A point of contention in the space 4X genre
Posted May 22, 2022, 4:34 PM UTC
2028
Fur is biologically more expensive than naked skin when the species might clothe itself. It could make sense for a technological species to have evolved in a way such that it ends up devoting relatively more brain space to processing some sensory inputs. Like if it's really important to hear better for whatever reason it'd make sense that species have big ears. Maybe for example given the conditions on their home world sound travels slower. Then it wouldn't be as important to have good hearing if it'd be more advantageous to have better eyesight. But for the same reason it doesn't make much sense for a species to have fur once it discovers clothing it'd wouldn't make much sense for a species to keep devoting biological resources to maintaining great hearing once it's cheaper to augment hearing with technology.
With how important mass affects the cost of space travel it'd make sense that any very advanced space faring race would've evolved into brains in vats or microchips or something. What's the point of hauling around arms and legs when you've spiffy drones to do everything for you?
Animal races make for better games though. Realism is not the point.
6
I mean, even if you go away from the evolutionary points you just stated, it makes sense. So if you look at the topic without data, you can possibly think : Oh it's the alien ants. They are really diligent workers and have lots and lots of people. Or, oh it's a bear tribe. They must be very strong and powerful. It's like a fable. Where you take the abilities and properties that are projected on certain animals from common sense. Even without scientific datasets it would make sense to use animal like aliens. What do you think?
3
: Oh it's the alien ants. They are really diligent workers and have lots and lots of people. Or, oh it's a bear tribe. They must be very strong and powerful.
This is the game mechanical advantage of using animal-like aliens. We can easily project personalities on them that make "sense" and make the universe feel more sensible. Of course the cat aliens and the bird aliens hate each other. It wouldn't make sense any other way.
3
Indeed. It is as simple and as genius just as that!
3
Yep. This is one of those "genius" things about MOO1 that no one realized was genius until people later tried doing things in a different way.
There was a lot of lightning caught in a bottle with MOO1, imo.
3
Human is also an animal..? I don't really get the point o_O
3
There is a certain segment of the space 4X community that dislikes the "animal race" trope in the MOO series. Cat people, Bear people, etc.
3
Ah okay. Thank you very much for explaining this. Well, if you care for my personal opinion: I must say I find aliens like cat people or aquatic races, etc pretty reasonable. For example it made sense to me how they connected the Mrrshan in Master of Orion 2016 to the ancient Egypt architecture, since they had Bastet as their God for home and house, which was - a cat. The aquatic, kraken like races also make sense because if you know more about let's say the octopus, you're aware that they're actually really smart animals, which means they could share a lot of DNA from an alien visitor who planted them in the ocean. (like if a human cosmonaut would bring apes to another planet). I don't know how the races would look else - that means they're all human like? Sounds boring and lazy. As long as it doesn't get that oversexualized furry look, animal aliens are very reasonable to me.
3
I haven't played nearly enough ROTP to know all the adversaries, but from what I remember of MoO, the aliens were a little lackluster. In my mind even if the aliens come from planets similar to Earth (the only lifebearing planet we know of), they should still be completely alien and not understandable until a certain level of research after encountering them. In MoO all of the aliens were humanoid and operated on understandable strategies. It just takes a little imagination to come up with other options:
- A race of centipede-like amphibians that are only intelligent in the larval phase. Once colonizing a planet they metamorphose and greatly increase a planet's strength. It takes a certain number of turns before a planet can produce anything because only the next generation can do it.
- A race that colonizes planets in a somewhat linear fashion, as if they're headed somewhere. They either terraform the planets to their highest level, or destroy the ecosystem. The rearmost planets are abandoned as their colony ships move through the galaxy. Have extremely powerful ships to make up for the lack of planets.
- Gas-bags that live in cities in the sky (planets must have a stable atmosphere). Have a bonus in ship combat because of innate 3 dimensional awareness. Planets are weak because their cities are in the sky.
etc.
