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Every empire in Homeworld took spiritualist or fanatic spiritualist. One of them was an advanced start egalitarian that immediately finished their precursor event chain, got a battleship with arc emitters and a jump drive, and then formed a massive federation. It eventually dissolved when other empires started having border conflict. Another militarist empire had the same precursor event chain and got their own jump battleship and started conquering everyone, but eventually got beaten back and had most of their starting planets conquered. Eventually the egalitarians ragequit the game when a third player had the same precursor chain and got their own jump drive ship, and then accidentally unlocked every gateway at once.
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Jan 30, 2018 02:25
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Purifiers arn't at perma-war, but they don't need to manufacture a Casus Belli - they can just go "Today is a good day to purify" and declare war. IIRC, the flip side is that anyone else can declare war on them at will as well. I imagine your main protection against being attacked is fear, possibly of a battle station. The new Barbaric Despoilers can also declare war as they pleases.
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Jan 30, 2018 02:28
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wiegieman posted:One thing that nobody ever seems to talk about is that a ton of the battles in Homeworld take place against these absurdly imposing backgrounds. You fight in the wreckage of megastructures that make the Mothership -- the crowning achievement of an entire culture -- look like an ant. These are things that would have taken multiple planetoids worth of metal and impossible manufacturing capabilities to build, and they're just glossed over. The story does not take place in the Milky Way. Long enough ago that nobody remembers, humanity came here across an impossibly long distance and fractured. i mean is it canon that they're humans from our galaxy? i thought they were just human looking in a fantasy galaxy, or maybe it's our galaxy many millennia from now???
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Jan 30, 2018 02:30
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wiegieman posted:One thing that nobody ever seems to talk about is that a ton of the battles in Homeworld take place against these absurdly imposing backgrounds. You fight in the wreckage of megastructures that make the Mothership -- the crowning achievement of an entire culture -- look like an ant. These are things that would have taken multiple planetoids worth of metal and impossible manufacturing capabilities to build, and they're just glossed over. The story does not take place in the Milky Way. Long enough ago that nobody remembers, humanity came here across an impossibly long distance and fractured. It depends on how much you care about Cataclysm, because the Bentusi, Turanic Raiders and the Beast were all depicted as nonhuman or nonhumanoid. Yandat posted:i mean is it canon that they're humans from our galaxy? i thought they were just human looking in a fantasy galaxy, or maybe it's our galaxy many millennia from now??? Homeworld is set in the Pinwheel Galaxy.
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Jan 30, 2018 02:34
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Yandat posted:i mean is it canon that they're humans from our galaxy? i thought they were just human looking in a fantasy galaxy, or maybe it's our galaxy many millennia from now??? I'm pretty sure it's implied that the Progenitors are from another galaxy and I think there's something in HW2 that depicts them as humanoid. turn off the TV posted:It depends on how much you care about Cataclysm, because the Bentusi, Turanic Raiders and the Beast were all depicted as nonhuman or nonhumanoid. Nah, Bentusi were humanoid. Turanics were, too, I think, just something about a fluid membrane or something. Homeworld has obvious Dune inspirations where it's been so long that things have changed dramatically and the reasons have been lost to the sands of time.
