Stellaris - To Serve Man - The Something Awful Forums

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Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

LordMune posted:

It would basically be the easiest mod in the world to create. You can edit the localization files yourself using NotePad++ or Sublime.

Fake Edit: Was going to link to the dev diary but I know when I've been beaten.

Thanks! I'll be doing this now.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2017 13:25

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# ¿ May 13, 2024 20:00

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Rakthar posted:

This is really weird to me, like honestly. I can't tell the joke if it's a joke.

Since I haven't played the expansion, do different species types really treat this stuff differently or not? These constant jokes about stuff that hasn't been explained (and GunnerJ straight up making things up to get a response) get tiresome when trying to understand the upcoming features.

If this bothers you so much, just put "they are pure 100% Vegans and this is the definition of Vegan they are going by: " in your species bio and exterminate all other forms of life, problem solved.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2017 20:24

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

PittTheElder posted:

Yeah, the apparent ethics requirements for psionics or cybernetics are kind of annoying, since it feels like you should always be one of the two in order to get the most out of the game. Same way that in the current state you really want to be either Collectivist or Individualist, and not neither, since Ethics Divergence is such a big deal.

That said I wouldn't want to open up psionics to everyone either, it felt kinda silly in my last game as a Fanatic Materialist where I managed to get a Maniacal scientist right away and then popped into the Psionics tech tree really early.

I'm fine with this, since you can still build robots without cybridizing yourself. Still, I hope one day we can actually start as a cybernetic/robotic race. I have some nice spiderbot pictures prepared just in case. Though they don't work really well if they're just normal spiders for most of the game until they can finally ascend. :sigh:

# ¿ Feb 9, 2017 23:36

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Baronjutter posted:

Yeah it makes sense when a spiritualist empire has strong ideas on what is a mind, what consciousness is and that can not include synths or uploading brains into robots. But what does a materialist have against researching a real phenomena ? Maybe they'd be less likely to discover it, but once it's clear it's a real thing and not mumbo jumbo?

I think the idea here is the Shroud and similar phenomena are only real, or even findable, to spiritualists who research psionics. Think about this, if you need a good understanding of psionics to find something, materialists won't be able to detect it.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2017 00:03

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Wiz posted:

If you want a lore reason, it's more along the lines that you need a certain mindset to tap into The Shroud because of the way it mirrors concepts and beliefs in the material universe.

Yeah, that's what I thought too, I just had trouble wording it in English. :v:

# ¿ Feb 10, 2017 00:06

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Ein Sexmonster posted:

This is just wrong though. Scientists HAVE investigated psychic or weird claims for decades. They just haven't ever found anything that backs up their existence. I'm fine with the current division though. Wiz is right about restrictions being good for variety.

Exactly. Think about it, what if magic was real, but needed people with a certain brain structure to access it? If that's the only connection magic has to the material world, quite obviously our scientists could test for magic for all of eternity and never find it. They would have to wait until by accident someone is born with the right combination of genes (a Psyker or Esper, essentially) or until they accidentally made an artificial brain capable of tapping into that power.

And the latter wouldn't work either if magic isn't everywhere around us, because that magic robot brain would in 99,999% of cases not be in the same spot as usable psionic power.

This is why the way things are work so well in Stellaris, and why Materialists still can stumble over psionics on accident.

Roland Jones posted:

This is really odd to me. Egalitarians and Xenophiles, the two ethoses that really care about other people having rights, can't give sapient robots rights, but Materialists, an ethos that otherwise has nothing to do with how people are treated, can? I guess the logic is something like "only Materialists acknowledge that they're people", but it still doesn't seem right that any combination of Egalitarian, Pacifist, and Xenophile, i.e. the most "we love everyone, hate slavery, and really hate purging" ethics, have to make robots slaves (or at least a permanent second-class) and are even capable of just killing them all off unless they also believe that souls don't exist and the only things that matter are what can be observed and studied.