3
More realistic than what?
3
Yeah I know. If you don't want to fight ant people and bear people, you can possibly just play Europa Universalis and fight the Chinese and Russian people. :D
2
Ulm!
In Crusader Kings you can fight the horse people.
3
What is interesting is looking at earth's species and identifying species that have separately acquired the same adaptations.
Flight (birds, bats, dinosaurs)
Tool use (crows, octopi, us, chimps)
Eyes/Vision (I don't know specifically, but I've been told multiple species have different imaging organs independently evolved)
So there are forms and adaptations that are common strategies in the Earth biosphere, and depending on the conditions of other planets, probably would exist there too. There are also fundamental computational models in mathematics, physical laws, and universal laws of chemistry that other species would evolve in.
But there is amazing variety in Earth species.
The main failing of alien races in MOO is that they are all terran-preferred except the silicoids, which are kinda bolt-on and don't have a preferred ecology (probably should be radiated IMO).
Birds/Alks should prefer mountainous (steppe?) or forested (jungle?), and hate oceans
Humans are terran obviously, but pretty flexible.
Lizards/Ssla are probably jungle give their love of nature
Cats/Mrrsh are probably jungle or steppe
Meks would probably prefer less or no atmosphere, so dead, barren, and minimal
Klacks would like arid or steppe
Bears... tundra? or terran like humans? Bears are pretty hardy, so their ability to adapt in many environs could be an advantage
Nazins... like darkness? Jungles? Are they even corporeal? Or maybe the desolation of deserts?
Silicoids would like rocky or radiated and no atmosphere.
Mentars... well, they are frail, so terran but less tolerance of other environs.
Worlds should terraform to different sizes relative to the species that prefers them IMO.
1
I think Star Control 2 had a good mix of relatable and completely incomprehensible alien types.
Still, outside of a Deus-Ex-Machina device of some sort, how are you going to communicate and perform diplomacy with with a race that is, say, made of pure plasma?
Having somewhat relatable alien races may be seen as some as a convenient cop out to ease development, but on the flipside, it is difficult to feel any sort of attachment or bias (positive or otherwise) to something we cannot conceive.
If one were creating a 4X race, a heavily hostile planet like Venus could just as easily be inhabited by energy beings that don't at all mind the crushing pressures, life extinguishing temperatures or the constant acid rain, or they could make up some sort of Godzilla thing that actually needed that acidity to survive.
Could go either way really, and that's the cool thing about it
1
Until we have more data, we won't know what's realistic. So we need to start building these spaceships with FTL drives and exploring the galaxy ASAP.
We do have data, though. For example, there are airless planets (hot & cold) -- no life. Hot planet with thick atmosphere -- no life. Cold planet with thin atmosphere -- no life. Gas Giants -- no life. Extremely cold moon with atmosphere and liquid methane seas -- no life.
Temperate planet with atmosphere and surface water -- lots and lots of life.
(by "life", I mean detectable life. There could very well be microorganisms on some of these planets, which would be very scientifically interesting.)
Now, on Earth, we have lots of different biomes with different selective pressures. These pressures are created by predictable atmospheric and geologic phenomena that are caused by chemical and physical laws that are consistent across the universe. And we see an incredible variety of morphologies that are adapted to these pressures. We even see convergent evolution from different biological types that respond similarly to the same pressures (e.g. sharks - icthyosaurs - dolphins).
So while internal biochemistries may differ (i.e. Mrrshan fruit may all be toxic to humans because Mrrshan life evolved from different protein combinations), it is reasonable to expect very similar morphologies (cats, bears, fish, etc) on alien Earth-like planets that we currently see on Earth or its fossil record.
That is the reasonable default expectation, imo.
Ok, so your assumption is that tool use requires convergent evolution, so any sentient tool user will likely be bipedal with two arms.
That seems logical, however that hypothesis still needs more data to be confirmed.
