"Chain reaction spawning"... that'd be von neuman machines of some description then.   Which is a cliche by your own description (VNM's are basically the idea used to make the replicators from Stargate).

Perhaps the Vasari are political disidents, they ran to save their own necks from the noose (i.e. we're playing the 'evil' empire... the good guys are heading our way).  I'm sure that's been done before as well.

You want something completley unbalanced chasing them?  Mash Borg/Tyranids together and sprinkle in some Xeelee magic.

Considering Ironclad lifted pretty much all of the races in Sins from other games/fiction, gave them a coat of paint and sent them on their way (Advent = tweaked Higarans, TEC = generic Terran and so on) I'd suggest that the thing the Vasari are running from is their own VNM nanotechnology gone bad. 

Or

"The masters of Baryonic... erm... phase space"  aka tweaked Xeelee, not that I'm complaining... seeing a Nightfighter kicking seven shades out of pretty much everything would be worth the price of admission

"Inhibitors", from Alastair Reynolds' "Revelation Space", would actually fit pretty well.

great ideas in here, fun to read and think about.

i'd like to see something truly unrecognizably alien. i don't just mean some creepy space version of a humanoid or even non-humanoid animal. i mean some form of life totally unrecognizable to us humanoids, not even a chance at communication or understanding.

for those of you who have ever read any H.P. Lovecraft or other similar stuff this would fall into the category of "outer realms entities". tentacles with tentacles on them. eyes that see the 4th and 5th dimension but not the 1st-3rd. really weird stuff like that.

they would be invaders from a parallel dimension with capabilities and motivations so alien even to the mighty Vasari that they were impossible to resist. their bizaare extra-dimensional communications would severely disrupt phasic transmissions and thus be responsible for the conquered parts of the empire going "black" as the exile fleet was running away.

well yeah, for game mechanics you'd just come up with cool graphics to paste on top of relatively normal mechanics. you could have some unique stuff like being able to spread "madness" down phase lanes instead of the normal culture, or maybe an economy based on a resource that only the invaders could perceive (extra-dimensional resource asteroids?).

i dunno, the point isn't to make the game mechanics so different, they should be close enough to the other factions that you'd still feel like you were playing the same game. i just think it would make for really really awesome visuals and background fluff material. who wants yet another light frigate with a laser gun. i'd love to see a giant space squid that grapples things with giant tentacles. even if the tentacles had the same range and damage as a normal laser gun, i'd just cackle with delight to see the different graphics. it would be way cool. 

Organic ships would be really, really hard to pull of for a host of reasons - basically none of the things that set organic ships apart have mechanics the devs can implement in the current game.

The origin of the threat (starting near the center of the Vasari empire and quickly taking out its homeworld) lends itself to a suggestion that the threat is a horde of ravaging nanobots that bust out of a military lab.

And here's a halo-fanboy-esque piece of speculation: the first shot of the opening cinematic shows a Vasari military lab surrounded by debris. The text says: "Viturska Experimental Transport Lab / Vasari occupied 'Kron' / 10,000 Years ago." The voiceover says "We don't know who they are." <-- (I acknowledge this is explicitly talking about the Vasari but there could be a subtext.)

Is it possible that this shot is actually looking at the beginning of the Vasari Nanothreat? It makes sense that it would happen on a transport lab - some new way of moving nanotech is developed independent of the weaponized uses on Vasari ships. Nanobots just start spreading like crazy, desinegrating everything in its wake. We know that the Vasari are threatened by nanotech because, well, they use it exensively in cutting edge warfare.

[shameless plug]

You mean something like this?

[/shameless plug]

Ok, mods aside, I am also very interested to see what new factions IC is going to come up with. Now, to tell the truth, I wasn't terribly impressed with the original three to begin with. Most of it we have seen before. You have your standard humans which a certain portion of the players can identify with. Then you've got your energy-wielding, elegance and style elves-in-space equivalents which appeal to yet another portion of the playerbase, and finally you cover all those misfits who are left - with a strange alien race with insect-like ships, menacing history and - lets face it, they're evil aliens everyone likes to play now and then, and some like to play all the time.