Also really disappointing because I was planning on changing my Pacifist-Xenophile-Materialist empire to Egalitarian-Pacifist-Xenophile with 1.5, since those ethics match it better, and I always like making robots and giving them equal rights as part of my "I love everyone" socialist space commune.

Edit: Like, only Materialists being able to upload themselves? Sure, I can accept that the same way I can accept only Spiritualists getting psychic powers. Only Materialists being able to give robots rights, though, seems unnecessarily limiting and contrary to what the ethics I listed above mean. Especially Xenophile, since its whole thing is "we love things that are different from ourselves and acknowledge them as people despite our differences, physical and otherwise".

If you aren't at least somewhat materialist in your thinking, you simply won't accept that robots, even sapient ones, could be real people. So being "Xenophile" wouldn't help since your toaster oven isn't a "Xenos" you could "Phile" over. :v:

Sure, there may be some individuals in a pacifistic, xenophile nation that would be willing to accept robots as people, but Stellaris isn't the Sims, individual people are mostly abstracted away. As long as you haven't at least some materialism in your empire, the majority of the people won't accept robots as people, so it's not possible.

Just think about this as the game preventing you from self-destructing your empire by refusing to give your non-materialist empire this option. Because if you could do this, incredible social upheaval, rebellion and military coups against the government would be the logical consequence. That would be like Donald Trump suddenly ordering all Americans to pretend their Anime-pillows are people: Some people think like that, sure. But if Donald Trump would do this, the best he could hope for would be impeachment because of madness and a fast reversal of that decision.

So logically, realism in this case would be Wiz giving you that option and the game just replaces your current leader with a random new one and automatically reverses your decision. And in 5% of cases you have all your planets revolt in unison and if you win, your empires ethos changes to include "Materialist". So you still wouldn't get what you wanted.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2017 11:53

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Serf posted:

Within a week of Utopia and Banks dropping, there will be mods that change the game however you like. Even if that's not the case, the game is fantastically easy to mod yourself. So much so that even I, an idiot with little coding experience, can change things pretty easily.

Yeah, that's true. I just wrote a mod in about five minutes to change the descriptions of all techs involving the terms sentience and self-awareness, for example. And most of that time was spend finding the data and copying the file into my mod. :v:

# ¿ Feb 10, 2017 14:40

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Splicer posted:

I said this and GlyphGryph called me dumb

Well, it is dumb. But I don't feel like copying and pasting my old answer on this again, so you just have to trust me on this.

Jeb Bush 2012 posted:

It's not that it's impossible to imagine an otherwise tolerant society that is bad to its intelligent robots, it's just bizarre to have literally everyone other than the science kings behave that way.

Maybe more importantly, it's also much less exciting as a bonus for materialists. Like, being able to build intelligent robots, that's cool as hell. Being able to treat them well is nice but much less exciting, and also completely useless if you want to be an evil empire backed by intelligent robot slaves. (which still seems pretty materialist to me?)

Evil is neither materialist nor spiritualist. Besides if you want to be evil, you have to be wasteful on purpose. It's pretty drat evil to enslave your citizens out of spite, even though it brings you nothing. :v:

# ¿ Feb 10, 2017 19:08

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Jeb Bush 2012 posted:

it's not though

It is. Arguably from my view point, though. So let's drop this or do you want us to exchange ten posts of "Yes" and "No" until we just report each others posts and give up in disgust?

# ¿ Feb 10, 2017 19:53

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

All this talk about eating people made me realize there aren't any nice-looking portraits of spiders and centipede-like beings in Stellaris' standard arthropod portraits. After some searching I finally found a really neat black-and-red nightmare of a centipede on deviant art and are trying to work it in as a portrait, but I had no luck with spiders so far.

If we ever get to start as machines, I'm set though: I found two pictures of robot-spiders while searching for nice-looking real spider artwork.

Does anyone know some nice pictures of spiders (webspiders mostly, but hunters would do in a cinch)? And when I say "real", I mean artwork of something that looks like a spider. My image search turned up enough pictures of actual IRL spiders to last my nightmares a lifetime (shudder).