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Jan 30, 2018 02:40
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turn off the TV posted:In Homeworld there are basically hyperspace drives, which is what everyone besides the Bentusi uses prior to Homeworld 2. All of their drives are inferior copies of progenitor manufacturing that nobody has been able to replicate in thousands upon thousands of years. This was partially intentional, because only the Bentusi had discovered an original progenitor hyperspace core, and they never let anyone else know that they only had one core or that they didn't how to properly build one themselves. For a while in the history of Homeworld there was basically one gigantic ship in the entire galaxy that could cross it effortlessly and crush anyone that tried to resist them without a moment's notice. Then people found a second core and also started flying across the galaxy effortlessly, crushing anyone that tried to resist without a moment's notice. This is actually important because a lot of the anger about HW2's plot revolves around the Great Hyperspace Retcon that isn't actually a retcon - anybody can build a functioning hyperspace core and zip around with it, but the Progenitor cores are simultaneously capable of going super far and also functioning as super powerplants, and they're the plot device. The only actual retcon of HW1 inherent in this plot point is a single line in the HW1 manual about the Kushan reverse engineering the core they find in the Khar Toba, since in HW2 that no longer makes sense. turn off the TV posted:It's also worth mentioning that a lot of Homeworld's narrative revolves around history becoming myth and religion (the entire conflict of Deserts of Kharak is about this), so the progenitors probably literally did create the Hiigarans and the rest of the galaxy's life, told them what was up, and then all died for a reason that nobody seems to know. So they have the legend of the space god that everyone else in the galaxy seems to have, and find technology made with materials that nobody can recreate. Why wouldn't they believe that their religion was true, if their religion appeared to constantly be confirmed by scientific fact? This is also a thing that I feel a lot of people gloss over. The HW2 story isn't good, no, but it having spiritual and mythical overtones is totally in keeping with HW1, and I think that people who think HW2 had too much myth in it are treating Cataclysm and its massive tone shift as a sequel, instead of a spin-off. Also the Progenitors are totally the ancestors of everyone in the HW2 galaxy (everyone is human except maybe the Turanics and a couple of apocryphal Dust Wars races) and I like the dumb fan theory that the Foundry was a ship from our galaxy and Homeworld is actually humanity's adventures in M51 in the super far future. turn off the TV posted:Homeworld is set in the Pinwheel Galaxy. Whirlpool actually 
Psycho Landlord fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Jan 30, 2018 |
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Jan 30, 2018 02:41
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Can you even finish the precursor event chain? I find five in the first 10 years and the sixth never shows up
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Jan 30, 2018 02:50
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Speaking of random toggles, (and I don't remember if anything like this has been announced, or indeed whether or not I've posted this suggestion before), Wiz, any chance that the random toggle functionality could be changed slightly? Currently, it works like so (illustrating because I can't think of words right now): code:code:Lprsti99 fucked around with this message at 02:57 on Jan 30, 2018 |
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Jan 30, 2018 02:52
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GorfZaplen posted:Can you even finish the precursor event chain? I find five in the first 10 years and the sixth never shows up I've finished a few. Eventually a random anomaly will pop up to help you along.
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Jan 30, 2018 02:58
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GorfZaplen posted:Can you even finish the precursor event chain? I find five in the first 10 years and the sixth never shows up Eventually other anomalies and such will appear prompting you to do it. These are few and far between, though.
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Jan 30, 2018 03:02
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Artificer posted:I've finished a few. Eventually a random anomaly will pop up to help you along. Sometimes. It doesn't always actually make you an anomaly where it says it did.
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Jan 30, 2018 03:02
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Shugojin posted:Sometimes. It doesn't always actually make you an anomaly where it says it did. Always click the little camera icon to take you to the system. Every time I do this, I get the anomaly to investigate. Every time I don't, I don't.
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Jan 30, 2018 03:04
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Artificer posted:I've finished a few. Eventually a random anomaly will pop up to help you along. I've completed the Cybrex one three times but never managed the First League or the flatworm guys. It gets a bit frustrating sometimes.
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Jan 30, 2018 03:04
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the cybrex have the only good reward iirc, the rest are just dead systems you can't do anything with
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Jan 30, 2018 03:06
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Psycho Landlord posted:This is actually important because a lot of the anger about HW2's plot revolves around the Great Hyperspace Retcon that isn't actually a retcon - anybody can build a functioning hyperspace core and zip around with it, but the Progenitor cores are simultaneously capable of going super far and also functioning as super powerplants, and they're the plot device. The only actual retcon of HW1 inherent in this plot point is a single line in the HW1 manual about the Kushan reverse engineering the core they find in the Khar Toba, since in HW2 that no longer makes sense. They explain this as them having reverse engineered the systems used to contain and integrate the core into a ship, which is the bulk of what you see. The actual hyperspace core is supposed to be relatively small. Psycho Landlord posted:Also the Progenitors are totally the ancestors of everyone in the HW2 galaxy (everyone is human except maybe the Turanics and a couple of apocryphal Dust Wars races) and I like the dumb fan theory that the Foundry was a ship from our galaxy and Homeworld is actually humanity's adventures in M51 in the super far future. There's a picture of a Bentusi guy in the Cataclysm manual (I think?) and he has some kind of weird scale poo poo going on. I think "it's like Dune" makes about as much sense as the rest of the setting, though. But the the Beast is 100% not a human.