I would love to see a purely organic faction come into play. But something original on that note, like a race of beings which actually live in space, like space wasps or bugs. Maybe they eat planets. Another relatively original take on things could be a race of purely energistic beings. Let's just say that their ships would be quite shiny. Positively luminous even.

What I would NOT like to see is yet another "evil cyborg" or "terminator" race. I know red-eyed robots are scary, but enough is enough.

Hmm, it could be a biological threat, Yuuzhan Vong anyone?

or perhaps something like the Harvesters from MOO3?

I'd love to see something along the lines of the Yuuzhan Vong. Not the fugly ships of course, but something with a whole different philosophy to it than the existing trio.

If I remember the story line correctly, the Vasari simply started losing contact with those worlds.  It was not a prolonged engagement, the worlds simply went quiet.  That means they were taken out extremely fast as no one or no electronic transmission got out.

A faction with that much power would be difficult to properly balance in the game. 

I agree I would also like to see it be something completely different as far as the race and design.

Here's an interesting tangent: is the Threat chasing the Vasari, or just expanding in all directions? The latter would explain why the Vasari have so much time to flee and would also jive with the apparent "all-consuming omnidestructive force" kind of feel.

As far as balancing: a force that's insanely slow to expand but devastating when it can finally get everything to bear would feel right in terms of storyline while still being balanceable.

yes, i aggree with athena

but maybe its so slow because it only moves at stl speeds. this would account for time factors, plus anything that moves a stl speed would have plenty of time to devistate races it encouners (if it expanding in all directions). phasic transmissions have to be supplied through something, right?

so when race A(race we r debating on) goes through a system, who says it has to kill everyone? maybe it just takes out all structures supporting phasic transmissions and enslaves the vasari, like the vasari did to lesser rasces.

fear factor.... not quite sure how to fit this in...

Giant planet/system-wide ambushes that kill everything in sight, cept for planets? letting one ship escape to incite fear and eaiser takover??

the other thing that comes into play is phase jumping, with a stl mover it would have no chance to catch any ship that manages to phase jump. this brings us to the origions of the pji. afterall these things did "litter" known space for all species and may have prevented phase jumping. The current pjis only slowdown phase jumping, but these are copies afterall. the real pji may be one that prevents phase jumps and is the more advanced version of the pji.

nanobots? eventually growth becomes exponential. the chasing theory will not work with nanobots. they would have to be expanding in all directions, maybe going in a totally different direction and chasing the vasari is just a side "project
since vol and surface area have a 3:1 ratio(or sumthin like that) the volume grows much faster than surface area and nanobots would have to fill up the space, if they would colonize space itself and not just the planets.

Now that would be truly anti-climatic.

In the intro, the first text says that the Vasari occupied Kron 10 000 years ago. I think that this is very important as it implies that something MAJOR occured here.

I don't think the threat to the Vasari will ever be added as a race. I think that it may be hinted at more so then now, but I doubt that we will see as much as we want.

It is the mystery that is appealing.

Letting us fans speculate and using the "less is more" philosophy is probobly the best solution.

I don't really want more races. More races means less uniqueness. I want quality rather then quantity. Thats what I like about Entrenchment, it emphasises the differences between the races and I think the next expansion will do so even more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Races_in_Revelation_Space#Inhibitors_.2F_Wolves

(SPOILERS) provides a quick summary of the Inhibitors I referred to.  Interesting foe with a multi-billion-year mission, high technology, and purpose that isn't exactly evil in a certain larger view, but perhaps unsympathetic.   RS is worth reading if you're into "hard" science fiction instead of fluffy space opera.

The 'blight' ala Vinge's 'A Fire Upon the Deep' would also be fitting for an "oh bugger, research gone badly" scenario, but is somewhat dubious considering that defeating it not only pretty much required a deus ex machina, but also triggering a catastrophe wrecking civilizations across an entire galaxy.