Why did they bother occupying Earth?

Perhaps pumping atmosphere full of gas is more expensive than putting a few combines on ground.

Because that would mean them staying around longer than they would have to otherwise, you need to set up those automatons if they have that sort of thing.

Completely crippling the military and then letting collaborators deal with the rest allows them to move on as quickly and efficiently as possible, all the while they are being fed these resources gradually.

they have AIs though, it's not like they can't plop down machines that do the basic shit required to make more machines, which then actually start stripping and shipping the resources

>then why enslave us
Resources.
Your very body is a resource, your DNA is incorporated into their army, they use humans as a genetic base to improve their genetically engineered troops/veicles.
>why not pump a supervirus into our atmosphere and leave automatons to drain the resources
Not resource efficient/too slow.
>so there's no uprising
The problem isn't "an uprising".
The problem is GORDON FUCKING FREEMAN ANTICITIZEN #1.
NO ONE could've predicted Freeman.
Because Freeman isn't just some guy, Freeman is the wild card in the deck that is being helped by a powerful third party that is interested in seeing him fuck the Combine up, among other things.

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They wanted to turn humanity into a synth race. Like the striders and gunships.

huh, organisms as a resource makes more sense
that way there's an actual reason for them to occupy and not kill everyone
shame the games never really made this clearly their goal and instead went "they're draining the water and shit yo"

Do they? We have seen no such automated processes for this purpose, I think it's reasonable to assume that's either more complex/problematic to do than you think or simply not as cheap resource wise as having the remaining populace be made to do it by handing power over to some willing to work for you.

Probably the latter, organic cost for a populace they don't care about anyway makes it real easy.

Reminder Breen did nothing wrong. He was protecting earth from the combine, not condemning it

Overwatch is almost guaranteed to be an AI
she even flat out sounds like a GLaDOS rip off in Episode 2
youtube.com/watch?v=AEc6U55j3rg

Actually they make it very clear that they are turning and using the civilian populace in a variety of ways. Seen the husks in the citadel? Seen the operations going on at nova prospect?

They don't have to directly tell you to make it clear that there's a lot going on there

thing is though, that doesn't show them harvesting the organic populace, just subverting it and altering it, something they'd already done with a lot of things on earth, like the weapons and vehicles

He was gradually allowing them to drain the planet, with not a hint of him working in secret to prevent them from coming to earth again.

All he was interested in was being allowed in on their galactic empire, to learn about their wonders. He was truly in awe by them, and no longer cared about human motivations for self preservation when in his eyes the Combine were the way for ascending into something greater.

It gets hinted at right away at the beginning of the game already, they casually send some with each travel or otherwise on the train to nova prospekt, they raid entire streets and civilians comment on it that it usually starts with a building and then it escalates from there.

They were definitely harvesting and reducing the population.

lore-wise, the combine probably have the process of taking over planets down to some kind of pre-defined protocol that is enforced by either an AI or some local governor or general. they probably don't care that much about how long it takes, how tedious it is, how much proprietary shit they have to create to make it happen and so on. it's just a matter of logistics for them. getting all the materials to the distant part of the universe where that planetary takeover is happening is probably a massive bother, so what they do is they take whatever is available (from previously conquered planets) and use that shit to enslave the next planet.

this is supported by a number of facts:

>the name "combine" and the fact that all their weaponry and soldiers are other aliens combined with their tech
>the combine have been shown to be shit at transportation, which explains their interest in the earth's teleport tech, and also explains why they didn't send some shit from HQ to automate and streamline earth's enslavement
>the combine are turning earth's population into soldiers, even though human soldiers, even enhanced, probably aren't that great at the kind of wars combine are doing. however, they're there and they're available, so combine can use them to take over whatever worlds are near them
>same reason why they're siphoning away earth's water, even though it's not that valuable. they're just taking it because they need it somewhere nearby, and they don't want to go through the logistics of getting it from somewhere else

so to sum up, the combine want to get everything they can from earth so they can use that shit to take over the next world they find nearby. the combine acts more like a virus than an actual galactic government, it just spreads its influence using whatever hosts it can find and combine with their own stuff.

They're pretty sweet desu

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There's an entire expanded lore for what the combine actually are and what they're doing, made by one of the writers that made a separate Twitter account detailing what is happening to Breen post-transport and mind implantation in a combine grub.

twitter.com/breengrub

You're free to consider this canon or not.
This IS made by one of the official writers, but it's canon status is...shaky to say the least, it's just something he made on his free time.

According to this, the combine are somewhat of an insectoid race that has two stages: grub and adult.
They generally stay grubs for as long as possible because they're intelligent when they're grubs, and they become dumb animals once they molt into becoming adults.
As grubs, not only are they intelligent, but they're interlinked in a dream state, a sort of inception style mind matrix that is shared among all of them.
They can also remove their mind from one body and tranfer it to the next, they clone themselves for more vessels etc (they can do this with other races, this is what they've done to Breen too).
Apparently, what happened is that in this dream matrix a "virus" showed up.
They were a peaceful race until the virus started spreading and made them batshit insane and power hungry.
At the point in the story where we are right now, the virus took over most of them tho it's implied there's some rare pockets of sanity.
Breen was shifting inside the conciousness matrix using twitter to talk about all this shit because he realized the true nature of what's happening and was trying to help humanity with this information, until he either got deleted (killed?), or transferred somewhere where he can't reach our system of communication anymore.

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Because we opened a portal from their system to ours and it'd be stupid to pass up that kind of opportunity for massive amounts of resources?

Also just a hunch, if a species could create a resonance cascade, they're probably valuable in other ways too.

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>Why did they bother occupying Earth?
local teleportation technology

>What did they have to gain?
local teleportation within a universe

Are you not paying attention to the story? They assimilate lifeforms into a technocratic hivemind army. Their goal is to dominate all lifeforms and they have infinite multidimensional resources.

We opened a portal because the Combine contacted us first.
It's also implied that the knowledge we had to to half the shit we did comes from them, we didn't just come up with it.

They didn't know they had that until like 2 days before the end of their ability to teleport to Earth. Breen sees Gordon teleporting around, the advisor sees Breen, the Combine rushes through the portal, Gordon destroys the Citadel and closes their portal. This happens in a timeframe of like 48 hours. 2 weeks if you count the Nova Prospekt incident.

It's a shit vacuum to be honest. Get a Riccar or Miele.