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Jan 30, 2018 03:08
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turn off the TV posted:There's a picture of a Bentusi guy in the Cataclysm manual (I think?) and he has some kind of weird scale poo poo going on. I think "it's like Dune" makes about as much sense as the rest of the setting, though. But the the Beast is 100% not a human. Yeah, the Beast is some sort of weird hegemonizing biomechanical infection from outside of normal space. The Nagarok basically pulled an Event Horizon and went somewhere where you don't need eyes to see. Edit: And I think part of people's criticism of HW2's mystic/spiritual theme is that even though it's consistent with Homeworld 1, in the first game it was very much part of the background, blending seamlessly with the rest of the setting. In HW2 they ramped it up to 11 and suddenly the whole plot revolves around "so advanced they're magical" Macguffins while they beat you over the face with the mysticism. Rhjamiz fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Jan 30, 2018 |
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Jan 30, 2018 03:17
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VirtualStranger posted:https://twitter.com/Martin_Anward/status/958028567954317313 A "gimme more monsters" slider would be fun, yeah.
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Jan 30, 2018 03:17
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Yandat posted:the cybrex have the only good reward iirc, the rest are just dead systems you can't do anything with If you're lucky with the timing the chunk of unity and research you get is kinda nice?
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Jan 30, 2018 03:18
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turn off the TV posted:There's a picture of a Bentusi guy in the Cataclysm manual (I think?) and he has some kind of weird scale poo poo going on. Cataclysm also implied that the Bentusi had not only become entirely spacefaring but had radically modified themselves into interfacing directly with their ships, so a Bentusi's current appearance is probably a poor representation of what they started out looking like. There's tubes and poo poo coming out of the one in the picture you're talking about, for instance. Cata did a few other weird things too, like humanizing (har) the Turanics where before they were described as aquatic or something, so who knows what's going on there. turn off the TV posted:But the the Beast is 100% not a human. The Beast is at the very least extra-galactic and possibly extra-dimensional, my statement is still true  Rhjamiz posted:Edit: And I think part of people's criticism of HW2's mystic/spiritual theme is that even though it's consistent with Homeworld 1, in the first game it was very much part of the background, blending seamlessly with the rest of the setting. In HW2 they ramped it up to 11 and suddenly the whole plot revolves around "so advanced they're magical" Macguffins while they beat you over the face with the mysticism. This is where the "the plot isn't good" issue screws everything up, yes. The theme is fine. The actual delivery is haphazard at best and actively stupid at worst.
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Jan 30, 2018 04:01
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Rhjamiz posted:Yeah, the Beast is some sort of weird hegemonizing biomechanical infection from outside of normal space. The Nagarok basically pulled an Event Horizon and went somewhere where you don't need eyes to see. To me the original Homeworld was the second game in the series I played - after Cataclysm. It turned out to be my favorite of the series. The plot was great with tons of little details because somebody actually knew how to write a drat story. They found little bits of tiny debris composed of unknown materials in orbit and noticed that they only shared DNA with a few small animals on the planet (rats). Eventually by complete accident they find a crashed generation ship and the ruins of an old city - followed by decades of scientists, archaeologists, and engineers working the site over to reverse engineer anything of value. They spend 60 years building the colony ship using the technological leap achieved from the above. They equip it with a scaled down copy of the hyperspace drive they found in the ship along with similarly reverse engineered powerplants and conventional drives. They only had rudimentary control over the hyperspace drive because they had little knowledge of how it actually worked - they controlled distance by just cutting power to it after a certain amount of time based on trial and error tests. Karan Sjet was just a computer toucher willing to stick herself into her own experimental computer interface to solve the problem of handling the colony ship's systems that kept chewing up their rudimentary AIs. Throughout the story they scan debris, salvage, and purchase new technology - usually coming up with analogs of enemy ships except in a few cases where they could not figure out how to make a thing work and ended up pursuing some tangential project instead. They are sometimes one step ahead of the enemy through luck or good planning, but more often than not either fleeing or getting caught in hastily prepared traps by the Taiidan - who are both in the middle of a civil war and did not have a strong military presence in that area of space. They end up winning only because the Taiidan Emperor was senile and crazy enough to place himself in the crosshairs of both the Hiigarans and the Taiidan rebels, followed by the Space UN intervening after much deliberation on Taiidani war crimes. In the second game the hyperspace core is suddenly an Ultimate MacGuffin with a long and storied history of being the key to everything, while Karan Sjet becomes Space Jesus. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 04:04 on Jan 30, 2018 |
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Jan 30, 2018 04:01
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Also the Bentusi go from wily, influential traders to weird space prophets/powerful elder species. Cataclysm did this too but it's basically not-canon. Like, they're hardly omniscient or omnipotent in HW1. They don't know a thing about the Kadesh, just that people who go into that nebula never return. The Taiidan will even kill one of their tradeships without much trouble.
