Proposed Race #1

Race name: Sentinel Minders

Abbreviation: SM

Ship call sign: SM

Leader name: Extermination Engine (possible alternative names “Genocide/Malice Engine” etc). It should be immediately obvious that these guys are never going to be your friend.

Homeworld name: ?TBD

Appearance: Something dark, utilitarian, industrial and machine-like – in the vein of the art presented here as a background/environment: https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2014/07/what-the-far-future-of-space-mining-could-look-like/

“leader’s area” would conceivably not even be interior in any structure as these “vacuum breathers” could just as well be communicating from the outside of a structure in space.

civ leader/spokesperson looking something like swarm of machines interacting to provide the appearance of an organism. Something like:

https://youtu.be/nEL5mIsi8Ok?list=PL1PDncK426u9TgrBZuMvCzKctI4ySjBa0&t=388

https://youtu.be/HpXkpkUK6gs?t=121

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukukcQftowk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUQ5ESK0rgU

Or, if getting away from humainoids swarm might attempt to portray something “universal” such as a planetary dust/rock plane surrounding a globe that would vibrate (like an oscilliscope) when producing audio. (this could all be the size of a large beach ball type of thing). Although the “approximating” a lifeform might make more sense as the SM are interacting with lifeforms (they’re generally programmed to copy), and players might like something more anthropomorphic..

Brief flavor text:

Epochs ago in far flung corners of the galaxy alien empires have risen and fallen. For many, all traces of their former glory have all but disappeared with the long march of time. But others left behind remnants of civilization, footprints in the sands of time. Artifacts & relics are the best known of these vestiges, and have been the inspiration for many a daring archaeologist and swashbuckler alike – bringing fame and fortune for more than a few, and altering the courses of dynasties, governments, and wars in their wake. But darker and more severe ruins also remain, floating haphazardly through space.

One such peril are the Sentinel Minders.

Fragments of a great war machine for a xenophobic empire all but forgotten, the Sentinel Minders were automated incursion and neutralization systems. Outposts placed in the Imperial hinterlands and distant borders of what must have been an immense expanse, the Sentinel Minders waited diligently in the cold reaches of space for potential alien adversaries of the empire to stumble upon them. Upon detection of an unknown alien race the Sentinel Minders would activate, escalate themselves to an appropriate war footing to deal with the treat, eliminating the alien interlopers, protecting the empire; upon completion of this objective they would then remove themselves from the universe and the empire would replace them with a new and unactivated Sentinel Minder.

While most of the Sentinel Minders are gone, a few still remain. Derelict and partially functioning automatons floating through space, waiting to be activated…

Faction abilities:

• SM are narrowly programmed and do not internalize information until this information is presented to them in an appropriate way. For example, subspace streams (phaselanes) are not accessible (visible?) to them until they see an alien ship use them. After which that particular subspace stream is added to their AI knowledge base and can then be used. Thus they are confined to sectors that aliens have interacted with them from.

• SM are an interstellar autonomous military platform, they do not need planets or stellar bodies. Instead they replicate themselves in the vacuum, and destroy planets for resources.

  • Destroyed planets are removed from the map.

  • Would really like to utilize a starbase-only mechanic, however might be difficult to code – could settle for coreworld only with disassembly (remove from map) non-coreworlds instead.

  • If some DLC planned for future for megastructures (matruska brains, dyson spheres/swarms, orbital habitats, etc) this race would fit in well with those types of game assets.

• Left alone, SM will just “build tall” in space using trace amounts of cosmic dust, energy, and mined planets etc until “activated”

• Their military tech, specifically is either super-expensive or unavailable until activated. Once activated their military tech unlocks at very steep discounts, but only military tech that directly counters the encountered enemy (the SM wouldn’t be programmed to allow some alien to somehow pilfer tech from them that they didn’t already know about). So, for example, if the SM see an alien ship and it has Lasers 3 and Armor 4 installed, the SM would then be able to research up to Lasers 3, Shields 3, Mass drivers 4 and Armor 4 at a huge discount in order to be at the same tech level as their adversary, but missiles/chafe would not since these technologies don’t seem relevant. Similarly hull sizes, miniturazation, etc would also have “keep up” mechanics.