Please pay attention to the games your playing rather than shitting up Yea Forums

>shitting up Yea Forums
He's not shitting up Yea Forums, his question sparked an Half Life discussion in a sea of twitter screencap threads and endless shitposting.
We barely talk about HL these days anymore.
It's interesting stuff and it's vidya for a change, he did good.

>Half Life 3...will never happen
I wouldn't expect it any time soon of course, but that doesn't seem likely when you realize HL games were always partially made to show off their engine to other potential devs to get them to want to use it, and that Valve has been working on VR a lot lately.

Gman is one of the most intriguing characters in vidya. There's just a lot of mystery and it's too bad Gabe will never make another halflife.

thank user
I just still like HL, and it's fun to talk about great old games like this
you wouldn't get these in-depth discussions from many, if any newer games

the combine was initially chasing nihilant and his people, and accidentally came across earth when nihilant was trying to take over earth. then the combine realized that the dudes in black mesa have weird teleportation tech and decided to stick around to use it. i mean, they probably would've taken over regardless but the combine's interest in the planet probably went up a lot due to it.

i would assume that the later tele tech that the c17 resistance guys use is just a refined version of the black mesa kind. even the black mesa teleport tech could essentially do local teleportation, it just had to take a quick trip into xen first. kleiner probably made that trip to the xen extremely short or something like that.

You know what? I apologize
I see a dumb question and kinda ticked off my bad

God forbid someone discuss video games on a board made to discuss video games.
Faggot.

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Humans had local teleportation which is the kinda technology that the combine were interested in since while they possess dimensional teleportion, they're still stuck using convential means of transportation. The ability to locally teleport around would be a huge game changer for them.

If you have to ask, you'll never understand

I think the great ironic tragedy in Half Life 2's cliffhanger is that once we finally got the supposed story outline for episode 3, it just told us that it was destined to end on another cliffhanger. We still don't know what G-Man is, or what he had planned for Alyx, and Gordan is just abandoned in the ruins of the resistance after another time-skip, not knowing if any of his friends are left. So beyond the sequel we never got was another sequel we'll never get. The End.

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Why won’t you make a 3rd half life?
>hurrrrrr HURRRRRRRRRRE cuz it won’t live up to everyone’s expectations!!!!
Shut the fuck up faggot and make the game. I don’t give a fuck how the game play. It could literally be a Garry’s mod copy and paste. I just want closure for the fucking story

fuck bros
half life was so fucking cool
why couldn't we get a fucking conclusion to the massive cock cliffhanger

I mean I think I understand now that people gave some good ideas.
Personally the only thing I could think of was the Combine suppressing potential future threats, but that just fell back into the genocide issue.
Plain old human harvesting makes more sense.
Especially when you consider madlad Freeman is him self just a human in a tincan, IE something that can be recreated with a nice suit and a couple alone in a room playing careless whisper
an army of freemans would be pretty valuable

they can't recreate freeman because freeman has a superpower: the player.
freeman is literally controlled by an being that exists outside of their simulated universe, that can control time and move around in save states.
freeman has a kind of freedom no one else could possibly have, not even the combine.

VNN's video on the canceled Half-Life 3 implies they were just gonna gloss over the events of Episode 3 as a prologue and Gordon would've woken up in Aperature, eventually escaped and entered a world that basically resembles what City 17 was in the 2003 leak (grimdark as fuck)

true, but the combine don't know any of this
they just know there's a few humans that are fucking amazing at kicking ass for some reason
Alyx, for example, is pretty dangerous herself, and she doesn't have any player controlling her
finding a way to replicate soldiers like the main characters of HL would be pretty valuable

Was Alyx intended to be the next protagonist after leaving Gordon behind?

good point
some of the combine-human soldiers they've already made are pretty damn tough anyways i'm sure they can do better

Because Breen convinced them it was better to enslave us than to kill us all.

Actually, this shows that the grub race are NOT the "original" combine, but yet another species that was conquered and assimilated into the combine, used by the combine as biological hard drives and internet.

We need to make a distinction between "open ending" and "cliffhanger." The end of Half-Life and Half-Life 2, and the intended ending of Half-Life 2: Episode Three, were "open endings" that finished the story arc but left an open sequel hook for the next story. Half-Life 2: Episode One and Half-Life 2: Episode Two were cliffhangers, ending with the story arc unresolved in order to build anticipation for the next entry.

Just to flex on weaker races

yeah, combine elites have like 70 health compared to Freeman's 100
so even if they are weaker, 70% of Freeman is still insanely dangerous
ofc there's more things at play, like Freeman's suit and their suit, the fact that Freeman can carry an entire armoury with him and still run pretty fast, or freeman's superior accuracy
but there's nothing saying these aren't all things that could be replicated by copying the HEV suit

i don't know if i believe these things are traits of the HEV suit anymore man, the suit was just designed to shield from radiation for lab tests

Would not be too much of a surprise considering they actually did that with Half-Life 2 treating cut plans for Half-Life 1 as canon.

Some of the original plans for Xen in Half-Life 1 was for Freeman to free the Vortigaunts and lead them in rebellion against the Nihilanth. Though this was cut, Half-Lfie 2 basically pretends like it still happened with how the Vortigaunts revere Freeman.

Also, I suspect they'll probably cannibalize parts of that failed Half-Life 3 into HLVR. Rumors are that the game mechanic arm thing was a teleportation thing, and Valve insists on teleportation over smooth locomotion in VR.

You are trying to make since of video game plot.,,

I think that Alyx getting whisked off into the unknown could still be taken as cliffhanger-ish.

because it isn't worth valves time to make a single player game

>HLVR
this isn't real please stop

I mean, the HUD is canonically part of the suit, and it has a system for managing weapons
Not to mention the suit energy reducing damage from ballistics fire and explosions
I'm more inclined to think the "Hazardous Environments" it was developed for were hazardous in a more violent sense than just radiation.

It's real and it'll be out this year you dumb cunt. It's been datamined for the past 4 years consistently in every Source-related game update.

>it'll be out this year
l m f a o

keep telling yourself that
remember how L4D3 kept getting "found" in datamines too?

True. They are making a game called "Combine" for Vive that is Half Life related.

>it'll be out this year
Yeah, just like Half-Life 2 came out on September 30, 2003, and Half-Life 2: Episode Three came out Christmas 2007.