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Jan 30, 2018 04:08
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Milky Moor posted:Cataclysm did this too but it's basically not-canon. But the final campaign mission where the Bentusi give you godmode fighters to build owned.
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Jan 30, 2018 04:45
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Warbadger posted:In the second game the hyperspace core is suddenly an Ultimate MacGuffin with a long and storied history of being the key to everything, while Karan Sjet becomes Space Jesus. Sajuuk is mentioned for the first time in the Homeworld 1 manual in reference to the religious beliefs of the Gaalsien, who up until the planet was destroyed were still living in the desert, fighting military expeditions and trying to sabotage the launch of the mothership. It implies that the only difference in religious belief at the time of the mothership's launch is whether Sajuuk was an absent god or had trapped them on the planet as punishment. The manual also calls the hyperspace module in the Khar-Toba "the solid state hyperspace induction module." They describe the mothership's module as having two parts, the solid state core, and the actual power and control systems. The description is that "although the core of the device is entirely solid state, the power and control systems that embed it are the most complex devices ever built. Only the upper part of a hemisphere can still be seen bulging above the surrounding construction." They also mention that "because the device was reverse engineered, the exact workings of the module are still very uncertain. All that our scientists know about the effects of hyperspace transport has been derived from limited empirical data -theoretical data is almost totally nonexistent." The entire product is always referred to as a hyperspace module, the solid state component is always called a core, while the machinery that controls and powers it is always called a device. They were able to reverse engineer the device, but they aren't sure how the module works. The core of the device is a solid state core, but they did build the rest of the systems. This is an interesting distinction, because at the time Homeworld 1 had shipped the plot for Homeworld: Empire (which became Homeworld 2) was already being written. Empire/Dust Wars have various scripts floating around the internet. The earliest one I've seen, dated just a few months after the first game shipped in 99, says this: quote:Karan S’Jet ‘Echo’ So, there's pretty good precedent that the concepts in Homeworld 2 (Karen is space jesus, the mothership's hyperspace module's core is the same one found in the Khar-Toba) were around just a few months after HW1's release, and they probably kept the writing in the manual incredibly vague because the second game's plot wasn't locked in yet. Or, the Dust Wars document could be a hoax, but I find that pretty unlikely because it's in a PDF format that was outdated by the time that Homeworld 2 was actually released.
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Jan 30, 2018 05:20
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Psycho Landlord posted:That's a good one, but I raise you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btXnl7AGFg0 Milky Moor posted:Hard to beat. But maybe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oco_iHIkHQ8 I really like the theme that the first DoK enemy had: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GhZNT_Bp5Y e:The intro piece is a great "poo poo is about to go down" bit too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVUbOsOCN0c
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Jan 30, 2018 05:30
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I like that this is the homeworld expanded universe lore thread now. I want more deep-lore poo poo in Stellaris.
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Jan 30, 2018 05:43
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What would the Kushan just coming off Kharak be, as a Stellaris race? Spiritualist Militarists?
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Jan 30, 2018 05:47
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Galaga Galaxian posted:What would the Kushan just coming off Kharak be, as a Stellaris race? Spiritualist Militarists? They got a poo poo load of research civics, too.
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Jan 30, 2018 05:49
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turn off the TV posted:They got a poo poo load of research civics, too. Some kind of civic that makes them better at salvaging wrecks and/or give fleets self-repair.
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Jan 30, 2018 05:51
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turn off the TV posted:Sajuuk is mentioned for the first time in the Homeworld 1 manual in reference to the religious beliefs of the Gaalsien, who up until the planet was destroyed were still living in the desert, fighting military expeditions and trying to sabotage the launch of the mothership. It implies that the only difference in religious belief at the time of the mothership's launch is whether Sajuuk was an absent god or had trapped them on the planet as punishment. Presumably, all the Gaalsien in the Kushan afterlife are insufferably smug about it. Baronjutter posted:I like that this is the homeworld expanded universe lore thread now. I want more deep-lore poo poo in Stellaris. Static lore is antithetical to Paradox's design philosophy. Their grand strategy games have always been about letting the player forge their own story.
