What mean friends...

Reedstilt · 2017-03-10T18:14:28+00:00

I imagine Civics will actually make it easier to ensure certain personalities will spawn - some could even become Civics like Fanatic Purifer did. I'm actually more curious to see how personality shifts happen now that that Ethos can change. What happens when Alien Rand here loses his Individualist / Egalitarian Ethos? Guess we'll have to wait and see.

Reedstilt · 2017-03-10T17:58:43+00:00

To be fair, I didn't read /u/carthe's comment as implying that adding a Galaxy Age setting would be as difficult or as outlandish as adding time travel. Instead I took it as a suggestion that once we had a way to render a galaxy at various ages, we could have add a Time Travel Tech to send expeditions to those time periods. I don't think that is particularly necessary here, but I could see Temporal Refugees as a new type of Fallen Empire, one that is more likely to spawn in younger galaxies, and who would be oppose the development of Temporal Manipulation Tech (if such Techs existed) the same way Keepers of Knowledge police Synthetic Tech.

Reedstilt · 2017-03-10T17:44:22+00:00

Then I apparently need to play with this mod more. Don't think I've come across those yet. I better get to that before 1.5 hits. How much are you anticipating needing to re-do More AI Personalities in 1.5?

Reedstilt · 2017-03-10T17:35:14+00:00

Credit where it's due, I was inspired by re-reading All Tomorrows and envisioning a game where I played as one of the civilizations emerging after the Machine-Asteromorph War that wrecked the galaxy over the course of millions of years. As my people explore the heavens, we'd discover ruined megastructures, shattered planets, blasted stars, and a few linger survivors that had also managed to weather the near-extinction of life in the galaxy. This started me thinking about making a scenario map based around those themes, which eventually led to the idea of just making a Galaxy Age variable to have various points along the Primodrial and Dying Galaxy spectrum.

Reedstilt · 2017-03-10T17:27:17+00:00

Honestly, the Galaxy Age variable might replace the "Maximum Fallen Empires" variable outright, though the two variables could overlap so that you could set a Primordial Galaxy to "Maximum Fallen Empires: 4" but its going to skew to the low end, while a Dying Galaxy set to the same will skew to the high end. As for planets, I'm envisioning that each Age would have a certain number of default habitable planets based on its size, then the Percentage adjusts that up and down accordingly. So a Medium Thriving Galaxy set to 100% Habitability will have more habitable planets than a Medium Dying Galaxy set to the same. Or perhaps they'll have the same number but the in the Dying Galaxy a much larger portion of them will be Tomb Worlds rather than the usual habitable worlds.

Reedstilt · 2017-03-10T12:51:11+00:00

how much work does this modification take

While someone might be able to jury-rig a version of what I'm proposing here with mods (I haven't looked too closely at what can be done with galaxy generation via mods yet to be honest), implementing Galaxy Age as its own variable would likely have to be done by Paradox. Maybe for 1.6 if wiz or someone else takes an interest.

On a side note, we could have option to travel between gakaxies (very advanced tech) and that galaxy would be older or younger. Ofcourse hardware requirements to play in both galaxies would be large, so maybie it is always a tiny galaxy.

Possibly. There are mods that create multiple neighboring galaxies, but that's a bit outside the scope of this particular idea.

Reedstilt · 2017-03-10T12:28:19+00:00

I'm mainly picturing this as something that changes the nature of playstyle on the roughly the same level as other start-up variables like the shape and size of the galaxy. I suppose there are really three potential levels of implementation. At the base level, it would only impact the frequency at which various features (star types, planet types, resources, primitives and Fallen Empires) spawn during galaxy creation. At the next potential level, it impacts the frequency at which certain events trigger as mentioned in the main post. At the last level, it adds new features, like the Cybrex Empire, as new Leviathan-esque mid-game bosses or new End Game Crisis-like events. Those new features would potentially be available in all age states, but are more likely during some than others. If you're in a Primordial Galaxy, you're more likely to encounter some horror that survived the Big Crunch of an earlier universe, while the citizens of a Dying Galaxy will more likely have to band together to solve the Last Question and overcome entropy itself by gathering sufficient data for a meaningful answer. Probably by fighting some entropic monsters and scanning their remains, knowing Stellaris.

Reedstilt · 2017-03-10T09:58:01+00:00

If it's not in the mod yet can you add in a quote that's something along the lines of this:

I am [insert Leader's Name here], and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a sapient not entitled to the sweat of its brow? "No," says the Enigmatic Observer, "it belongs to the primitives." "No," says the Holy Guardian, "it belongs to the Shroud." "No," says the Mind, "it belongs to the Hive." I reject those answers.