On earth, we have decent levels of intelligence and tool use in corvids and dolphins. Now we have no idea if their failure to build a civilization is due to environmental issues/lack of evolutionary pressure, or due to unsuitable morphology. As I said, not enough data...
To add to the corvids and dolphins:
Elephants can use tools with their trunk.
Squids can use tools with their tentacles.
All of those 4 types of real existing animals look a lot more different from one another than the humanoid depictions in rotp.
I wonder how mankind would act if we found aliens which are slightly less intelligent than ourselves.
If our treatment of other species on our own planet is indicative for that, then that's really bad news for the poor aliens.
Hey, look at how Russians treat Ukrainians. And they are very similar nations with very similar language, like Germany and Austria or Germany and Switzerland maybe. Humans can be extremely nasty.
We're not getting to the stars with that attitude, so whatever less powerful aliens exist out there would be fine
Simple tool use isn't enough. Lots of animals can pick things up and move them around. Whatever limbs you are using to manipulate tools need to be complex enough to perform a wide variety of unrelated tasks. This encourages brain development by vastly increasing the solution space for problems.
Many animals are intelligent because they are social creatures (they develop language) and simple tool use becomes a logical followup to that (they're already smart, so picking up a stick to poke an ant bed isn't a huge leap) but there's still a hard limit to the kinds of problems they can physically solve.
Other animals are intelligent not because they are social, but because they have complex tool manipulators (i.e octopi) that allows them to solve difficult problems that enhance their survivability.
Humans are fortunate to have both. They are both social creatures and have complex tool manipulators.
We have "a lot" of data about the biodiversity of the current state of the Earth, and a small fraction of the past from the few fossils we could get, but that's just a extremely tiny little thin particle of the biodiversity that has existed in Earth during its history. There have been at least (that we know) five great mass extinctions that have changed the face of life on Earth (eradicating 70% to 85% of species each time) with most of those species remaining unknown, and we don't know how many more will happen in the future, or if any of the species we know (including humans) will even be here to tell the tale in their current form.
In a cosmological scale, we just have a faint idea of how diverse life can be. When you put things on scale, we just know an infinitesimally small fraction of the planets that exist. And even if we did as you suggest and take that data as sufficient for making extrapolations, then it follows that any intelligent animal-like race would be as different from their animal ancestors as we humans are from our monkey-like ancestors. We are not just standing monkeys that can talk. I imagine that an evolved intelligent bear extrapolated in that way would be a lot more hairless and humanlike to the point that it would be easily distinguishable from what we know as a bear just by looking at its face, which would make it seem a lot more "alien" to anyone who didn't know better.
Not saying that I'm against anthropomorphic animal-like alien races. It's just that I don't think they are very "scientifically realistic", even if they might be cool, convenient or easier for us to visualize in some sense. Personally I also think the alien races that come out from symbiotic relationships are fascinating, and we even have many examples of that on Earth too. Or when there's a history of biological relationships between different alien species that has shaped them in curious ways as they evolved together (in a H.G. Wells "Time Machine" kind of way). I think Star Trek for example has a lot of interesting races too, with personalities and relationships, and they are, generally, a lot more human-like.
It's not impossible that, for example, an aquatic creature that isn't at all anthropomorphic (or even vertebrate) could in some way develop a high level of intelligence comparable to humans without any reliance on opposable thumbs or upright posture (I think Star Trek has done intelligent whales too). We just don't have enough data on the likelihood of it, but if it did, then there's no reason to expect it would be "anthropomorphic" in any way.
No one questions the possibility of intelligence for aquatic creatures, but the real question is whether it could be a technological civilization. I've never seen anything close to a compelling argument that this is possible.
Yes, I agree, my point was that we don't have enough data to give a conclusive answer, but it's probably much harder to develop underwater since the conditions there impose more limits.
[removed]
We have a ton of weird animals here on earth but also humanoid ones so that covers everything. It's all realistic.