How do I do an "alien invasion" plot right?

Make them raiders. There's honestly no believable way for humanity to fend off an attack by a race that has mastered star travel.

Even if we win, they just go back to orbit and drop rocks on us.

There's also the XCOM schtick, where they're 'testing' humanity to see if we'll make good vassals for reasons that make little sense.

They are a matriarchal society that wishes to test the strength and valor of their males against the virile males of the human race.

So they send their males down with slightly better gear than what humans have, and see if we crumble or overcome impossible odds, then we become the new breeding stock, our females become cuckqueens, and they search the stars for the next species to test US against.

aliens are the religious fanatics/pirates/misfits of their culture, decide to invade earth and set up a warlord cycle.

>Earth men defeat the technologically superior foe with bravery, heroism, and audacity.
>Alien space women use the super tech they used to travel between the stars to disable what is left of our military.
>Alien women take earth men as sex slaves, force human females to helplessly watch as their men are ravaged before them.
>After a few generations, the humans accept their place, and are sent to fight the males of another species.
>This time around WE are the invaders

my dick is 100% ready

>human females forced to watch helplessly as their men are ravaged before them.

Gotta prove your valor first

>wanting human genocide NTR

>human genocide
Lets assume the alien space females have omni-compatible wombs that can create hybrids.

Actually, this is a cool idea for an alien species, make them a trifid like tentacle monster species that are essentially walking wombs collecting the best genetic material with which to make the best possible offspring. They can take from anything, so they could effectively breed their own subservient race out of animal material, but to pass on the mantle to the next generation they have to find a suitably intelligent, adaptive and tenacious species with which to breed.

Instead of an invasion from space, have an invasion through time. In the far future, post-FTL earth is winning a war against an alien civilization, so in an attempt to turn the tide, they use experimental time travel technology to send a small, well equipped force to wipe out the human race. The current time is the earliest they could send them back to, and their high tech but low numbers means the aliens must work with stealth.

I was just baiting, BTW. I just wanted to note how it's similar to NTR. I added "human genocide" because the humans are actively prevented from conventionally reproducing with each other.

Also, why wouldn't the aliens just clone the humans that won and fuck off from them (assuming all they want is genes and honor). Their technology would likely be advanced enough to have fully-functional cloning, or at least tissue growth and slaughter-free meat.

The aliens barely managed to get to the first habitable planet.
Earth.
They never had FTL, their planet was dying and they loaded as many as they could onto colony ships and fired them out into the void hoping for the best.

after thousands of standard solar years of drifting through space, the culture aboard the ship, their understanding of science, and even how their own tech works devolved until they are nothing more than warring savages with a handful that know the secrets of how to keep the ship barely functional.

They crash land here, with their only hope being conquest.

>Cloning vats instead of good ol' fashioned humpin'
you disgust me

>why wouldn't the aliens just clone the humans that won and fuck off from them
I don't know user, why do humans mate even though they don't intend to breed?

>cloning vats AND good ol' fashioned humpin'
Y'all lack resourcefulness.

user, its like you don't even want to stick it in a horrifying tentacled monstrosity

>The female alien womb monsters don't even need to mate with the human men, they just like doing it in front of the captured female humans out of spite and to invoke jealousy

>There's little chance of fending off a full invasion so make them basically petty raiders/the remnants of a failed and mostly destroyed expeditionary team.

Or we are on a more future earth with more advanced tech, and enter a war over "normal war reasons" basically resources or religion.

The god of war who's been sitting around in the sky trying to entertain himself by watching fights (since there's nobody strong enough left to challenge him) gets really excited and goes full on into killing as many aliens as possible, assuming they prove to be a big threat.

>we win and it turns into district 9

>Immortals setting
Well considering how most people are in the bronze/iron age they are kind of fucked

Unless the aliens want to uplift/colonize then some of the civs might be able to rub off on them or assimilate

how about the aliens are a inter galactic drug cartel,they are trying to secure resources and labor to harvest space drugs or something.

do whatever the guys that made xenonauts did, that plot was awesome

Plot twist, "aliens" are not automatically distinguishable from "sufficiently evolved transhumans".