• SM have no unrest mechanics, and their assets cannot be culture flipped. Conversely SM produce no culture. ?TBD culture flipping would be a viable form of extermination, also the influence/vision mechanic might require some influence prod??

• Citizens/Leaders would have to be looked at, depending upon how the mechanics of these work. Whether being able to recruit them or not makes sense. However, they could certainly be captured from enemies – with probably them being dissected and analyzed with their traits added to the SM AI knowledge base.

• Can bank research points instead of researching something specific.

• Causality Violation Engine. The final kicker for SM would be a mechanism for causality violation. What violating causality would do would be to erase all participants from the timeline and restore the combat zone/civs to a state where they and their wars never happened. In the old Empire this could be employed to wipe the slate clean in the area after gleaning all available data from the enemy (to feed back to the imperial knowledge base), leaving a pristine and unremarkable border region for the empire. In GC4 this Causality Violation Engine has gotten a bit dilapidated and wonky with the passage of the eons and it only activates on defeat of the SM restoring all of the planets they destroyed/mined back to their original un-colonized states (I’m thinking that this would happen per sector?). (here’s a video from Isaac Arthor where he discusses how this would work in a Fermi Paradox Late Filters episode @ 9:45 https://youtu.be/cCzpYxedIe0?t=584 )

Faction abilities TBD:

• Unique buildings

  • none if can do starbase only route – would need race-specific starbase modules

• Unique Ships

  • Ship/module to disassemble planets, could take something like 2 turns per planet class to disassemble per module. Ie a ship with 1 disassembler module would require 10 turns to disassemble a Class 5 planet.

  • If no influence, then gets no influence-vision. Address vision via ship or starbase mods?

• Racial traits:

  • - diplomacy

  • - trade

  • - no tourism

  • - no influence

  • + ship range (vacuum native)

  • + ship capacity (vacuum native, no need for life support systems)

  • + mining

  • + ship combat

  • + invasion

  • + maintenance costs (no habitable biomes to maintain, no care for any beautification)

• AI traits

  • build tall

  • will aggressively attempt to move into areas occupied by others (includes monsters/pirates)

  • will prioritize research buildout and will bank research points waiting for an enemy to copy via its “catchup” research mechanic

Broadly, inspiration for the Sentinel Minders came from Alistair Reynolds’ Revelation Space series, but all of the above ideas are original. I feel like this would be a really fun faction to play as because as envisioned it’s really a one-dimensional war machine faction. The “play a race where I can just be a dick” game definitely applies here. The Causality Violation Engine mechanic is also interesting because it makes fighting against the SM not an auto-lose situation as you can kick them out of a sector and get your planets/resources back. ?may need to look at phaselane ‘forgetting’ too. They’re potentially a very dangerous faction and a fun tactic would be to “expose” an enemy’s sector to the SM.

Proposed Race #3

Race name: Planeshift Ghost Nomads

Abbreviation: PN

Ship call sign: PN

Leader Name: Ibrahim Mir

Homeworld: Azrael

Appearance: PN “race” itself is multicultural – has no default racial type.

No “leader” per se, rather decisions are made by a ‘learned council’ that basically video-conferences into the meeting onto screens that rotate around a central apparatus/projection that interacts with the player.

(img src = screengrab from “visage chapter 2” video game (idk what this game is I just found a pic of it)).

Like above, but not dark/gothic (but still partially built by ghosts so not exuberant either). Mirrors levitated and slowly spin in a circle. In each mirror is a somewhat grainy image of an alien or small group of aliens (random aliens, drengin, torian, etc – no synths; the PN are multiracial their leadership should reflect that), and ~half of these aliens are Planeshifted – thus appropriately “ghostified” in appearance.

A whispy tendril extends from each mirror to the center of the circle where the central apparatus/projection that interacts with the player is located. This central apparatus might look something like the Eye of Sauron in the LoTR trilogy with a similarly styled mouth underneath it.

This central apparatus itself should have some quality of being slightly “shifty” as if it’s not solidly tethered to any specific place. Similar to the Callistege Companion NPC in the game Torment: Tides of Numenara

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc1JxhmuVyQ

https://numenera.fandom.com/wiki/Callistege

Flavor Text:

Monastic orders settling in the depths of space are as old as exploration itself, though many of the ghost stories told there are eons older still. Usually these are simply stories to pass the time. Usually. But if one spends enough time in the reaches a great many stories turn out not to be simply made up at all – ghost stories being one of them.