>remember how L4D3 kept getting "found" in datamines too?
L4D3 was a real project that was being worked on. It just lost traction and fell apart because Valve can't finish any of their projects anymore.

here's the thing about the combine, they can teleport inter-dimensionally, but not to different places in one dimension. they came in from an alternate universe earth, that's why they invaded earth instead of some other planet.

why are HL threads so comfy?
is it shared suffering?

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because it's something everyone agrees on

less toxic fanbase
Zoomers have little interest in the games, and the ones that do tend to be more well behaved
so you can have an actual discussion that doesn't turn into screeches of reddit, barely or not even relevant memes, and shit flinging.

proof?

Commiserating over something we enjoyed. And speculation over something that will never exist leads to less shitposters ranting over how it will be inevitable shit.

graphene

our sun

so what makes you so sure HLVR will see the light of day

inter dimensional capabilities

Haven't played the HL games in years now, especially 1, but isn't the suit canonically more or less a super suit? If we look at shit like the crash course tutorial (not sure how canon that is), the suit
>let's you tank damage / hazardous environments like a motherfucker, being able to do shit like survive long falls, bullets, radiation, staying underwater for certain periods of time, etc.
>advanced enough to detect various kinds of injuries and categorize/treat them
>administers morphine, cauterizes wounds, applies sutures and casts (not sure about these last two, I seem to remember the suit voice saying shit about them too) to keep the user alive if they sustain enough damage to feel it through the suit
>enhances strength/mobility as show by all the parkour shit you have to do after you put it on
>potentially developed to be used in hostile xen environments

I'm not, actually. I don't share the optimism of some of these other anons.

oh
well then i wanna know why the dude that called me a faggot is so sure it's coming out this year then
sorry, everyone anonymous and all that

They're a type-4 super-race with access to countless resources and conglomerates of other civilizations they've taken over. If they have means to eat up every fucking planet they see just to amass their control that much further, then why the fuck not?

Also IIRC they were primarily after the Borealis, since its own science was just that advanced. Also possibly a minor threat to their own too.

Nah, freeman job was to destroy the ship, he cant do shit to the combine or liberate earth, Gman just wanted that ship.

Fuck... I was 16 when hl1 came out 21 when hl2 came out and nothing, my life in a bottle everything builds up to nothing! What a shitty timeline I have lived.

because HL has a fascinating lore but there is one thing that bugs me:
If the combine are the sole leaders of multiple universes it is so unrealistic that they have not found one intra universal teleportation tech and have to raid humans to get it.
The combine have universes full of their dyson spheres.

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How would you want them to go about Opposing Force 2?
What would the plot be?
Any changes to gameplay?
What devs would you stick it with?

Way back in April, when Valve was gearing up to launch the Valve Index, Valve also said that it would be announcing and releasing "Flagship VR game" later this year.

But seeing as the Valve Index has shipped and it's now August with no further mention of this "flaghip VR game," I'm not optimistic on hearing anything more about it this year, let alone it actually releasing this year.

reminder gearbox made opposing force, not valve

when artifact released valve also said that they'd hold a 1 million dollar tournament in 2019
still waiting tho

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That's why I asked what devs you would choose.

God that story is garbage.

My headcanon was that the combine were humans from like 99999 years in the future/different dimension, and since FTL is impossible, earths combine empire is just layered over the top of earth over and over, through all its dimensions and possibilities, hence the combine dimensional looking logo, idk. Like we were invaded by our future or fucked up selves, hence why they were so well informed about how to conquer humanity down to the DNA.

dunno, better than that garbage

favorite hl2 mods?

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>intra-universal teleportation is basically the most important thing ever to the Combine
>they expend almost no effort in trying to secure it

>the Combine are a dimension hopping super empire
>the first thing they do in a new dimension is to kill some locals and then leave instead of expanding into space to get at the real resources

>the Combine have the ability to build at least one Dyson Sphere
>despite a single planet being utterly insignificant in every way at that scale, they still have a conventional army that took 7 hours to pacify Earth

The Combine are a fucking mess. They wanted a big, imposing sci-fi enemy but realized they could never actually put them in the game because they should have won the moment they appeared.

Yeah, it's not like there are billions of other stars just like it with no inhabited planets near it or anything

if earth is some backwater they don't care about, and they have other shit to deal with then them not showing up for a few years might make sense

its not like they were particularly needed

why dont you try to manage a universe sized empire

One could actually incorporate the apparent incompetence into the lore pretty well by explaining it as bureaucratic inefficiencies.

Laidlaw was pretty heavily influenced by Borges and trying to imagine impossibly large systems. While I obviously don't know what Laidlaw's actual conceptions of the combine are, I would hazard a guess that Laidlaw imagined the combine sd something so ancient and vast that it doesn't actually have a coherent vision or "ruling class" or anything like that; just an infinitely large network of middle manager bureaucrats keeping the expansion going, because that's the only thing the combine machine can do anymore: mindlessly expand.

>notice portal to unconquered world opened when some idiot scientists run an experiment
>be running a huge empire
>DON'T take advantage of the situation
?????

It was about resources,power and elimination competition. Humans proved smart enough to open the rift into other dimensions which means leaving that unchecked could mean that at some point humans advance enough to be a threat.

>they expend almost no effort in trying to secure it

Technological advancement isn't a linear path, it's possible they could have never figured the shit out even with trying. Humans just seemed to stumble upon it by accident really.

>the first thing they do in a new dimension is to kill some locals and then leave instead of expanding into space to get at the real resources

They weren't great at hopping into our dimension, they only had a tiny foothold on earth and were basically using the citadel in City 17 as a means to get back to our dimension.

>Humans proved smart enough to open the rift into other dimensions which means leaving that unchecked could mean that at some point humans advance enough to be a threat.
this

it might require exact conditions which are possibly random for discovery

>the most important thing ever to the Combine
on EARTH
there's no reliable indication the greater part of combine is interested in it
they are spending lots of locally allocated resources in finding it, and that makes sense because it's the only thing they don't have that humans possess so it has value
you never see any non-standard off-world shit coming in specifically for the task, which I imagine they would send to secure "the most important thing ever"
it's all standard off-world forces, allocated to this local branch of the combine and on-world forces manufactured locally
in the grandscheme of combine's plans it might be next to worthless and not worth the hassle
they appear to see conquest as an inevitability, they rarely take out of the ordinary action against anything
an opposing force with teleportation tech would still shatter like glass against the sheer numbers combine possesses, be forced permanently on the run or stuck inflicting minor casualties in a never ending guerilla war

no your idea is a lot more garbage just stop and fuck your reddit tier spacing.

