I didn't catch the Dune spin on my first read-through, that's pretty great. Dune and Ender's Game are two of my favorite sci-fi books/series.
That'd be pretty cool implementation.
One other question I had, maybe I missed it on the first few reads but I'm not sure, What is the alien's means of interplanetary travel? Do they have spacecraft or something? It's not too important for gameplay, but it could be an influence in some map designs.
I'm pretty sure that you can already do that by modifying the worldspawn entity.
Does anyone have any objections to any major part of my timeline? Or, any suggestions? I want to get back to making a final draft soon. After I finish the timeline, I can write material for individual things like alien forms and human equipment.