The Planeshifters learned this after spending eons in the darkness, “Ghosts” were merely those who transitioned to a parallel plane of existence that mirrored our own. Furthermore, those who adequately prepared their minds, bodies, and souls for the journey could actually transition their full selves to one of these parallel planes instead of the damaged and haunted semblances of the former lives observed in those old ghost stories. Thus the term “ghost” is taken as a bit of a pejorative as to be Planeshifted is something greater than what a mere ghost could ever hope to have experienced. However, multitudes of races have their ghost stories – so the designation stuck.

Planeshifted individuals were freed from many of the material and social constraints of this plane of existence, and thus represented a new form of wisdom, perspective, culture and intelligentsia. Furthermore, once Planeshifted, individuals were also freed from resource constrains on interstellar travel, migration and settlement. Thus this once monastic order inadvertently attained the trappings of a sprawling empire. An empire of ghosts and shadows, but an empire nonetheless.

They say that every ghost must taste the darkness. Just don’t call them ‘ghosts’.

Faction abilities:

• PN have two simultaneous forms of pop:

  • Hadir: regular “alive” citizens

  • Planeshift (“ghost” = slang) citizens that are converted from the “alive” citizens.

  • Planeshift pop does not grow automatically, must be “built” ie converted.

• Planeshift pop doesn’t count toward pop cap (but total planeshift pop cannot exceed pop cap. Example if planet pop cap = 10, can have 10 pop + 10 Planeshift pop = 20 pop total)

• Produces faction influence proportional to pop even on planets not controlled.

• +0.1 diplomacy for every alien core world with Planeshift pop (or a Ghost Leader). +0.2 diplomacy if the Planeshift pop = pop cap (ie is “maxed out”).

  • ??Mechanic: Once Planeshift pop = pop cap keep the +0.2 Diplomacy, or make player try to keep up with transports etc when planets inc pop cap w terraforming, etc? TBD – “keeping up” doesn’t sound particularly fun, more like bookkeeping/work

• Leaders:

  • Both Hadir and Planeshift Leaders may be recruited.

  • Like the populace, both a Hadir and Planeshift leader may be assigned to the same post (ie double leaders).

• Echos of Battles Past:

  • Enemy fleets must fight PN battles twice:

    • first time = just normal battle

    • second time = surviving alien fleet fights original PN fleet (regardless of how first battle resolved). This second battle is a separate battle, so defenses, cooldowns, etc. all refresh.

    • This is likely to be a really nasty racial trait for skirmishes at relatively equal power levels. For unequal matchups it won’t matter at all.

    • ?? Considering limiting this only to battles initiated by aliens (ie becomes more of a defensive trait rather than offensive). Might rename to something along the lines of “Retribution of Ambush” or “Ghosts of Retribution” if this is done. Otherwise might be OP and not really intended as an offensive/aggression race or ability.

• Having two parallel societies however increases some costs:

  • Executive orders cost 2x the ‘political capital’ points.

  • ‘Political Capital’ points are much more difficult to attain. TBD how/%

  • Trade offers cost 1.5x the ‘trade points’

  • TBD other costs related to coordination problems that make sense.

• Special buildings.

  • Mausoleum of the Planes (one per player vs one per sector?): +25 Influence, +25% Influence, 1% Tourism, +30% Morale. Every turn planet receives bonus Planeshift pop equal to 1% of entire (non-planeshift) pop in influence connected to planet on which Mausoleum of the Planes is located.

  • Necropolis Gate (one per planet (you wouldn’t want more than one)) +10 Influence, +10% Influence, +20% Morale. Every turn converts all pop growth over pop cap into Planeshift pop instead.

  • Library of the Planes: +influence, +research, +morale. TBD/Balance

• Special ships/modules

  • Planeshift Nomad Transport – basically a colony ship that can permanently deliver a bunch of Planeshift pop (but not Hadir pop) to another planet (regardless of faction).

• Special building projects

  • Necro Gate allows you to “build” a bunch of ghosts out of pop – like “Planeshift Conversion: 500M citizens are converted to Planeshift citizens” – if player wants more Planeshift pop and he/she doesn’t want to wait to organically produce via hitting pop cap – ? this would not be necessary if Mausoleum of the Planes can be constructed in every sector?