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What are the prevailing gman theories? I assumed he just sold Gordon to the highest bidder, and in HL2 that meant some kind of combine rival

Always kinda digged Rock 24 desu, not the greatest overall but it's kinda kino for me at least.

It's adapted military tech if Shepard's uniform is any indication

Lots of research going into making a suit like that in real life, but the main problem they run into time after time is that they don't have energy storage good enough to pull it off

The batteries in the game don't look like any battery I've ever seen and look positively radioactive -- and the HEV charger makes extremely high voltage noises when it's juicing up the suit

Eh, the progenitor human story thread makes the universe a little less big and alien imo. Not saying your idea isn't terrible, just could use some workshopping to make it work.

I like the idea that of ourselves conquering ourselves to the point of perfection tho.

Sudden idea: the highest bidder IS the Combine. It's some other mid-level Combine bureaucrat who wants to screw over the mid-level Combine bureaucrat who has Earth under his jurisdiction. Because that's just how huge the Combine are. That entire planets get screwed over by petty squabbling in middle management.

How depressing would that be?

We got a Joseph Anderson fan here

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>go back in time and fuck up your ancestors
this is a dumb fucking idea

you have to remember the guy who discovered ideal teleportation was a mad scientist doped up on asbestos from shower curtains that was poisoned by exposure to moon dust

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Atmosphere > story for short FPS games, so suck on that.

Mission Improbable is really solid. Transmissions Element 120 is cool but really short. A lot of people like Minerva but I found it pretty annoying due to how it handles the difficulty.

the one with the fully modeled cervix

Kino writing:
>youtu.be/VAr2rd9PVL4?t=45

youtube.com/watch?v=nUUgqkyvy50

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Mossman pretty much explains it when you reach Black Mesa East:
They want teleportation technology, they can go anywhere when they cross dimensions but once on they arrive to their destination they are stuck with local transportations, the ability to teleport large amount of troops and ressources anywhere they want is fairly important for an empire of that scale.

Everything you said is false
>Intra hopping tech is universe specific so doesn’t mean much outside of their universe
>taking over a planet using the planets own people is the most resource saving way of doing it
>the combine never used a conventional army, other races basically bombarded earth

Because of teleporters you fucking retard. Did you even play the game?

>If the combine are the sole leaders of multiple universes it is so unrealistic that they have not found one intra universal teleportation tech and have to raid humans to get it.
The combine's evolution isn't being controlled by the Gman. He was the one who brought the xenium crystal to Black Mesa and those crystals are the key to so-called intra-universal teleportation. Humans are not teleporting within our universe, they swing around the crystal relay in Xen. The one that Barney had to re-activate at the end of Blue Shift. Xen is a border world between universes into which species enslaved by the combine escaped most notably the nihilanth species. The combine doesn't know how to get there and how to exploit it for teleportation. Humans can because the Gman gave them the means to do so.

In fact by the time of HL2 crossing Xen is no longer required, it just a theorical point, and the combines uses an old version of this that takes weeks to make more than one person to go anywhere without getting buttfucked by a gargantua on the way there.

Dyson spheres? They should have been fetching a pail of water!

Gman already has technology surpassing the Borealis bootstrap device. He's everywhere and anywhere at once at the snap of his fingers. The Borealis is stuck across all space and all time because Aperture were exactly 50% brilliant and 50% retarded. They managed to invent a device that could simultaneously hop in all dimensions at once but they couldn't actually steer it at all.

I'm pretty sure every time they teleport in the story they calculate for the Xen relay. You don't actually physically jump into Xen and then start up another teleport. The wormhole just swings around that universe and ends up back in ours.

>Why did they bother occupying Earth?
Because the resonance cascade pinned Earth as home to an intelligent species whose technology may be worth commandeering.
>What did they have to gain?
Local teleportation technology
>It's not like the water they were pumping from it was rare enough that they couldn't go to a different planet and sap it's resources instead.
The level of resource harvesting and subjugation observed in HL2 is likely just a means of supporting the occupation force/transhuman arm while they search for local teleport technology and not for the greater Universal Union. I mean, did you ever see them send water through the Citadel?

Overwatch is blizzard, user

If you actually paid attention in half life one you would have realized that the HEV suit is a combat suit made to be used in Xen, it's why you find tons of dead HEV guys with rocket launchers and other weapons in Xen, it's also why the training course for the HEV suit also has a weapons training course. Freeman got put into it by accident.

Idk if this is bait but he's talking about that computer who constantly gives updates on the combine radio chatter

Could the Covenant empire at its height of power(pre Elite secession) take on the Combine?

They explain it in the game, after the events of hl1 they notice us and got interest in our teleportation technology. And it's just my theory but GladOS didn't want anyone out including herself or the robots because she knew they would assault their facilities for the portal technology after being retconned into half life.

But since they're there might as well get all the resources they can, including species. If you look at the beta, read about the 7-hour war and look around at the last level (where you just chill on the pod) you see how they used enslaved species for conquering planets (the dropship and gunship are probably alive too). And until now they were all pretty too big, so a small species capable of tactical thinking and 10 pretty little fingers would be a nice addition to their tank army.

they seem to have better FTL tech than the combine, but apart from that they'd get fucked as soon as their tech got reverse engineered

crummy dyson spheres...

Nothing wrong with colonization and imperialism

We never saw that full combine force or what theyre doing.

Earth is pretty much just some backwater outpost of theirs with limited resources.

That's why the combine utilize shitty soviet infrastructure, buildings and train tracks instead of having everything be alien tech.

train tracks are a very efficient mode of transportation on a relatively high gravity world like Earth. No need to waste huge amounts of energy on overcoming gravity using some kind of floating tech when you can just load a carriage with metal wheels on metal tracks.

No, she's just gone on her own journey. Would you call wesley crusher leaving when he because the whatever the fuck that was because fuck if I could stand to pay attention to that episode more than 10 minutes a cliffhanger? You're supposed to imagine what happens yourself. It's not supposed to have an an answer.

>Why did they bother occupying Earth?
teleporters smell good
>What did they have to gain?
really tasty teleportation technology
>It's not like the water they were pumping from it was rare enough that they couldn't go to a different planet and sap it's resources instead.
gotta occupy it anyway, why not just take what's there?

I really like that

>have you seen my husband
That lady was the saddest shit to me for some reason. I think it was the "they're better ng nice though" line.
Hope she gets revenge.