Well, depends a bit on what you mean by fending off and invasion. Taking the territory might be easy for the offworlders, but keeping it could be a hassle. Patrolling Martian tripods meet IEDs, etc.

But anons, what if the alien bitches look like this?

"They" sounds plural. What if...there's just one of them? Maybe they just want to set themselves up with their own petty kingdom or whatever. Can GrrxTH, the asteroid-belt-trash computronium addicted loser whose hive finally had enough and kicked him out, take over enough of Earth to feel like a somebody? Or will even the primitive barbarians put in a better effort?

So basically a Terminator movie?

Jackpot.

>the aliens have a mothership, queen, computer etc. that controls everything and if the plucky rebels can take it out the invaders will be defeated
Retarded. Don't ever do this. It's one of the most hackneyed cliches ever.

Why didn't they just send a spacenuke back to blow up Earth?

Have you seen Terminator? Time travel doesn't work like that. Obviously, they had to grow a skin layer over their gear, and the few bombs they had left were too pointy and radioactive for that to work.

One idea I faintly remember is similar to this.Their FTL involves some amount of time travel, and is limited to being able land them on Earth at a certain year. Therefore the aliens are scattered over the course of the year with no way to guarantee that any particular asset will be there when they need it.

I liked the aliens from Iji.
For starters, they instantly obliterate most of the planet's surface with orbital strike, which is a sensible thing to do for any colonising alien force.
It also had one of the coolest pacifist/genocide run duality I saw in videogames.
Aliens are reasonable and they understand they act monstrous from a human's point of view, they do not pretend to be dindu nuffin, so both them and the game itself respect your desire to murder them all. On the other hand, when playing as a pacifist, you encounter more recurring characters willing to talk with you - and these are not some obviously special guys, just ordinary soldiers which you would kill otherwise, not knowing that they have some personality or personal motives.

Don't stop...

I think thats what user had in mind

In my setting, the aliens are refugees (not /pol/, I swear) trying to find a new world to settle after a coalition of alien nation stomped their shit in for being warmongering assholes. They don't have a whole lot of time or resources, so the invasion is poorly planned and they have to rely on captured human equipment to do most of the heavy lifting.They almost succeed, but eventually the alien coalition finds them and beats them up for the humans.

30 years on, humanity is uplifted and the invaders are playing District 9 in Australia.

Like others have said, you have to bring the aliens down to a manageable level. Bringing in an outside force to clean things up helps too.

What's their firepower like? My setting is somewhere in the star wars magnitude

>something is wrong when the ship exits hyperspace
>the planet is much larger than they calculated, and the engines can't compensate for the extra gravity
>luckily the pilot manages to land on something soft, avoiding any serious damage
>the engineers start working on a plan to get the ship moving again
>before they can finish, something massive attacks the ship

>you hear a loud pop coming from your bedroom
>you go to investigate, thinking it might be an electrical problem
>instead, you find what looks like a very expensive toy spaceship lying on your bed

>no rigid structure
>excellent mobility

I don't think the people that drew that understand why sea creatures can get away with that but land creatures cannot

ITS TRYING TO PRY OPEN THE BAY DOORS!

>The ship is attacked by a massive carnivorous beast that begins tasting the ship.

That's sorta the premise of Broodmother SkyFortress - aliens fuck up your campaign setting.

>the initial force is written off, but Earth is marked for further investigation
>years later, the aliens send a much larger force with a much smaller mission
>bring back a few native lifeforms to test their potential as biological weapons

Figure out what the invasion force's goal is and then work backwards from there.

Copy Half-Life 2's story, if your campaign is set "after-the-fact". If the campaign is set mid-invasion, said it pretty well.

Everyone gets an alien waifu.

The invaders take the planet without a shot fired.