• “ghostify” enemy prisoner leader – turn alien prisoner leader into crappy ghost version of their prior selves.

  • Whatever he/she is assigned to produces Planeshift ideology also (??~20% TBD/Balance).

  • Enemy prisoner leaders did not properly prepare their mind, body and soul for the transition, thus retains only 50% of prior attributes.

  • Ghostified Leaders can also be assigned alongside regular leaders by alien factions: ie they can have 2 leaders if one of them is a Ghost, so get 150% of usual Leader attributes for the post, at the cost of generating PN influence.

• Of note: Synths cannot be Planeshifted (ie pop) nor Ghostified (ie Leaders).

Faction abilities:

• Racial traits:

  • + trade

  • + influence

  • + ship range

  • + research

  • - ship combat

  • - invasion

  • - maintenance costs

  • - fertile (planet seems more crowded than it really is)

  • “Zealot” traits - like the Krynn. A faction based upon an ideology rather than a race

• AI traits

  • prioritizes influence, research, trade.

  • Aggressively exports Planeshift pop once their production starts ramping up

  • needs to be pushed pretty hard to declare war

• AI interactions

  • Somewhat fatalistic in demeanor.

  • Comes across as wise & taking the longer view of things

  • Not really concerned about slights or petty/transient events

  • lots of “We’ll need to think about this issue and get back to you,” “We must discuss this amongst ourselves” etc type of statements.

Other notes: consideration for missions based around 1001 Arabian Nights themes. Also considering mechanic for a “wish” system: Djinn, Genie, Efreet problem where you wish for something and either literally get what you wish for, get what the Djinn interprets you actually wanting (usually the best), or get something in line with your wish but bad for you. Not sure, this would be difficult to do.

Other rough notes that I might need to look at later:

• TBD Ghosts retain characteristics of orig race or just generic? I think generic – revisit?.

• Will need mechanic to get organic population, growth, slaves, etc? - I think I fixed this issue with necro gate changes.

• Ghost morale balance/probs? I think generally ghosts should offset their own pop/morale, ie they shouldn’t really need morale buildings.

Additional race ideas:

Incubating ideas on the following.

• Something Locust and planet-hopping based

  • “buildings” are upgradeable forms of mines. Each produces a bunch of 1x resources but no resources/turn.

  • Mines cannot be removed

  • So planets just end up being all tiles of destroyed planet.

  • Mechanic for moving leaders easily from planet to planet as only ‘core worlds’ could be mined by manually building stuff on them?.

  • ?opportunities for aliens to fix destroyed planets? - otherwise too poor counterplay potential, or doesn’t matter?

• CRO Research Commune ?Risen Empire Plague-axis inspired? Multicultural with lots of brain swaps? pure AI running in a parallel universe (ie M-theory, adjacent brane? vs running on structured quantum framework, like fine alpha coefficent, metric etc?)

  • Can license techs – instead of selling/trading/transfering techs allows other civs to use their techs but not have them forever.

    • Licenses can be revoked

  • Special research tree – Plague Research

    • Make plagues that everyone else gets. But 90% immune d/t genetic diversity? Or

    • Make race-targeted plagues ie: Drengin Pox or whatever

      • Tech license Plague treatments/cures

      • Easy vs difficult to do? Minor plagues meh, major plagues sacrifice leader of same race?

      • intelligence/espionage component? Minor plagues hard to track down, major more suspicious?

      • Minor plagues = death by a thousand cuts – plague xyz lasts 30 turns and causes -5% raw prod, for example.

      • Also make computer viruses that infect synths. Ie “synth plagues”

      • Also make computer viruses that attack infrastructure

  • Could combine this idea with CRO RC but then biological vs mechanical. Biobodies with energy field brains old cure for mind plague?

  • Specializes in ‘hard’ research, not so much on sociological, humanities etc res. Lacks perspective on downsides/costs of dangerous research trajectories. Just science for science, don’t care about ppl

  • cumulative knowledge: +2% research per tech researched; I would really like to get around having to build a bunch of labs per se, this would allow a very narrow civ research snowball even if they’re not “building tall” – can just build poorly and still be good at research.

• Himalayan inspired.

  • Talpa/thoughtform – space-monster summoners

  • Bonuses for solitude/reflection

  • Pacifist expansion – ie Buddhist monastery like. Expand via ending wars/ peace-brokering mechanic? PN already have pacifist expansion, would need to be very different.

