Idea: Corrupted/Tower invasion

[evilChair]

Would function identically to an infested invasion, except that they would be exceedingly rare (once a week or two); battle pay would dispense a bundle of a rare resource (or maybe a semi-monthly drip-feed of 1x vaulted relic). The invasion rationale would be that Orokin towers would from time to time attempt to "subsume" a ship and its crew for expansion/acquiring repairs materials through a Void fissure much larger than the one found in void relic missions. Despite the fissure, the invasion would not permit opening relics since the neural sentry would most likely prefer to economise with its energy and not attempt to corrupt mobs in a hit-and-eat invasion. All missions would carry a level-spike similar to the one found in the nightmare mode. Reducing corrupted forces to 0% would force the Tower to abort the operation and fully return to the Void.

Inter-ship transition tiles would involve flows of golden slag spreading across the walls (much like the infested growth on Sedna ships) "Orokinising" the tile(s) by gilding accents, growing Orokin-style decorations on doors (for example, turning a common corpus door into something that resembles a more explicitly baroque/orokin counterpart*, gilding grineer pipes and tubes, turning all lights orokin-teal), "redecorating" other faction assets (lockers and covers) while not fundamentally changing their placement and shape, and overwriting corpus/grineer written signage with slogans written in Orokin.

Spoiler

And in case the player has finished Chains of Harrow, a 50% chance to "meet" Wally loitering about in the transition tile, doing nothing in particular except looking at you.

*i have a mockup but it's so bad and lazy that i'm embarrassed to actually upload it

[Loza03]

I don't think the fissures are the work of the Neural sentry, just a side-effect of void shenanigans.

That said...

I LOVE the base idea. Orokin tech briefly or partially re-entering normal space through a giant fissure. Perhaps the reasoning as to why we couldn't use relics could be some other handwave, like "The amount of energy is too fierce, the relic would open with excessive force." and the Tenno are forced to act as a (violent) go-between to stop the Corrupted and neural sentry pouring out and destroying everything around it, but also to stop opportunistic Corpus and Grineer making off with the sudden influx of fresh Orokin tech. Since we have no evidence the neural sentry nicks material from nearby ships, perhaps change it that the tower literally materialised over the unfortunate location, 'overwriting' part of it, leading to some areas having the void tileset, others with whatever faction's was unlucky enough to be there, but most being the two twisting over each other.

Edit: Also, Wally having a chance to  show up in a mission would double-down on the creep factor. Love that.

Edited October 9, 2018 by Loza03

[evilChair]

Yeah, now that you've mentioned intersecting/hybrid tiles in a coarser way, I think it's probably the easiest solution since it's actually feasible within the game's constraints. Can't really go through my folder of 4K+ weird screencaps, but there's one from a grineer shipyard tileset where the scenery of a previous tile cut into the one that was currently being rendered, and it was just a wall of rock where it shouldn't be, with collision detection and all. Though just making a third, separate asset for that kind of hybrid tile would be easier on the RAM, I figure.

Addendum: I'd love to see a Glowing Tree displacing pipelines, burrowing into databanks, deforming rooms, etc., while also gilding anything that it breaks into. That last one solely because the Orokin motto seems to be "bling up everything".