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Jan 30, 2018 05:55
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1stGear posted:Static lore is antithetical to Paradox's design philosophy. Their grand strategy games have always been about letting the player forge their own story. on the other hand, there's a very deep lore behind other paradox games called "history"
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Jan 30, 2018 06:00
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Crazy advanced sci-fi poo poo that has become myth, legend, and with Machinarium-style rituals used for maintenance is unbelievably my poo poo
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Jan 30, 2018 06:00
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Ms Adequate posted:Crazy advanced sci-fi poo poo that has become myth, legend, and with Machinarium-style rituals used for maintenance is unbelievably my poo poo best part of the foundation books is teaching atomic religion to space barbarians
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Jan 30, 2018 06:10
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1stGear posted:Static lore is antithetical to Paradox's design philosophy. Their grand strategy games have always been about letting the player forge their own story. Stellaris already has static lore in the form of Precursor civilizations, certain events and the crises. I'd actually love to see a lot more stuff like that. I don't think that it conflicts with the random nature of the game. Even all of Homeworld's storyline involves a handful of factions in a galaxy that has hundreds of planets and civilizations all doing their own thing. Homeworld 2 even ends with the dawn of an age of exploration within their own galaxy.
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Jan 30, 2018 06:17
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Yeah I figure any "lore" in Stellaris would be stuff like the weird worm cycles or whatever and the point would be mostly, "All of this poo poo happened and left some cool wreckage behind. (Fallen empires are wreckage.) Then rose the new species/robots."
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Jan 30, 2018 06:26
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Does researching Jump Drives always spawn the Unbidden? I've never seen another end game crisis because someone always gets Jump Drives as some point...
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Jan 30, 2018 06:26
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appropriatemetaphor posted:Does researching Jump Drives always spawn the Unbidden? I've never seen another end game crisis because someone always gets Jump Drives as some point... No. It only allows them to have a chance of spawning.
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Jan 30, 2018 06:28
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I wish the Precursor stuff was done better. Either cut the number of required systems in half so it's more likely to be accomplished, or make it a grand part of the game with a massive role similar to the role Protheans played in Mass Effect.
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Jan 30, 2018 06:30
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I don't know how easy it would be to set up, but it might be nice if you had a way of getting the equivalent of a precursor artifact from a fallen empire you had good relations with, or did some task for. Like they would say "Ah yes, the old [precursor], we interacted with them in an ideologically appropriate way." It would give a bit of flavor to the fallen empires too. The mad machine fallen empire's interaction with the Contingency is fantastic and the game could use more of that to spruce up fallen empires, which are conceptually the coolest god drat things but in practice kinda meh.
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Jan 30, 2018 06:37
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Cool HW chat. I've played bits and pieces of the series over the years. I love the first ~4 or so missions of HW2--when the story beats are both fast and clean and big and mythic--to the point of replaying them from time to time. But I should probably play the whole series in one go sometime. HW's religion sci fi pastiche is actually a lot more resonant and plausible as a conception of the future than it might seem. a lot of philosophers of history (RG Collingwood, Karl Lowith) would argue our modern conception of progressive secular time requires religion--specifically post-Abrahamic religion--to function. if we were purely rational about human history we would not expect the future to be any better than the past. the greeks and romans thought the universe could only repeat tragic contradictions of various opposites, of virtue and corruption, mind and body, civilization and nature, in an enormous circle. it is only the 'divine comedy' of Christianity that posits--through 'faith'--the integration and resolution and transcendence of these opposites in a forward movement through time. we are essentially the inheritors of the latter paradigm (Christianity) over the former (Greco-roman) insofar as we continue to retain 'faith' in the ultimate progress of 'justice' or 'reason' or the 'human spirit' over time. a crazy sci-fi civilization, 10,000 years in the future, with broadly similar existential problems, and huge holes in their historical records, would still plausibly take religious ideas of fate and prophecy and destiny pretty seriously. Zane fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Jan 30, 2018 |
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Jan 30, 2018 06:41
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The main reason I play as avians (or have avian trophies when I'm servitors) is it gives me the thinnest justification to use the Hiigaran emblem in my empire's flag. If anyone has any other HW symbols they'd like added, let me know: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=847812732 Lprsti99 posted:Speaking of random toggles, (and I don't remember if anything like this has been announced, or indeed whether or not I've posted this suggestion before), Wiz, any chance that the random toggle functionality could be changed slightly? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxSfV20pQro&t=42s
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Jan 30, 2018 08:35
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