vehicle...?

Otherwise I can only think of a special weapon or desperate agents on the ground with stun grapples trying to avoid being stomped all night...

--Karp 04:17, 18 August 2008 (PDT)

The Overspawn is definitely implemented as a vehicle in the game. Through a little game editing trickery with XED, you can gain control of one. In fact, it has hardpoints that mimic the Annihilator, although the shape of its option space differ somewhat (it's wide, but roughly the same amount of space). It has a few weird controls when you try to manually control it. It has an automatic wander command that kicks in every so often where it'll wander randomly in either four compass directions and crush anything in its way. This always happens no matter what control mode you're in. Oddly enough, this attack is treated as an alien attack. If you try to use the home/end/pgup/pgdn keys, things get weird. Usually they'll crash the game, or maybe make the overspawn destroy whatever building it's standing next to and teleport it to the other side of the building (as if it charge dthrough building?). Basically it's just another incomplete part of the game. I'm guessing if there was a play-as-aliens portion to the game, you'd probably get control one of these big guys. - NKF 05:42, 18 August 2008 (PDT)

Whoa... play as the aliens? Sounds cool and incredibly frustrating at the same time ( presuming automated X-COM is atleast somewhat effective ). Too bad that didn't make it into the game.

Still, I'd hate to competely level such an attractive city. ( Yes, I love Mega Primus looks )

--Karp 06:18, 18 August 2008 (PDT)

I'm guessing it was set up to act uncontrolled because you might get to run it when you went to the next alien diminsion that was planned but not implemented.--(name here) 07:01, 18 August 2008 (PDT)

I don't THINK it is possible to capture an overspawn... can an overspawn crash land??? Jasonred 08:42, 17 March 2009 (EDT)

Possible reason for the existance of the live research entry.

The reason that the megaspawn has a live entry may be because the game requires a live entry and a dead entry for all aliens that have either -- i.e. no autopsy possible if there's no live data available. Essentially, it would be a (minor) design flaw of the software. FrederikHertzum 23:28, 17 January 2011 (EST)

Notes of a determined modder

I don't think this really belongs in the article because it only really shows up if you start hacking stuff, but some notes on the Overspawn AI:

• It won't fire on other vehicles with any weapons you give it. Ever. It will occasionally use them to blast a building while it's attacking it, but that's all.
• It has a short list of waypoints (which appear to be randomly determined points on the map), and after walking to each of them (clawing down all buildings in the way, of course) it'll simply stand there forever (sometimes walking in circles).

The combination of these two means it's impossible to make the Overspawn a threat without revamping its AI. It is fundamentally incapable of fighting back against any attackers, and even if you buff its armour to the point where it laughs at buildings falling on it and is immune to all corporation vehicles' attacks, this only makes it reliably annoying - it's still quite unlikely that an X-Com base will happen to be in its path, and the only problem once it's out of waypoints is that its presence on the map disables ultratime.

As a side note, setting the Overspawn's health to a negative value causes it to crash (as in, UFO crash) as soon as it's dropped. If you go there with a squad, you will fight 36 Brainsuckers on the Senate floor (specifically the one module of the Senate building that's the Senate floor itself). This will not unlock the Overspawn research topic (either of them), but it will allow research of Alien Craft Energy Source/Control/Propulsion. Magic9mushroom (talk) 11:27, 7 July 2020 (UTC)