Combine Vs. Xen - the final solution

i luv xenians :D , but only the ones from hl1 -_-
 
Llama said:
For what point and purpose? If they didnt know that was the hiding place for the Xenians, why would they invade it?
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Uh, how exactly are you so suer they didn't know it was where the Xenians went?
 
Becasue you said it yourself.

"It's quite possible that the Combine never invaded Xen because of the Xenians - but were planning to when they had built up enough strength."

If they didnt invade becasue of the Xenians, ever though they have been chasing the Xenains, then logic states they didnt know the Xenians were there. Unless im reading your point wrong, what are you trying to say?
 
I don't know how that could be read as anything other than what it was:

"Maybe the Combine knew where the Controllers had gone (into Xen) but didn't invade because it would be a massive fight and they were biding their time."
 
OOOOO Lol
I read it to mean "The Combine didn't invade becasue they thought the Xenains were there, but were building up for another reason"
Sorry.
Thats a good point. But, If they were building up before the events of HL2, then:
a) They didn't know they can't tunnel through to Xen and the building up is a waste of time or
b) They are trying to develop the local tech for the main porpuse of Invading Xen, having built of their offensive forces as previously said.
 
eh did the combine know the controllers before xen ? how is that possible if they didnt know xen o_O , am i missin somit ?
 
eber said:
eh did the combine know the controllers before xen ? how is that possible if they didnt know xen o_O , am i missin somit ?
Click to expand...
Read the first post you idiot.
 
Element Alpha said:
How did you determine this? To me it's pretty obvious the cascade accident caused by gordon in hl1 was arranged by someone in its administration. Hence this person had a deal with someone, and I don't think it were the xenians. If I had to put my money on it I'd say the arrangement was between dr.Breen and the Combine (eg. the other professors hate Breen because he sold them out before the cascade even happened).

Also, about the teleports, it was nihilanth who caused them to appear, not some unorganic technology. Maybe that's why they weren't able to reproduce it. You could also argue that his teleporting abilities only worked in the xen environment.

But the main quality that seems to be part of the combine mentality is: "let's turn their own kind against themselves with as little resources as possible." They didn't need xenian healingpools on earth because the healingposts on the walls were enough, they could be created locally and didn't require any interdimensional transportation.

So the big picture I've got is:
-earth scientists discover teleporting & Xen, send reckon teams
-contact is made with xenians, combines find out, contact the teamleader (Breen) and convince him to arrange a cascade accident for the good of mankind.
-Combine really want to invade earth, order nihilanth to attack as soon as he can. Combine think the xenians are enough to weaken earth forces until they get there themselves.
-Gordon, being in the middle of it, goes to xen and destroys nihilanth, freeing the vortigaunts. Unexpected move for the combines. Now the vortigaunts join in the battle against their opressor, the combine. This is why the gman helps gordon. He's (or his contractors are) against the combine and put the vortigaunts and the humans together to fight them, so they'd do more dammage and stand a better chance.

So I think the army was ment to attack earth, not to protect from the combine.
I also think the vortigaunts did flee to xen, but where caught and enslaved by the combine, with nihilanth there for control. Otherwise the vortigaunts actions wouldn't make any sense.

My 0.02€
Click to expand...

im reading your arguments again and again , and i started to think about if you can read at all. did you even took the time to read the first post of the thread. the xenians fled to xen to escape the combine. the whole point of fleeing to xen was that the combine couldnt follow. the vortigaunts themselves say that they had always been enslaved which leads me to the end that they were enslaved by the controllers at first before the combine even came to their planet , and then they were enslaved by 2 parties. the vortigaunts say that when the lesser master was defeated the greater would fall in time .. now with the lesser master they dont necessarily mean nihilanth , rofl. have you ever thought of that they mean the controllers at all? the nihilanth says "we are their slaves" , that quote doesnt show that hes a slave of the combine . its just very easy to come behind it that he means only himself and the vortigaunts . notice that the controllers dont have collars but the nihilanth and the vortigaunts have. heck , the controllers are called controllers because they control them.. but for the good of their own race not for the combine.
now the rest is pretty simple to encounter... maybe the metal assjet of the nigilanth is combine , but this just means they took it with them when they fled. the nihilanth is a cyborg anyway. he seems to be the last overlord of the xenians master race. notice his speech at the end of hl1 "the last , i am the last". he could have been partly modified by the combine before they fled but its a sure thing that the controllers also modified him. they gave him a third arm and they burned his legs or whatever and his eyes seem to be burned out too. i would rather say that this was the price of being able to flee from the combines bonds and to bring everything under the controllers control.
now the rest i hardly need to tell is already said by angry lawyer...
 
safetyswami said:
The Combine-on-Xen debate seems to revolve around a couple unsolved issues here, and the one that gets me the most is that of the bee shooters from HL1 (I don't know too many official enemy names, sorry). Now, it's pretty obvious that the Xen factory was mass-producing them, but their origin is hazy. The prevailing theories seem to be that either they're being made by the Combine or by the Xenians as an army. I don't think they're like the Overwatch guys, because they don't have anything in common with the Vortigaunts. However, if the Xenians were making them, what were they making them FROM? Again, they're probably not Vortigaunts, and I didn't see any other Xenian life form that might have served as a starting block for them. Plus, they really don't seem to fit into the Xenian food chain (nor do the fish, seeing as how there's nothing for them to eat besides the little maggot things).