Resources. And not only water, not only resources from earth, but it's suggested on some texture that they mined and drained whole Sol system to the point some planets went fuckin missing.
But most importantly portal tech, which is one of the things combine didn't figure out well enough, even after they conquered earth. Blac Mesa was destroyed and they tried their best efforts to cap last living personnel from BM and AS, as well as Borealis.

>A 4-way war with 2 of them being entire races on their last legs
>combine shows up
Nothin personnel...

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They wanted access to the teleportation that humanity unwittingly discovered.

Humanity just lost the best technology it ever had, G-man is confirmed as not an ally and Combine is confirmed to still be stupid strong. Vorts managed to save Freeman, but overall epistle 3 just ramps up the threats and revelations yet again - that's the definition of cliffhanger.
You only saying that because you know for sure there will never be another HL game. If Valve would actually care enough to make that ending a reality, they probably would care enough to make HL3 or even some more side-stories like with HL1.

That reminds me, what was the point of brainwashing Alyx to say "prepare for unforeseen consequences"?

Underhell, my GOTY 2013

i always figured race x was some combine scouting party the way the geneworms portal work

Gman probably knew that the vorts taking Gordon away from his control would lead to a future where the combine raids White Forest and Eli dies

>How would you want them to go about Opposing Force 2?
classic half life style shooter
>What would the plot be?
as freeman fucked up nova prospkekt the rebellion kicks in full gear in city 17, gman takes shephard out of stasis to join a parallel rebellion in the usa led by that mustached hecu veteran that ordered the pull out of black mesa. rosenberg is there too, adrian finds american rebels that take him to the ledership where you get your orders to infiltrate a train to new mexico and return to a nuked black mesa to get a mcguffin, you then use the old teleporter rosenberg and barney use to escape to return to the rebels but some xen shenanigans ensue, some race x appear and finally you storm a citadel with a combine portal partially working, you destroy the citadel and get pulled out of there by gman who tells you good job and offers you two choices, either return to live out your life at earth or a job offer as an infiltration asset to his employers with some tempting reward like immortality or something or for some greater good. it ends with the osprey scene from the original except you make a choice
>Any changes to gameplay?
more gore, vr support and xen flora/fauna returning
>What devs would you stick it with?
someone good

I mean, comparing it to the lab experiment which have led to three alien invasions in a row, nothing in the episodes is even close to being "unforeseen" and if he were aware of Eli's upcoming death that just looks like him being petty for no good reason towards the wrong man.

Maybe they are actually some space losers, like in the movie Evil Alien Conquerors.

i think i read somewhere that they were impressed by humanity's adaptive skills as a millitary and incorperated them into their synth army

Specifically they liked our monkey-style penchant for dominating and brutalizing subjugated species. They planned on turning most humans into Overwatch to use as cruel occupation forces on their other holdings. That's what I read in Raising the Bar.

youtube.com/watch?v=RQimJJEwscQ

Gman let Eli die because he wasn't on board with team Kleiner in getting the Borealis. This is just a theory of mine.

>we will never get HL3 raising the bar, to see exactly what occured in valve headquarters that made them constantly shutter the sequel to HL2

It's almost like they had no plans to finish it or weren't able to and g man was just some mysterious character with no writing behind him for the sake of being mysterious

Hey if steam starts to fail maybe they will make Half-Life 3.
Pray for Epic Games Store to succeed.

Hey buddy I think you got the wrong door
The test chamber is two blocks down
youtube.com/watch?v=oRH7bo29vIA

>space niggers enslave the entire global population and force us to make them vacuum cleaners
Any video games for this feel?

oddworld?

Never played oddworld or heard anything other than the recent fiasco. Should I play it? Where should I begin and on which platform?

Resources and slave/cattle aside, I'm pretty sure there's some lines in the game revealing that the Combine can teleport across dimensions and worlds, but the humans (namely Black Mesa staff in the resistance) have a different method of teleportation which allows them to teleport around locally, and they want it.

Entropy: Zero is pretty cool

Attached: 1550294770621.gif (294x331, 3.74M)

youtube.com/watch?v=yBOzBA9Bc84

That's a hard question, depends on your tolerance for retro. New n' Tasty is a reasonable entry point, but the classics have their own charm. Stranger's wraith is fun, but lacks the soul of the other games besides a few good moments. Look up the cutscenes for the game to get an idea of how much you'd enjoy exploring the universe.

youtube.com/watch?v=Ec5oR2uRL7o

youtube.com/watch?v=JgMes_8e3AM

this better be a porn and you better have the name because im ready to go

dumb gamer

Uhhhhh, source?

Oh, Munch's Oddysee is also really overlooked and great.

youtube.com/watch?v=WTt25dkIxsk

youtube.com/watch?v=R8HxNvt0xLw

Literally a Doctor Who plotline.

That is fucking boring desu.

We know what happened. Valve's in-office policy. Nobody can force the developers to create something they aren't motivated to create. In other words Valve would rather release nothing at all than something bad. The development team will only do something that all of them want to do, and what all of them want to do is nothing at all.

But they managed to make the HL2 with this same policy. I find it insane that nobody feels motivated to create the next installment of a critically acclaimed fps

The project probably fell apart due to internal disagreements over the direction of HL2:Ep3 (and HL3). Epistle Three is how Laidlaw wanted to close off the HL2 series and set up for an HL3, but others might have disagreed. Some possible leaks suggest that a 2013 version of HL3 project fell apart because of internal disagreement over how much to revisit HL2 and bring back HL2 characters.

HL2's final version is such a weird mishmash of cut content and final content.

HL2's beta version had a ton of interesting ideas, like being set in the US rather than Eastern Europe like in the final game, or having Conscripts and hinting at the Combine Invasion being far more different than what was decided in the final game, with Freeman even seeing stuff like the former Government serving under the Combine.

Most of that is removed, but it's hinted to actually happen in the background. But we don't really know that for sure about this kind of stuff. A lot of information on the Combine are a mystery, the game gives us multiple reasons on why they are here but never gives us a concrete reason.

Also I hate how almost every HL2 mod takes place in the same Eastern European setting instead of moving to the US or Western Europe.

Oh, they’re motivated to create. Of course they all want to create “the best FPS game ever made.” Doesn’t mean they will agree on what exactly that is.

Rumors and leaks on failed Valve projects pretty much always involve stories of internal disagreements and fights scuttling things.