• “Catabolic Toxicity” race? - inspired by Koy4Goff ? - SPAM based economy? Idiocracy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f9oJikx0-I

  • Race that blasts out unlimited amounts of crap culture/influence

  • Mechanic for unlimited money, but internal cost inflation (fiat currency basket economy)

  • Monetization aspect where productive capital is drawn down for quick money

  • Mechanic for influence instability – produces tons of influence but influence can be destroyed also

  • propaganda production: “We have always been at war with Eurasia.”

  • Ability to trade away a bunch of techs/ships, etc that don’t work/fall apart or suck

  • Everyone’s an idiot with a magic money machine

  • hard to spend political capital bc no one believes in anything (and is an idiot)

hah, thanks for the input.  I actually like the PN quite a bit myself as I feel like their internal consistency is pretty good and their mechanic is thus far unique.  The general idea is based on the historical nomadic Muslims who were able to spread across the ME, central Asia, north Africa, S/SE Asia and retain their cultural identity.  Whereas lots of groups conquered these regions, but all ended up just blending into the populations there and disappeared as cohesive social/cultural groups - this didn't happen with the Muslims because their ideology (Islam) was generally stronger and more coherent than the places where they settled.  Needless to say, their multi-century "conquest" of these regions was also non-violent, in contrast with all of the great armies that had swept through the area.  I mean, plenty of Muslims waged wars, however, this wasn't why they were successful. 

The Planeshift/Ghost mechanic was a way to create a win/win situation for pacifist expansion.  Just like real-life, if someone moves to your town, you're not worried that they're going to take your stuff - rather that person just gets a job and joins the community like everyone else living there.   The GalCiv mechanics tend to be all/none with respect to ownership/influence/conquest.  Either you own a planet, or you don't.  This mechanic was thought up so that people move to your planet and you get free population, also free pop-cap busting, and the only downside is that they also produce some influence - which isn't a big deal.  Likewise they cannot produce more influence than you do on your own planet (although it gets up to 50%) unless you decide to assign a Ghostified leader to it, but again you're getting an extra 50%-good leader, so you might still want to.   The "Ghost" mechanic is also a strong and obvious way to point out that this particular population is never going to just "blend in" with the natives and disappear - they're fundamentally different in a way that this cannot happen; it's not just that they're a different race, rather they have a type of existence that is different in kind.

Could I ask what you didn't like about them, or what could be changed to make them seem cool to you?

Also, I'll have to think about how to differentiate the SM vs Yor.  I tried to make the SM much more one-dimensional than the Yor, which really are a full-fledged race with ambitions, a history, and functionally play just like all of the non-robot races.  I do think it'd be great to have more machines/robot races.

Again thanks for reading, and thanks for the input .

-tid242

Interesting, yea. I could see that.  They definitely were not meant to inspire traditional horror tropes of zombies, vampires, etc.  Maybe I could just drop the word "ghost" from their name.  So just "Planeshift Nomads"...  huh

The two pop types might be a bit confusing, although I feel like the planeshift pop should just 'flow' pretty naturally.  I'm curious to see how complicated the 24 stardock races are that'll be in the base game. 

Thinking about it, I could just drop the Hadir pop altogether, although the intent was for the PN to also get the "double the population" bonus, as well as the planets they wandered to.  I'll have to think about this.  I could lose the complication by simply allowing them to have 2x pop on their own planets.  But then it would/could just get confusing immediately if you flipped a neighbor's planet, because that would be a 50/50 pop, and if it converted to 0%/100%, what happens when your neighbor flips it back? 

cheers!

Done.  Except for ghosts.

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 11

Done.  Except for ghosts.

Poor ghosts, everyone hates them ...   LMAO.  I'll de-ghostify them and see if they don't rub everyone the wrong way.

You guys all hate Casper too?

Don't worry buddy, all of the GC canon (ie non Star Control DLC) races will still be around and playable (with some minor story-driven exceptions around the edges, it sounds like), along with some new cool sounding ones so far.

Brad had just said that he thought there were too many humanoid races already, so hence the moratorium on adding more - they need to dilute out the pool..

-tid242

Just repeating what I heard, so no personal promises from me on this.  hah