So. Seeing as the Vortigaunts, Nihilanth, and the Alien Controllers all originally came from somewhere else, they would have had to bring the bee shooters and fish with them as well. Which doesn't seem to make much sense.

Now, if the Combine were to have controlled Xen, then that would be a much more logical origin for the bee shooters and fish. The bee shooters might be one of their standard unit models, much like the synths.
Click to expand...

the bee shooters are alien grunts. come to think of it , they have the same characteristics like the vortigaunts: 3 arms , several eyes, thelepatically , similar skin. cant you imagine that the alien grunts are like what the apes are to us? they are cognates to each other and it seems that the alien grunts are the prestage of the vortigaunts in evolution. notice that the alien grunts were engineered in the factory , not build . they were just giving them armor and that hiveglove and controlling them with thelepathy.
well it makes great sense to take the alien grunts with them to xen , if humans would flee from earth they would also take apes with them ... and otherwise they probably knew that they could need them as army .. maybe they had been using them as army before the combines raided them.
and i dont know what you mean with "fish".
 
Llama said:
As far as I recall, those crystals are used because the Teleporter they power is an early model. Look at the size difference between HL-BMRF teleporters and Dr.Kleiners, thre has been a massive improvment since the first prototype.
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dr kleiner and eli still have such crystals in their laboratories , how you know they dont use them for teleportaition .. dont u think it needs a massive amount of energy to teleport ... you cannot just connect the teleporter to a electric socket :frog: think about it , its plausible they still use crystals.

Angry Lawyer said:
Portal at the other end? How do you justify that?

Multidimensional space doesn't quite work, with things "blocking" it. Every dimension touches every other dimension at every point.

-Angry Lawyer
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can someone explain what you mean with "dimension" , i never really got what that means ... does it mean the only way to get into another dimension is to teleport or could you just step into a spaceship and fly there?
 
i have a question . someone here said there would be a vortigaunt in the water hazard level that eats a headcrab ... can you tell me where it is or show me a screenshot - i was just playing through the whle level but didnt found it.
 
Its in a sewer tunnel in the side of a cliff near the helipad. Where you face the chopper.
 
eber said:
can someone explain what you mean with "dimension" , i never really got what that means ... does it mean the only way to get into another dimension is to teleport or could you just step into a spaceship and fly there?
Click to expand...
This is going to take some weird thinking, but its the best way to describe it.

Take a dot. It's zero-dimensional.

Now grab the "edges" (a zero-dimensional object doesn't have edges) and pull them. You've streched it into a line - one dimension, length.

Take the line, and grab its edges (again, a bit impossible in the literal sense). Strech it. You now have a two dimensional square.

Now, grab the flat edge of the square, and pull it out of the page. When it streches, you've got yourself a cube - a 3D object.

Now comes the hard part. Grab the edge of the cube, and strech it in the fourth dimension. You now have a hypercube - a 4D object.

As humans, we can only percieve things in 3D - any other dimensions are invisible to us. A good analogy would be little living squares on a piece of paper. They can only move on the sheet of paper - which has two dimensions - and can only see on this flat piece of paper. The same is for us. On the higher dimensions, we're paper thin.

Dimensions, in the Xen sense, exist like our universe presumably does - a paper-thin place floating in the extra-dimensional space. To get between these paper-thin worlds, you need to be able to dig in a direction that we can't quite percieve, or understand.

-Angry Lawyer
 
I always thought that in HL(and several other sci-fi games/books/movies), the word "dimension" is synonymous with "world" or "universe", rather than the true scientific term.
 
wow thats a good explanation , i almost understood it .. but i still cannot imagine how 4d looks and how it is to be in the forth dimension . :(
 
Google Image "Hypercube". You'll see what scientists theorize a 4D object looks like through human eyes.
 
Exactly, you CAN'T picture how 4D looks, because we've only got 3 dimensions to us. "Dimensions" in the "world" or "universe" sense actually means a 3D sheet in a 4D (or higher) universe. Going to another "dimension" in that sense is simply jumping from one sheet to the other.

(to be scientifically correct, we're actually 4D, because time counts as a dimension, and we're able to percieve that. Just add one to each number I've used if you want to take in to account the dimension of time).

-Angry Lawyer
 
Explaining a forth dimention to humans would be like explaining to people on world where everything is square what a circle looks like, even better, what a sphere looks like.
 
Angry Lawyer said:
Exactly, you CAN'T picture how 4D looks, because we've only got 3 dimensions to us. "Dimensions" in the "world" or "universe" sense actually means a 3D sheet in a 4D (or higher) universe. Going to another "dimension" in that sense is simply jumping from one sheet to the other.

(to be scientifically correct, we're actually 4D, because time counts as a dimension, and we're able to percieve that. Just add one to each number I've used if you want to take in to account the dimension of time).