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I've been debating basing a game off of this for a while now.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_story)

tl:dr, aliens invade with 17th century tech, because our scientists missed the blindingly obvious FTL method the rest of the galaxy uses. Entire invasion force BTFO by the national guard.

Reading this was honestly kind of funny, human engineers figuratively smacking their heads dumbfounded that we had missed gravity manipulation because we were distracted by other pursuits.

Then humanity after conquering runs into another species even more advanced but without FTL...

But then we can't have the escapist fantasy of beating a superior species through the greatness of human spirit

But nuking the planet ruins the only resource a species with interstellar travel would invade a habitatable for, life itself

So basically David Webber's The Apocalypse Troll?

Then why not encase the spiky or radioctive bom inside a larger lead sphere, and cover that in skin?

Go on...

Femdom is shit though, user. You should know this.

Wouldn't be against fighting in an intergalactic gladiator arena though. Sounds like a good time. Go to new and beautiful places, meet diverse and interesting people - and kill them.

The UFO After_ series had an interesting premise. Rather than the alien invasion being a full government of jackasses, the aliens had actually been trading and secretly talking with Earth's governments for decades. Then a bunch of space-terrorists stole some ships and a weird bio-weapon, jumped to the Sol system and blew the warp gate to hell. The game takes place as they are desperately trying to complete their devious scheme, before the intergalactic authorities can install a new door to kick in.

Nah.
There was a strife which divided the alien race into two different civilizations (and species, due to genetic engineering). One of them lost the resulting war and was destroyed almost entirely, their armies vanquished, their planets exploded. Only a small fleet with the last remains of their people managed to escape, while the adversary searched the galaxy for their traces. With nowhere to hide, they decide that there is one place where, with any luck, pursuers would not think of. The Origin. Home planet of both alien species, abandoned by them long ago. However, upon arriving, they see an entire new civilization thriving on a planet they left as a barren wasteland eons ago. They might try to establish contact with natives, but then they probably wouldn't be able to hide their presence on the planet in time, even if the natives were cooperative. Besides, the enemy would likely want to investigate the new intelligent specie and discover the refugees. Their commander decides they can't afford the risk and have to eliminate the traces of intelligent life here for the sake of their survival.
They are discovered anyway.
You should play it. It was great for a freeware game.
youtube.com/watch?v=G9H6ULM-Bwg

I, too, miss Megas XLR...

>they take back a number of fleas to act as exotic off planet mounts

>the doors look like they open, but they're definitely resisting your efforts
>after a few tries, you decide not to force it
>there's probably a button somewhere that opens them
>you turn it over and gently start poking at the superstructure to see if that does anything

CAPTAIN, WE'RE UNDER ATTACK FROM ALL SIDES
FIRE MISSILES

NATO and the Warsaw Pact stop fighting and join forces to collectively nuke the fucking aliens.

I have to be honest, after a lot of Stellaris and binging on CNN with some drink, wouldn't lots of countries just welcome the Aliens? If you have FTL, you have a lot of comparable technology, wouldn't it be better for Spain or France or Panama to just make a deal and let them land there?

If their goal is to invade they've got wizards and demons to contend with. Advanced civilizations have come to the planet before but they knew to keep their distance from reality-breaking arcane casters.

>thinking anybody but America, Russia, or China would get first dibs on the ayys
>playing Stellaris past the first three hundred hours
>watching CNN

There is a Larry Niven novel called Footfall that is considered one of the best ones about alien invasion. There aliens called Flithp have several traits that make them defeatable and gives them a reason to invade:
1) they are not much more technologically advanced than humans. All their tech was conceived but not built by humans before. They are not defeated through absurdly fast reverse engineering or through being allergic to Earth. Instead they get hit by creative use of existing technology.
2) they don't understand their own technology as it was taken from precursor civivization
3) they are initially a colony mission
4) they expect humans to behave like them
The Fithp evolved from herd animals, unlike humans. They have a very alien idea of conflict resolution. When two herds meet, they fight until it was obvious which one was superior. Then everybody immediately stops fighting, and the inferior herd is peacefully incorporated into the superior tribe as second-class citizens. Fithp do not comprehend the concept of "diplomacy". So they show up and immediately attack something important like the middle of US with an intend to cause humans to surrender and then wait for the reply.