Because realistic space expansion doesn't make for dramatic storytelling

Any spacefaring race is going to get 99% of its shit from raw space sources like asteroids, gas giants, and nebulae. Fighting creatures for their planets over resources is not likely to ever happen unless something very rare and valuable is on that planet that somehow doesn't occur elsewhere in the universe.

But fuck that, rule of cool. Besides Combine don't have localized teleportation so maybe their space travel abilities are ass and they don't want to fly into space for 500 years to go find resources.

people work with what they got
same reason almost every mod in half life 1 takes place in some "unkown part" of black mesa and every protag is called dr freeman

>Muh disagreements
Can't they fucking find a compromise? I find it insane they always cancel every fucking project because one team member says "I disagree with this"

intradimensional portal technology from black mesa and aperture
experimenting on humans to assimilate them
resources

luckily there.s boreal alyph

>same reason almost every mod in half life 1
Literally the opposite. Half of Half Life 1's mod has new environments, only the early ones take place in an unknown part of Black Mesa.
Let me name mods that aren't set in Black Mesa
>Wanted!
>Afraid of Monsters
>TFC
>CS
>Cry of Fear
>ESF
>Vampire Slayer
>Paranoia
>Half-Rats
>C.A.G.E.D.
>The Challenger Deep
>E7 Black Star
>Gunman Chronicles
>Heart of Evil
>USS Darkstar
>Swiss Cheese Halloween
>Day of Defeat
Etc. The list goes on.
HL1 has a ton of mods set in other places and environments but for some reason HL2 has rarely any mods set outside of the Eastern Europe location of HL2.

To change the setting they’d have to create new art assets instead of just reusing HL2’s Eastern Europe art assets.

For all we know they could be strip mining the asteroids too.

As for why bother with Earth, the Seven Hour War could be considered analogous to miners clearing out local wildlife before beginning operations. Remember that it was Breen that convinced the Combine that humans were worth assimilating into the Combine rather than just exterminating outright.

Because the entirety of Half-Life was lazy fucking stupid writing for a style-over-substance shitgame.

Research & Development
So far I'm also really digging Dark Interval

nah

nah

Thread theme
youtube.com/watch?v=G3saHq5eBmM

yeah but the arcade part is stupid

Portal technology

I'm I the only one in the thread who actually played this game?

bad writing

No, you are the only one who didn't read the thread.

>because the resonance cascade pinned Earth as home to an intelligent species whose technology may be worth commandeering.
This. Everyone sees the humans as being completely feeble in the face of the combine, but I think thats an understatement. For all we know humans can be more technologically advanced than 95% of the other civilizations the combine has taken over

most of their synths seem to based on wildlife

>Would you call wesley crusher leaving when he because the whatever the fuck that was because fuck if I could stand to pay attention to that episode more than 10 minutes a cliffhanger?
Can you speak english please

It was the same with Blizzard for years. With the luxury of infinite money you can have board meetings for weeks and weeks discussing nonsensical shit like the color of Kerrigans panties or how many gray hairs G-Man should have. Why compromise when you have no deadline or worries.

One word is off. If you can't extrapolate which one and what it should've been, then you are a retard.

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>time travel
>ever better than anything

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Also Project Borealis.

TWO HL2Ep3 fan projects are in active development. I hope I live long enough to play both.

and they dont look like shit too

Free fan projects can’t afford to look like shit or else morale tanks and the project immediately dies. While shit projects can survive and get released off of corporate money, fan projects run on morale alone. Just by surviving this long you know that Boreal Alyph and Project Borealis have both cleared a minimum threshold of not terrible.

You say that, but Stalker: Lost Alpha somehow got released.

Because streamers don't pick it up, so you don't have the "I saw X play it, and he's based!" shit going around.

HL1 is easier to mod? Idk

>what is bolloxed
bruh

>Why did they bother occupying Earth?
Bro heh heh heh I'm gonna kick over this ant nest
DON'T DO IT BRO ANTS ARE DANGEROUS
Nah bro check out these boots I got
Awww shit bro those ants don't stand a chance!
Haha take that you stupid ants.

There is way more fucked with that sentence than one word being off

Yeah, Source is an incredible pain to work with. No one wants to mod it.

Even level creators for HL2 Episodes One and Two have complained about working in Hammer. The guys behind Boreal Alyph outright made their own level creation tools to avoid using Hammer.

>They generally stay grubs for as long as possible because they're intelligent when they're grubs, and they become dumb animals once they molt into becoming adults.
Oh shit, the combine are GIRLS?
Haha that means that Breen is Trans now.

>better
hmmm

>thisyear
wew

does black mesa team work in hammer?

The Shu’ulathoi are not the Combine. The “THEY” and “THEIR” in the tweets are the Combine. The Combine conquered the Shu’ulathoi by using the “virus” to mind-wipe the grubs. Shu’ulathoi grubs are basically just biological hard drives that the Combine use for memory storage and internet.

so the combine are basically gmen that squable among themselves over power and gordon was just some combine powerplay to fuck with another corporate branch of the combine
sounds kinda anticlimactic desu

because its a fucking video game you retard.

>What did they have to gain?

We're the only planet in the universe that has [insert hip trendy food here].

What if Gman is Gordon in the future?

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Attached: Mexican_ass_destroyers.jpg (2961x3035, 820K)

Wasn't the story of half life 3 that all those stuff were meaningless since the combine were such a powerful empire that your shitty rebelion was the equivalent of a street riot to them

Go play fortnite kiddo.

Because they don't have advanced teleportation themselves, they most likely find humans, a race that developed advanced teleportation but couldn't make use of it yet, by chance.
Just imagine fighting an empire that know how to use teleportation technologies: They can send troops/destructive weapons even in the most well defended fortress without breaking a sweat, any ground gained can be immediately lost if they decide to send reinforcement, they can send a squad behind yours at any time and wipe the floor with them,...
The combines may have multidimensional teleportation but once the spot they would be fucked.

still a species kicking their occupation out might never have hapened to them, even the nihilianth had to escape into xen, it might have messed with their ego that a fucking species barely out of their caves managed to kick em out

Mossman explained they developed Single-Dimensional teleportation, where Xen no longer require a focusing device
>we figured out how to use Xen as an unexpressed axis, effectively a dimensional slingshot so we can swing around the borderworld and come back to local space without having to pass through.