My plan so far is putting those new people-eater portraits into my Weird Portrait mod on the Steam-workshop, including some custom name lists.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2017 12:53

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Korgan posted:

This happy little fella is getting ready to consume some ethically sourced vegan protein matter made from genuine intelligent creatures through that feeding tube.

edit wait you wanted artwork, poo poo

Yeah, IRL spiders I have seen about a thousand by now. Did you know the Portia-spider is almost as smart as a mammal? She uses some kind of staggered neuronal processing to imitate the decision-making a higher lifeform can do. The drawback is, she is by necessity a very slow thinker. For example, her main eyes have a visual range of about 75 cm and if you want her to notice you, you would need to stand insider her range and wait for a while, so her brain can very slowly assemble a picture of you in her brain.

Spider facts! :v:

(Still an awesome pic though)

# ¿ Feb 11, 2017 13:27

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Man-eating centipedes incoming :siren:

I finally completed the first versions of the two mods I wanted to make.

The Sentience before Sapience mod just reverses sentience and sapience wherever I found these terms. No longer is a self-aware AI forced to live in a box for centuries because your scientists used sentience wrong! :v:

But what most of you really want is this:

Weird Portraits and Namelists is one of the first mods I made for Stellaris. Upgraded many times, it now includes three additional (and rather cartoonish) mammalian and a brand-new evil centipede portrait. The last one properly under arthropoids, of course. A custom-name list for arthropoids or just generally really horrific aliens is part of the mod, too. The name list is still WiP, though. I'm still working on it.

Centipedes done. But gently caress, making this work took so much time the spider-portrait has to wait until next weekend. :suicide:

# ¿ Feb 12, 2017 19:35

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Ofaloaf posted:

Nice! Just modifying human portraits alone is daunting stuff, working on a new alien species altogether must be draining as hell. That end product's worth it, though.

Most of the work was done by Mr. Unknown DeviantArt-artist, luckily. I just had to do the uncreative work of modifying the picture in paint.net until it didn't look like a painted cardboard shoved into Stellaris. :v:

That said, the original picture had tons of weird shadows and mist layered over it, which confused the hell of paint.net's selection tools. I had to manually move along the edges of all those feet/arms with a tiny eraser. Still not really difficult, you just need a calm hand and lots of time.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2017 21:02

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Indoctrination sounds great, especially as someone whose xenophile-empires are always getting burdened by the strangest weirdos. Gently leading rear end in a top hat aliens to the path of awesomeness sounds a lot better than dealing with unwanted Fanatic Shitheads.

In other news, my centipede-portrait is now used by 40+ people according to the Steam-Workshop. Nice!

I also had my first bug report: "It's not working for me." Great my friend, but uh could you tell me a little bit more details? :shepface:

# ¿ Feb 13, 2017 15:35

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

A question for modders: I have this weird issue where 2 guys out of 40+ can't see the portraits from my portrait-mod, any idea what could cause the portraits simply not to show up?

The guys in question already tried shutting down all other mods, even though a simple portrait+namelist mod shouldn't cause trouble. It still didn't work. Since I don't have this problem, it's kind of hard to find out what went wrong here. :confused:

# ¿ Feb 13, 2017 17:50

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

100 degrees Calcium posted:

Welcome to the world of software development.

The super-confusing thing is, they can see my namelist just fine, just my portraits won't show up for them. There isn't even a conflict with other mods, since they tried it with every other mod off and still can't see them. At this point my knowledge pool is basically depleted and I have no idea how to solve this.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2017 18:01

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Mister Adequate posted:

Your people looked at a cat and said "Boy that thing's too cute and sociopathic to be ours, must be an alien!"

I'm always imagining aliens visiting your homeworld and accidentally leaving their pets. Cue your scientists going "Huh. That's weird, this five-armed starfish with ten eyes doesn't even have DNA. It's totally alien. How did it get here?!" :v:

# ¿ Feb 13, 2017 18:14

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Ofaloaf posted:

Libluini, are your portraits overwrites of vanilla ones? I noticed that a few of them look like they're where dlc-bonus species are.