-Angry Lawyer
Click to expand...

so we would see 4 or even 5d as 3d cos our eyes are too stupid ... sounds plausible. but isit possible that theres a 2d or even a 1s universe , i know this sounds terribly stupid but im just interested in such scientific theories. :afro:

oh well i was on google searching for a picture and a found a very good example.. it looks like ,4d is like 3d but more complex and with diffrent faccetts in itself.
like a diamont.

-- anyways im still searching for the headcrab eating vortigaunt , can any1 give me a directed explanation ? isit before u see the g-man or after .. isit before u get the gun or after .. isit before u fall down the big dam or after ... : \
 
ríomhaire said:
Explaining a forth dimention to humans would be like explaining to people on world where everything is square what a circle looks like, even better, what a sphere looks like.
Click to expand...

That's a pretty good analogy, and reminds me of a short story thing called "Flatland".

Now "Flatland" is two-dimensional, and on it live the squares and the circles. The flatlanders think that there are only two dimensions to the universe, because they can't see out of the paper.

One day, a sphere falls *through* their dimension. The flatlanders see this as a circle that starts off as a point when the sphere touches, expands to its greatest width, and then shrinks and pings out of existence, when it finally finishes the journey.

Now, no matter how you try to explain it to the circles, they'd have only seen the sphere as a shape-changing circle. And they'll never truly be able to percieve the sphere actually as a sphere.

Or something.

-Angry Lawyer
 
A faster-than-light particle, a tachyon or, as I like to call it, a bugger.
 
yes im serious riomphaire. sorry that i dont know what a ball is .. sorry me sorry me :\
 
I'd like to contribute something here. You're all trying to figure out how Breen and the Combine made contact and how the Combine discovered Earth etc.

Think outside the box - the G-man is some kind of agent-for-hire/mercenary. He has teleporting technology far superior to that of the Combine or Mesa Scientists.

Why couldn't the Combine have been using someone like him (probably not the G-man we know) for preliminary survey or contacts of new worlds?

The G-man seems to be employed by some Power opposed to the Combine (possibly open warfare throughout universes, or more Cold-Waresque). Might the Combine themselves not have similar agents?
War and Espoinage by proxy perhaps.

Anyway just something for you to think about, you don't NEED to explain the Combine discovering Earth with their somewhat limited teleport tech. Or them communicating with Breen.
 
Eejit = winnar. I missed you, man! And the time we bumped into one another in SvenCoop. Oh how we laughed!

-Angry Lawyer
 
Good times, good times. Me, you and Samon, the "May 2004 Gang" ;)

Whatever happened to Brian Damage?
 
Brian Damage was the only person to review Charlie's Angle, and positively at that :( He is sorely missed...

And, for the record, I hate the idea that Nihilanth is ruled by the Controllers. If anything, I thought it was the other way round: at most, they're a hive mentality (like a counter to Vortessence) with Nihilanth as its hub.
 
I thought that Nihilanth was the grand master but I guess I was wrong.
 
Eejit said:
Good times, good times. Me, you and Samon, the "May 2004 Gang" ;)

Whatever happened to Brian Damage?
Click to expand...

Alas, poor Brian has vanished from the face of the Earth. Rumour mill suggests he is stuck in a slow teleport :(
 
*Pants.* I... made it. Last... page. Good God, that was a gruelling experience. I thought the Steam forums were bad.

I want to go back to the first post for a moment. Throughout this entire thread, one thing has not been answered: why exactly are you getting so excited about what Lombardi said? I've read all your arguments about why the Combine were not occupying Xen at the time of HL1, and many of them are very compelling, but I entirely fail to see how the quote on the first page vindicates your views.

The Combine chased Nihilanth and company out of their homeworld into Xen. Great. So? That's just a new element to the story that we weren't aware of (which could very well explain the disparity between the Xen species, and questions about headcrabs, etc). It does not mean the Combine didn't catch up with them and enslave them in the end.

From what I can see, no one side is winning the overall argument with their respective points (be they about teleportation, architecture or population), and the quote by Lombardi doesn't actually add anything to either side. He just said the 'Xenians' aren't originally from Xen. All the old arguments still hold, and as such we're still stuck.
 
Hang on... I'll add to that. Having re-read the quote again, check this out:

...from which location they were all to glad to seize the opportunity to continue on to Earth with suppression through the citadels.
Click to expand...

By 'they', Lombardi is referring to the 'immense threat', the Combine. He is actually stating that the Combine followed Nihilanth and company into Xen and went on to Earth from there. Oddly enough, I don't recall anyone picking up on this yet.
 
Lombardi said:
"We knew that some immense threat had chased the Nihilanth and its creatures out of their own world and into Xen, from which location they were all to glad to seize the opportunity to continue on to Earth with suppression through the citadels"
Click to expand...

The Combine forced the Controlleresque things onto Xen, and attacked from the Controllereque's homeworld.

-Angry Lawyer
 
No... That's not how English works, unless Lombardi got a little muddled. The first part of the sentence names Xen as the last location. '[F]rom which location' is referring to Xen, not the Controller/Vortigaunt homeworld.
 
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