Yeah but eventually it worked both ways. It was the equivalent of a street riot on a backwater mining village so the empire couldn't be bothered with continuing the operation. Decades later Gordon appears on Earth, the revolution is over, the Earth combine forces who were abandoned by their superiors were defeated long ago and everyone Gordon knew is long gone. And all that was basically edited from the real script to include parallels to Valve's office politics and the reasons wy HL3 was never made. The world had moved on, Alyx had been transferred to Gman's care and Gordon was alone, just like Valve had moved on, everyone important had tranferred to different companies and Laidlaw was alone.

the special earth teleportation tech doesn't make much sense to me. If the combine knew about this thing which apparently doesn't exist anywhere in all of their vast dyson sphere repertoire, and clearly is super powerful, why didn't they just invade earth until it was shoulder-to-shoulder with synths from the arctic to antarctica? Why let some local milita and some faggot human manage the whole thing?

Stranger's Wrath is a really decent shooter that still holds up

>combine elites have like 70 health
And stiff as hell but still an opponent to be reckoned with when in a squad.
Just imagine an HEV Combine Elite
>match Freeman in term of mobility
>tank a shitload of damage and capable of using many weapons

>position constantly given away by the cascading noise of a dozen MINOR. LACERATION. DETECTED.

Bureaucratic inertia.

Having sold out and gotten a corporate job, the Combine makes so much more sense to me. Doesn’t matter how big of a potential game changer something is, a big corporation is always slow to act and hesitant to commit.

Breen probably also sweet-talked his direct manager in the Combine hierarchy that he could deliver the portal tech without having to commit the resources: “Sure, you could commit $1 million to getting this project done using your own guy, but I’m a local and understand things, I can get the project done for $10,000.”

didn’t they want the portals?

Same reason why Star fox fans make threads:
Talk about something we all miss

Sounds about right.

Local teleportation in general.

The game would have been pretty disappointing otherwise

Same voice actor.

god, imagine being a combine bureaucrat
you probably command enough power to lay waste to a hundred civilizations, yet all you really are is a caricature of a long dead species with a little chip in your brain that gives you one sad faps worths of dopamine every time a planet under your control is fully assimilated

breen was also admin over the place that came up with the tech and knew kleiner, vance and magnusson and maybe rosenberg if he's still alive
so he was obviously important to the goal of teleportation, and now that they blacked eli vances brain they may have got some of what they wanted coupled with aperture tech
if the advisor that snacked on vances brain gets to he combine homeworld its bye bye earth

>We're closing in on a reliable local teleport technology, something the Combine still hasn't mastered. Eli thinks their portals are string-based, similar to our Calabi-Yau model, but they've failed to factor in dark energy equations. They can tunnel through from their universe, but once they're here, they're dependent on local transportation. If they knew what we're doing with entanglement—
I'm curious what she means by entanglement, and what do they do when that happens.

Now imagine that Gordon’s entire journey was due to some jerk in the next cubicle over hiring Gman just to screw over one of your planets and rob you of that dopamine rush.

sending rebel assasins and vortegaunts into the citadel fucking with the advisors directly

They work mostly in Wall Worm now iirc.
Though any HL2/Hammer modders reading this thread might be interested in this: youtube.com/watch?v=HOQgwy6hvaE

i guess it's quantum entanglement, which i think is when two things share the same quantum state regardless of position or time

If Gordon had just submitted the right form and visited the right department, the combine invasion might not have happened

>the Combine are just the Vogons

Just a quick check on moddb gives loads of mods not set in eastern europe though.

Here's a better way to stop the combine invasion
>file a complaint to the OSHA because most of your workplace is clearly missing a lot of guardrails and disregarding a lot of safety protocols.

>the combine rulers are just an entire dyson spheres worth of dilbert-style offices except the structure is large enough that the hierarchy can be looped around so you can have seniority over your boss without anyone actually noticing

Attached: dt141217[1].gif (900x280, 123K)

>why not pump a supervirus into our atmosphere and leave automatons to drain the resources
because they sent a text to Breen "take care of problems or we wipe this planet" and just left
why would you tire yourself out throwing a virus in the very ressource you wish to harvest instead of just asking several slave races to oversee things ?

it's actually just because they might find an exotic bird or something that has an enzyme that could ramp up their overall efficiency by a factor of 10^-7 so they thoroughly process the planet first

>"sir, someone slipped a tiny pink paper in between our forms with "Stop ataking urth" written on it"
>"you're not being paid to ask questions, just give it to the other department for processing"
>And so, the combine removed all their force, and Urth was safe once more
>Earth on the other hand, was emptied of all its ressources to cover the loss

I think a good scenario for HL 3 would be, after the events of Episode 3, where Gordon's in the future and the Combine's been removed, a more traditional alien empire from space attacks Earth, thinking us to be weak due to our youth and small size.
Whereupon we kick their asses with relative ease, free the races under the powerful alien empire, and form a more peaceful one.
This would show how strong humanity would be after having managed to fight off the combine, and set up a HL 4 where the combine comes back, and our strength has gone up from backwater village to third world country.
Maybe I'm just rarted but I think it would be neat for humanity to be underestimated by a species in our universe who doesn't realize we've fought off inter-dimensional threats.

Didn't they already got the BM tech from Mossman? Borealis probably were much more important for them anyway.

>Didn't they already got the BM tech from Mossman?
Yes and no, they developed their own teleportation due to Mossman but she was clearly not giving everything they got at BM, their model still rely on their old model where you slingshot from Xen, and to avoid landing on it, it takes over a week to carry more than one person.

Not quite, she just knew the right calibrations to use the Xen Relay. The actual tech of the Combine portals was still far behind, as evidenced by even with the right calibrations the portal at Nova Prospekt took 2 weeks to send Gordon and Alyx to Kleiner's.

>and since FTL is impossible

wrong

Where is any of this story even told? cuz it sure as shit isnt in the 4 mainline games released.

pay attention to the fucking games for once

Also it has a lengthy charge time in comparison to the portals Kleiner and Eli work with.

Dialogue bits and details in the world mostly.

Most of this is told in the games, you just have to look and listen for it. HL doesn't throw a shit ton of exposition in your face.

Even the Kleiner-Vance teleported is cutting edge new tech. Alyx’s teleportation at the beginning of HL2 was its first application for human transportation.

Teleportation is still a very young and active field of research in HL2. That’s also one of the arguments Mossman made to Breen for sparing Eli: they need him to continue his research.

Well yea, I remember it being shitty. But Combine are smart enough to develop their own technologies, they could fix it, reverse engineer or whatever, given the time.