Are you talking about my mod or about the species I submitted for the Goon Mod? I think some of the Goon Mod submissions could have been dlc-bonus portraits, since I got some from pre-ordering Stellaris.

The portraits from my own mod aren't overwrites, I added additional species-classes and sorted them into the relevant species-groups. This way they'll always show up, regardless of how many portraits Stellaris adds in the future. No idea why Stellaris re-orders all portraits to put them in spots in the middle, though. :shrug:

# ¿ Feb 13, 2017 21:19

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Grizzwold posted:

Hey, I downloaded the mod and poked around in the files and it looks like there's no text file that tells the game to display the portraits. Does that help any?

There are actually two files for displaying the portraits in that mod. Also, two guys out of 56 (as of now) have this problem. Why are the other 54 seeing the portraits?

# ¿ Feb 14, 2017 01:40

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

3 DONG HORSE posted:

I haven't looked but earlier a goon mentioned if some of those portraits are taking up spots from the plantoid DLC. That would cause it to be invisible if those two guys didn't have it.

That's impossible, I grouped those portraits in their own species classes and added them in Mammals and Arthropoids. Plantoids are a completely different group altogether. And the names I used for species classes are 100% not names Paradox would use for their own portraits. So they aren't replacing anything in those two groups either.

Edit:

In fact, I don't have the plantoid DLC, so I'm pretty sure I don't even have the code block for the plantoid species group, so I wouldn't have been able to put portraits in there in the first place.

Libluini fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Feb 14, 2017

# ¿ Feb 14, 2017 02:27

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

VirtualStranger posted:

1) Go to \Stellaris\common\solar_system_initializers
2) Open special_system_initializers.txt
3) Find the sections titled "Primitive Civilizations" and "Stone Age Primitives"
4) Set the "usage_odds =" to 0

Do the same thing to the the section labeled "The Sanctuary" if you don't want that to appear either.

If this doesn't work, check to make sure you don't have any mods overwriting that paticular file.

The Enclaves are in guardian_system_initializers.txt but I'm not sure how to do that one yet.

I'd rather suggest copying the necessary files and folders into a mod and modify that one. This way you don't have to reinstall and wipe everything you did away every time you want to do multiplayer.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2017 01:25

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

canepazzo posted:

Stream started https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive

Some new tidbits:

- Core sectors have been lowered to 3 at the start, increases with tech.
- Sector view has a tooltip showing what they are working on (buildings, spaceport development, ships)

That's fine, most people probably put everything into one sector and forgot about it anyway. :v:

# ¿ Feb 16, 2017 15:13

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Serf posted:

Outside of my very first game back when Stellaris came out I don't think I've ever used sectors. Just got a mod that lets you use as many core planets as you want. The sector AI is way too dumb to give control over anything.

Curiously, that was what I thought back in 2003, when I started playing Master of Orion 3. Man, did that game cure me of this delusion fast. :shepface:

# ¿ Feb 16, 2017 15:38

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Jeb Bush 2012 posted:

if you thought the moo3 AI was too dumb to give control over anything you weren't wrong

it's just that the game was also too dumb to give a human control over it

Yeah, that's my point. Don't fear artificial stupidity, embrace it! :v:

# ¿ Feb 16, 2017 16:16

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Torrannor posted:

I don't know why a delicious species would provide more food. Sure, they taste nice, but they should still have the same calories as less tasty species?

But people obviously wouldn't eat as much of the bland, non-tasty food. So a lot of that will go to waste.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 19:02

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

OK, we had this alien food stuff now for what feels like weeks. What about robots, ascension to super-robots and all the related things to it? I want to know more!

# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 20:08

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:

I really disagree, again, that a hive mind should play out any differently than a democracy. A hive mind is just a democracy where they communicate through some other way than talking and writing.