The aliens are a coalition from the future here to stomp out all earthlings before they become a tyrannical intergalactic empire.

They're humans from an alternate Earth that is only ahead in interdimensional portal technology, but at c.1960s for everything else.

They have amazing strategic mobility, and logistics, but that is it.

Wouldn't Australia be a good place to land?

It might be, save for all the vicious wildlife, but I was more going for the angle that the ayys would either be offered to land in America, Russia, or China, or that wherever they decided to land would quickly become America, Russia, or China.

It's sad that even Niven, who's written some damn fine stories, succumbs to the Planet of Hats and Humanity Is Superior tropes. In retrospect his kzinti race is hilariously badly written, with less reasoning ability (about fights) than actual house cats. Even cats don't just "scream and leap" repeatedly at obviously superior foes.

>How do I do an "alien invasion" plot right?

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Last RPG I played was Dogs in the Vineyard

Well... that would certainly be original. But to be fair I don't think even aliens would really give a fuck about 1850s' Utah.

Anyway I wouldn't do a full-fledged invasion.

Why? 'cause when imperialism didn't work that way. First they simply saw the land (and natives generally didn't grasp the problem breeding there), then maybe they came, but they generally didn't have any reasons to exterminate people. Either local manpower was a good thing, or superior technology meant no real armed resistance was a problem, or the land wasn't even that important in the first place. Invasions usually take a "militaristic" angle that doesn't make much sense (tough I guess something like Footfall makes sense).

Personally I'd consider different scenarioes. What if actually Earth is something like Japan in the 1800s, isolated and not really worth that much fuss over, the aliens are content with trade and shit cause there is so much worth more of their times, and decides in the end to play their game alright?

In general I don't think aliens would really like us to be exterminated. They wouldn't have much reasons to, unless they treat us as food or something.
Pic might be an interesting idea but pretty different. What if they see Earth, or us, like we see lions in the parks?

>this might need something more like a time for humanity to unify, shocked at the tought of the alien powers, but not necessarily

>you flinch, dropping it in surprise as it launches a salvo of tiny missiles at you
>the missiles sting, but they don't seem to cause much damage
>you watch for a moment as it struggles to take off
>then quickly pick it up again as you realize that hot exhaust might not be good for the carpet
>realizing at this point that it might not be a toy, you put it down on the bathroom floor where it probably won't start any fires

Would it be something like Macross?

>There's little chance of fending off a full invasion

The Day the Earth Stood Still?

Essentially reavers. Kill them all.

>wanting to fend it off in the first place

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They're not a true invasion, they're the colony ships of a planet that was under threat of an extinction level event (think rogue planet was hitting their homeworld). They sent as many ships to as many planets that seemed habitable as they could in hopes of hitting a habitable one. One of these ships arrives at earth. They've got weapons, but they're not prepared for full-scale war, and can't just go somewhere else.

the first part of doing an alien invasion plot right is giving the aliens an actual reason to invade; the second, working in concert with the first, is creating limits and flaws the aliens will have to follow; the third, seemingly in contradiction with the second, is to not make the aliens act retardedly.

the best route in my eyes is to have aliens that invade to collect biological and genetic material en masse, not have them all too much more technologically advanced and to have their forces logistically restricted.
they will be sneaky, they will be diplomatic with some nations to avoid the forces of earth to unite and they will seize or destroy any weapon of mass destruction that could both be used against them and against the resources they are gathering; they may to enslave the world to milk its resources if possible but they will otherwise just leave when enough resources are harvested and scorch the earth to avoid any possible retaliation.
this is if you want an alien race that's still somewhat organised and not acting on desperation.