Reedstilt · 2017-03-09T12:24:51+00:00

Could be. Since we've seen some rogue turian Anarchists in promotional material, I'm thinking we might find the turian ark but it'll be tied up with another story and won't need rescuing like the other two.

Reedstilt · 2017-03-09T10:48:39+00:00

It's interesting that there are achievements associated with the salarian and asari arks, but not one for the turian ark. We know that one is missing too, but unless the story associated with finding it is tied to a different achievement, it looks like it might stay missing.

Reedstilt · 2017-03-08T07:42:37+00:00

do the reapers have a 'do not interfere' protocol or something?

They do. During ME3, the Reapers specifically avoid messing with Parnack, the yagh homeworld, presumably because they're leaving the yagh for the next cycle. The raloi (a species we never actually got to see in the trilogy, unfortunately, but exist in the lore) had only recently started to engage in space travel and once they learned of the Reapers they blasted themselves back to pre-space flight civilization hoping that the Reapers would consider them too primitive to bother with. No word on whether their ruse was successful or suicidal.

furthermore, species like the turians and asari seem to be much more technologically advanced than humans were, but they weren't taken out by the reapers during the prothean cycle?

They're not all that more advanced that humans really. The Reapers last passed through the galaxy 50,000 years ago. The asari only reached the Citadel about 2,700 years before humans did, and the turians got there about 1,000 years after that. On the grand scale of things, that's not too far off.

Incidentally, around 2,000 years ago was when the Reapers were supposed to show up in this cycle. That's when Sovereign attempted to activate the Citadel relay only to discover that the Protheans had sabotaged it. When that failed, he attempted to use indoctrinated rachni hiveminds to take down the Asari-Salarian Council. That, of course, failed and he had to wait until the geth could be swayed to try again.

Of course, the rachni raise another problem. According to Javik, the rachni were already a formidable threat in his cycle. They don't seem to have had spaceflight of their own and relied on the Protheans who had been selectively breeding rachni queens as biological weapon-factory in order to get to the 200 worlds that Javik said had to be burned to rid his cycle of the rachni threat. When the Reapers exterminated the Protheans, they left the rachni alive on their homeworld at least, and while the rachni there eventually invented spaceflight, they weren't FTL capable until they reversed engineered the technology from a crashed salarian vessel.

Now, had the Reapers successfully invaded during the Rachni Wars, it would have been interesting to see if they would leave Earth alone at the time, or would they be making husks out of the Roman legions. If they had left Earth alone, it would be interesting to see what the galaxy would look like with humans as the "dominant" species rather than the asari. Especially if the Reapers do keep to a general 50,000 year timeline and we get the Citadel only a 1-2 thousand years after they last passed through.

Reedstilt · 2017-03-08T07:12:33+00:00

There's a mass effect relay in the Turian's home system so presumably they figured out mass effect technology by studying it or other allegedly Prothean technologies, just like asari and humans did. The Turians possibly had a 5-10,000 year head start on the humans too. Garrus says Turian Civilization is 15,000 years old. Now, "Civilization" is a bit of a vague term, but I think we can safely say that Turian Civilization significantly predates anything we'd call Human Civilization, since 15,000 years ago we were still in the Ice Age.

Reedstilt · 2017-03-08T06:55:28+00:00

In reality we're not that genetically diverse [...]

Every time I play ME2, I wonder what horrible cataclysms befell every other species to make us the genetically diverse ones. Probably best to think that something went wrong with our omnitool's universal translator keeps glitching out and Mordin means that we're less diverse than everyone else and that makes us a useful control group because we don't have too many pesky genetic variables to mess with.

Reedstilt · 2017-03-08T06:36:56+00:00

it reminds me of how babies (human) only have their cranial plates grow together completely after birth

From what I remember, this is intentional on the part of Grunt's character designer. I remember some old featurette that discussed the various ways they made Grunt look younger and that was a primary one.

Reedstilt · 2017-03-06T12:46:38+00:00

The only common crop used between the New and Old worlds are gourds which were both independently domesticated.

This could be a technicality, but one in keeping with the spirit of the question, but wouldn't the various species of cotton count as well, being independently domesticated in both hemispheres? Since it never quite made it to eastern North America prior to European colonization, the exact history of domesticated cotton in the Americas isn't something I'm well versed in though.

Reedstilt · 2017-03-02T18:53:40+00:00

I fully intended to do an Qu-based RP playthrough once Utopia hits.