To explain why you are wrong, imagine your guts voting that they should take over your body and your brain should be executed for treason. Instantly, you die. A hivemind works more like a living body and by definition can't work like democracy.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2017 20:23

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

King Doom posted:

I'd love more info on hiveminds. It says that non hiveminded pops can not survive in hive mind space, what happens to them? why do they die? how quickly?

hivemind pops can't survive in non hivemind empires. Okay, that kinda makes sense, it means they can't have pops migrating around the galaxy. What happens if some non hiveminds conquer a hivemind world though? What if you come across a pre-ftl hive mind? are a bunch of the usual options just not there?

Well, you're in luck then! The new dev diary with answers to your questions is supposed to come out tomorrow.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2017 01:04

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Shogeton posted:

The idea might be that even for a Xenophile Hivemind, that absolutely loves interacting, trading, communicating and sharing the galaxy with other sophonts, the idea of having them 'inside of them' is simply horrifying to them, the Hive equivalent of having a xenomorph inside of you. "We think you humans are great, and we love your music and your culture and everything about you, but our Mineral and Food drones just aren't equipped to handle large amounts of non-Hive lifeforms. They just see you as resources to be gathered, and giving all of them the intelligence to distinguish these things is simply not a thing we can do on a large scale. So, we of course welcome a few guests and tourists here and there in specifically prepared areas with our ambassador-drones, but co-habitation is just not a thing we can do.'

I do hope that a nice and xenophile Hive can try to make sure that people on a planet they conquer can migrate to other planets, rather than just perish as the world gets adapted to the Hive's needs.

After reading the dev blog, the answer is actually totally different: Over time, a hivemind can learn to genetically engineer non-hivemind pops to join them. So xenophile hives don't need to avoid all co-habitation, they can just modify alien population to join them!

(And the other way is possible to: You can eventually unlock techs to remove hivemind pops from their overmind. They don't have to die if you end up "liberating" their worlds.)

# ¿ Feb 23, 2017 14:51

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

I also love that there about a dozen different civic pics just for hiveminds. You can build your very own hive the way you like it! :allears:

# ¿ Feb 23, 2017 14:54

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

GlyphGryph posted:

Theres no xenophilia there though. Thats like claiming you love dogs and thats why you took one and chopped off its head and grafted the body to your hip to keep it alive.

If a human hive organism can have pet dogs, regular hives should at least be able to have pet species in their empires.

Also based on what we have seen I dont understand how the idea of converting pops to not be hive minded anymore would even possibly make sense. They arent being mind controlled, they are appendages.

That would be like someone chopping off your hand to "free it" and modifying it to live independentantly. What would that even mean, haha. Closest I can came is putting the brain of one of your dudes into the drones and wearing it as a flesh suit.

I do hope hive minders can actually conquer and integrate other hive mind pops though. Let me kill my enemies and gain their power by grafting their body parts to my own!

That's antropomorphizing aliens, though. That's how we would think about this issue. An alien hivemind could very well decide being part of a hivemind is so awesome including aliens in it just makes sense.

As to your other observation, there are like a dozen options for different hiveminds and the basic background lore is that individuals are "psionically" connected. There's lots of leeway for cutting out individuals out of a hive without it stopping to make sense. For one thing (the very first thing that came to mind, actually), the individuals making up a hivemind must have at least some kind of higher brain functions. After all, why it is theoretically possible to just staple cockroaches together until you get something complex enough for human-like thoughts, that's not what is happening here. That way (starting with sub-sapient intelligence) would result in something resembling a normal society, just with individuals who are all their own, walking hivemind.

Instead, to get a meta-hivemind on the level of a space empire, you logically need something at least approaching human-level intelligence to begin with. In a game with FTL and other magic technology, I see no problem in biological research suddenly finding ways to cut a hivemind-drone out of the overmind and giving it free will.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2017 15:46

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

GlyphGryph posted:

Wiz, do you think you might be able to allow secondary portraits in the portraita area? Either for secondary races or pet races.

I really want my humans to have doggos, my Harikas to have Yorns, my Plants to have elves, my zoqs to have fots.

Also, would it be possible to give us more space for species biographies? The space we have is rather tiny, I think.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2017 16:17

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Psycho Landlord posted:

QFT

There already is one for the Alliance floating around the workshop. No Boring Gay German portraits to go with it, though.

