Agreed.
@Joveus always had my respect by caring enough to dive deeply.
You have mine (and always will) by caring (and thinking far enough ahead) to preserve it.
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However, the Locust are more brutal than humans, the Hollow is relatively flat and they do have technologies/mounts available. And the US taking so long to expand was more political than anything. I believe there was a law in place that said no one was able to break ground on territories West of the Louisiana purchase for so many years, while the Locust just constantly expanded.
The Hollow isn’t flat though, as seen in-game across multiple games. And the Locust war dawgs had to be broken and tamed, and some are outright genetically modified like the Brumak. Stuff like that subtracts even more time from the already tiny window available.
Well I said relatively flat, and yes it subtracts time but we ourselves went from horse-drawn carriages to the Autoban in 60~ years.
Locust = not a hive mind, just all connected to the Queen. She used Spotters and some tech to see through their eyes and maintain control. But she still needed to use radio broadcasts to keep the Locust morale up, since she couldn’t put her mind everywhere at once.
Lambent = true hivemind, one massive entity.
Swarm = true hivemind, but each individual has some autonomy. Scions are definitely in control. The Warden was able to shrug off Kait’s control and kill who it wanted, despite Kait’s objections.
It makes sense, considering the Swarm seem to be stabilized Lambent who are now controlled by the evolved Locust.
Pouncers, Snatchers, and Carriers all share physiology and shape language with polpys (EDIT: polyps). I think of them as “polypoids,” but TC might go a different route later.
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Are we sure that was actually the case and not Myrrah taking control away from Kait to get/allow the Warden to kill Oscar? While not cutting the connection for reasons I think might be clear. It’s obvious her mind or what remained of it had some control left over the hivemind and seemed to want Kait’s body for her own purposes(something that Myrrah seemingly abandoned to Kait’s resistance at her intrusion attempts and after getting Reyna’s body). Kait remaining connected to the Warden while being unable to stop it from killing her uncle… well, if that’s not an attempt at causing psychological harm and/or intimidation to make Kait more susceptible to giving up or Myrrah’s attempts to take her body over, I don’t know what is.
And I thought/think Pouncers, Snatchers, Carriers are creatures bioengineered by the Swarm with some substance in them that shares genetic code with Imulsion but without the parasitic intentions. A leftover that was not targeted/destroyed by the countermeasure or survived because it was not actually killing off anything(assuming Adam discovered such a thing within Imulsion and did not seek to destroy it as well).
A symbiote, basically. But only compatible with former Locust creatures(seeing as the Brumak/“Swarmak” now has a similar type of pink-reddish goo in the blister-like formations on its body and dies when enough or all of them are destroyed), and the new bigger Swarm creatures have it in them, or capable of being used to modify genetic material or break it down to create something new(Juvies) and evolve it(nests).
But until we know more those are just speculative ideas that may turn out to be wrong.
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It´s kinda weird isn´t it. They created the Hollows as the habitat of the Locust and then they just made the Locust men-made. What a wasted opportunity, but I guess Epic didn´t care much, since New Hope and man-made Locust have been a thing since Gears 2.
Something I noticed is one of the things Dom said in Gears 2. At one point he says, that they don´t know for how long the Locust have been living beneath the surface. Does this mean, that the humans were aware of the inner hollows before? This statement does imply, that they don´t believe the Locust to be native or that they´ve been around for long.
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All of those are possibilities. It’s easy to forget that Myrrah is very much still part of the hivemind, if only as an impression. And “Reyna” is just that aspect of Myrrah, in a puppet suit.
As for Swarmaks dying from popping their blisters… They actually don’t, with one notable exception. In the very first Swarmak boss fight (Gears 4) the Swarmak does in fact die when most of its blisters are popped. But it takes an inordinate amount of bullets to do the job. It’s far more efficient to use Torque Bows, Boomshots, and frags to pop those blisters. Plus, the Swarmak is also being clapped by all the stored thunder of a leaky dam, repeatedly.
Every other Swarmak is merely wounded and aggravated by the popping of their blisters. They only die after a Mega Mech cracks open their skull, or after a frag-tagged motorcycle explodes in their mouth, or when a Hammer strike turns them to ash.
So the first Swarmak should be considered a case of bleed-out, electrical shock, and lots of explosive damage.
Also don’t forget when Dom says that the route under Mt Kadar “feels too old.”
Epic loaded Gears 2 with environmental storytelling that told exactly the opposite of the origin story they wanted. And their origin story for Locust (they’re less than a century old) was full of logical holes. But it’s the origin story we got.
shrug
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I guess that’s just a Horde gameplay mechanic then. But it hasn’t been explained or detailed anywhere whether the blisters are actually vital to the Swarmak’s biology after the countermeasure also put them into hibernation or if they’re merely some substance that was eliminated from the body and collected on the outside on those blister formations(why the Swarmak in Gears 4 had them covered in scabs is unclear to me, while every or most other ones we see have their blisters exposed already - a hit registration bug in 4 also once lead me to find out it took several Boomshots to destroy a scab to expose the blister underneath so shooting them isn’t exactly a way to get to them).
And I could swear I read somewhere destroying the majority or all of a Swarmak’s blisters kills it, but it may just have been a piece of information included as a Horde tip since it mentioned they always explode upon death but the one killed in Gears 4 doesn’t when the cutscene begins.