>But Combine are smart enough to develop their own technologies
Maybe not. If all this speculation that the Combine are basically mindless corporate bureaucracy scaled to a ridiculous size is true, then the Combine should basically be utterly incapable of real innovation, and wholly dependent on conquering other species in order to get any new tech.

Can u give examples of where they talk about this whole invading and taking over humans for their soldier thingS? not trying to be a smart ass, genuinly curious.

Wasn't the whole idea of the combine that they can only steal ideas and tech, all the way to relying on literal brain sucking in order to think up anything new?

I wouldn't expect a "corporations are bad" kind of message in series where all the most impressive tech humans have comes from corporations, in one case quite literally mindless too.

Because Breen.
Why not just create several half-lifes at the same time?

up in the thread people discuss how the combine is harvesting and modifying people
and how most other reasons they would invade earth wouldn't explain why they'd dominate humanity rather than genocide them, unless humanity itself is the resources they want from the planet

Brain sucking is a last resort, they more about assimilation and enslaving. Even brainwashing isn't used universally, Breen and Nihilanth being the best examples of having ambitions of their own.

>no half life 4 where you get the password to the dyson sphere through phishing combine employees then blowing it up

Attached: 1503805772004.png (706x396, 455K)

>Why not just create several half-lifes at the same time?
They’ve tried and failed.

Valve can’t make games anymore.

>Rumors and leaks on failed Valve projects pretty much always involve stories of internal disagreements and fights scuttling things.
i thought it was obvious from all the looks behind valve studios that all they have done since portal 2 is using the steam money buying and eating candy all day and treating their offices and work hours as a continuous lan-party
youtube.com/watch?v=Jykakik24gY

Were the combine just that incompetent that they somehow couldn't tell that the Nihilanth was capable of biologically controlling inter-universal mass teleportation of entire populations and that's why it and its people we capable of escaping to Xen?

A big part of the Combine forces are other aliens with cyber modifications to them. The gunship, dropship, Striders and Hunters are all aliens that were captured and modified to be a part of the Combine army. That plus the later human Combine soldiers have more and more modifications done to them compared to the normal citizen patrol ones.

Valve is honestly really good at environmental storytelling.

Pretty sure they were trying to catch him, but Gordon killed him first.

was the nihilianths death out of gmans control

>Can u give examples of where they talk about this whole invading and taking over humans for their soldier things?
Let see the ones I can recall:
Overwatch dialogues mentions the fact that Metrocops must undergo surgery (as they are humans) to reach better ranks in the Overwatch, and the combine soldiers are refered as the "Transhuman arm of Sector 17 Overwatch" by breen during a breencast
Newspapers in BME talking about the Seven Hours War and how earth surrendered to the combines
In Nova Prospekt you can see an half-naked combine soldier that shows the extend of the surgery
Alyx and many rebels mention the fact that Stalkers are also human that got taken by the combines, either because you are against them or simply because you were at the wrong place at the wrong time.
During coast level, you can notice a lot of grounded boats and mold on surface that shows that the sea level have decreased drastically.

Who knows. I doubt he would end up looking the way he did in hl1 if he could escape from the start though.

I would assume it's what he wanted, but no one really knows his motivations now. Kind of a bummer.

after stroggification how much of their sentiens are left intact do you think, are they like star wars clones or like robocop

Some sentience is definitely still there, what with them exclaiming "Shit!" when grenades are thrown at them

my theory is that he's a combine nihlianth synth working with a group of combine leaders trying to prevent another combine falang from getting local teleportation as it would shift the power balance that they got over the others thus fucking up earths and the last nihilianth teleportation via gordon
basically gman is pompei to some combine ceasar

or vortigaunt synth

Because of Candy Shop youtube.com/watch?v=_UqOHEPkGms

>Climb on top, ride like you in a rodeo
You ain't never heard a sound like this before
‘Cause I ain't never put it down like this
Soon as I come through the door
She kept pulling on my zipper

Attached: 1524757375168.jpg (814x814, 139K)

>Put giant monster in shock shackles
>Tell it that it's going to get shocked if it doesn't enslave its people by putting all of them in shackles as well
>Monster teleports its entire species into a different universe outside the range of the torture shackles
The combine are genuine morons

What?? I need source my man.

It worked though. Nihilanth says he's the last.

Definitely sentient but a limited self-awareness, they have motivational/propaganda speeches, can't make up their own goal but are clearly capable of making their own plan to reach said goal (at least the higher ranks can, it's not rare to see them do something out of the ordinary like unconventional traps or destroying something important in an attempt to stop the player), and a limited fear response, they don't fear dying in combat but still react to grenades with a stress response (Sniper yelling "Shit!" when they realize a grenade in this their room)

>considering Portal 2 canon

>Why did they bother occupying earth?
From the plot of HL1, they were drawn to earth via the Resonance Cascade, seeing that there may be a race exactly like them in the multi verse, they went full steam ahead

>What did they have to gain?
When they realized human kind was shit tier, they realized we had the one thing they didn't. The ability to teleport within the same dimension. So they stuck around trying to get it because if they can teleport within the same dimension, they no longer have to spend a fuckton of resources and time conquering other worlds.

>Something about water
The combine have no ships, and even if they did, if there was a chance that the teleportation technology was under the sea, they'd drain that bitch in a heart beat to look for it

Wouldn't a scouting party just be robots or something instead of alien soldiers?

I am the combine

I must kill fast and bullets too slow

In the 7HW the combine sent an army of synths. It would seem that they've augmented their army to withstand the conditions of various types of alien worlds. They don't need full robots and their logic is that why waste effort building entire robots when you can grow 90% and tune up the rest?

well maybe they wanted to be mor inconspicuous blending in with the xen aliens incase earth had a stronger defense

At least there is hope that with the new system we will get something eventualy.
Cork board in Red Letter Day, train ride from citadel in ep1.
I always thought that slow teleport was due it being assaulted

Yeah I forgot that their robots seem to rely on a central AI system (the Citadel), but they also have synth scouts
>implying Earth could actually defend itself
I like to think the Combine launched Citadels from space, doubling as a weapon and FOB

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The whole thing with the grubs is pretty interesting. From the twitter page it looks like there are 3 main kinds of imprinting.
-In rare cases consciousnesses transferred into the grubs get to control the form they take. I wonder if these are the upper echelon of the combine or if they simply turn mindless like the original species.
-Then you have the Advisers who get the privilege to move, see, and interact with the world.
-Finally there are the Breens, who are merely stored in relative isolation seemingly for archival purposes.