Does it come with custom events where your homeworld constantly tries to backstab your fleets with stupid bullshit? For example, Space-ISIS assassinating your best admiral? :v:

# ¿ Feb 27, 2017 02:15

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Captain Oblivious posted:

The dev diary even says at the beginning "The Shroud was a fairly major mechanical addition to the game, which we felt was needed as Psionics lacked any such mechanic associated with them, unlike the other two. For this reason, the Biological and Synthetic Ascension Paths do not have the same degree of new mechanics associated with them, but rather focus on enhancing the existing mechanics (Genemodding and Robots) that they are tied to."

So you may start your bitching engines. That said, I'm sure there's still more to Synthetic and Biological than what we're seeing. Not "The Shroud" levels of more stuff to discover, but more stuff all the same.

Hopefully some of the "more stuff" is more robot-portraits. Nothing is dumber than your space spiders suddenly deciding to built humanoid robots.

Honestly, I never even used robots before, simply because most of my species so far have been non-humanoid. (Yes, this point is that much of a turn off for me. :v:

)

# ¿ Mar 2, 2017 17:02

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

ZypherIM posted:

Here is the good thing about the gluten free fad though: people who actually suffer from celiac (ie the people who actually benefit) are much more able to get safe food and at better prices. View people following it as indirectly supporting sufferers of a real disease!

Not always, I've seen poo poo like water bottles labeled "gluten free". In that case I'd think a company that brazen will probably poison you one day if you're stupid enough to buy their products.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2017 10:41

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Hot Dog Day #82 posted:

Man, Utopia just can't come out soon enough. I was playing last night as a Xenophobe and it felt great invading a bunch of lovely backwater primitive worlds and tossing the survivors into the mines/shipping them across the stars to my home world's farms; things will only get better once I turn my evil tree species into literal ubermensch (uberbaums?) this April.

For me, I've cooled somewhat on the expansion. First I was excited, but when robots and synths were discussed in this thread, it slowly dawned on me that that part of the expansion may be too half-baked for my taste. Which is bad because I don't care for all that other crap. It's certainly nice and gives my guys a lot of colorful enemies to destroy, but I don't want to play as Psionics or bio-monsters.

So for now I've decided to wait until we get more diverse mechanoids than our lame humanoid robots, or until a Steam sale makes the expansion cost less than 10 bucks.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2017 19:25

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

PoptartsNinja posted:

Surface temperature would hit -100* F within a year if the sun were suddenly turned off, so not very long at all.

If I remember this right, I've read it takes about 48 hours after the sun is gone before Earth gets a shiny new coat of ice to replace all that boring vegetation we have. Even if we bugger off underground with lots of electric heaters and batteries, the few survivors would then probably starve to death before the year is over.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2017 00:18

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Torrannor posted:

The drastically redesigned faction system alone would be reason enough to buy this as a DLC. Then there's the ethics reword, the unity mechanic, the other ascension perks, mega structures, the ability to influence the ethics of primitive species, and the possibility to terraform some currently unusable planets. And the fact that I no longer need to purge all my pops in order to create a robot utopia is pretty sweet as well.

I understand being less excited about Utopia if you expected more from the Ascension paths, but the rest is still pretty amazing.

Yeah, that's why I said it's nice in my post. :v:

Anyway, it's still not fun for me if my favourite thing is missing, so I decided to wait. It's not like I'll never buy the expansion, if more diverse robot portraits are added at one point, I'll go buy it.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2017 11:04

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

ulmont posted:

Some notes from Wiz. Delay for new droid portraits and you still have to build new synths.

Ah well, time and money saved for me, I guess.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2017 16:46

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# ¿ May 13, 2024 20:00

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

GunnerJ posted:

Beats living on a planet full of spiders tho.

Eh, like with centipedes, some look cute.

That said, for some reason I get really creeped out by spider-faces. It's something about the eyes, I guess. :shrug:

# ¿ Mar 11, 2017 14:34

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