Reedstilt · 2017-03-01T12:53:50+00:00

There's a lot of diverse opinion on that. The consistent preference is for specificity. If you know the relevant national / tribal / ethnic identity, use that as appropriate. If you don't, "Native American" is generally acceptable, even if (American) Indian would be preferred For more specifics, I'd head over to /r/IndianCountry, specifically their FAQ on the topic.

Reedstilt · 2017-03-01T11:27:35+00:00

Population estimates for the Pre-Columbian Americas are notoriously difficult to pin down. The current high-end estimates put the population in the neighborhood of Europe's at the same time, around 100 million, give or take ten million (Europe's population in 1500 was between 90-100 million). Conservative low-end estimates place the population at around 50 million instead. Either way, around 50% or more of that population would have been concentrated in Mesoamerica and the Andes.

So it's possible that the population of the Americas was greater than of Europe in 1492, but that requires the highest estimates to be accurate. I tend to fall in line with the High Counters on this issue, but I'd be hard-pressed to say that the American population was higher than the European population at the time until we have more concrete information, rather than statistically equivalent, given the margins of error involved.

A bit stereotypically for /r/AskHistorians, I'll recommend 1491 by Charles Mann. It has a good summary of the shift from the old estimates of merely 10 million toward higher estimates of 50-100 million. If you don't have time for a whole book, this older article summarizes the basics. Sad to say nothing has radically shifted the debate in the last twenty years here.

Reedstilt · 2017-03-01T06:41:33+00:00

It was a pre-set starting system from another mod, so that might have interfered with the start up script.

Reedstilt · 2017-03-01T06:39:29+00:00

I might be wrong, but I think Hive Minds still use Consumer Goods. They're probably locked in to using Subsistence, or whatever the lowest level is called, since anything else would go into Happiness that they don't need. But since it's effectively a Population Maintenance cost, I don't foresee them getting out of it entirely.

Habitability wouldn't effect the Hive Mind's Happiness, but it would still impact the hypothetical penalty to Consumer Goods and/or Population Density. So if a Tropical-Preference Hive Mind settles a Desert Tile, it still has to dedicate more resources to keeping its drones surviving at Subsistence level and its drone population can't be as dense as they can be on a Tropical Tile. The drone isn't angry about its situation, just less efficient.

Reedstilt · 2017-03-01T06:10:33+00:00

After last week's stream, he was asked this question in the chat. His only answer was "No comment" and that any additional graphics would be discussed in a future Dev Diary. Of course, it's unclear whether he meant "There's a Dev Diary coming up that will discuss this" or "If we make changes like this, you'll find out about them in a Dev Diary, not in a Twitch chat."

Reedstilt · 2017-03-01T05:50:58+00:00

As do I. Synthetic Xenos are too crunchy for my tastes, and Spiritual Xenos aren't as filling.

Reedstilt · 2017-03-01T05:49:34+00:00

It was probably another mod, possibly the preset starting system I was using for the first time. It doesn't mention anything about a second habitable planet in my solar system. The game may have also randomly spawned it because it turned the number of habitable planets up.

Reedstilt · 2017-02-28T22:13:14+00:00

I just started playing with that Mod yesterday. My species evolved on a tropical planet and I gave them bonuses to food production. Unfortunately, it turned out that my homeworld had Unusual Seasons, completely cancelling out my Food bonuses. Fine, I thought, it makes sense that my species evolved to break-even. Once we're off-world, we'll feast like kings! I was surprised that there was an Arid world in my solar system inhabited by Iron Age primitive. I'm jealous of their Perfect Seasons trait, but it'll be a while before I can think about claiming their planet since the climate is so different. But it gives us hope. Our unstable climate is not the only way habitable planets can exist.

At the edge of our sensory range, our astronomers detect planet that may be suitable for colonization. We detect elevated oxygen, suggesting that it is teaming with plant life, and its proximity to its star suggests that it would be a steaming tropical world like our own. Our explorer rushes out to survey this new world.

They report back that the massive planet is indeed covered in Endless Forests as predicted. Amazingly, these plants appear to be linked into an Ecological Nervous System. Unfortunately, our explorer reported back one additional trait: goddamn Unusual Seasons!

That aside, I'm liking the mod so far. The traits that are currently just for flavor are interesting and would serve as interesting story-hooks if you ever want to add in event chains. I may even look into figuring out how to do that myself, since they intrigue me enough.

Keep up the excellent work.

Reedstilt

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