Meet the Yor, though the sociopathic murderbots don’t much care to meet with meat.
Our sentient race of homicidal machines are sitting pretty in the Galactic Civilizations III timeframe. The clever Drengin plot to hold back during the Dread Lord war and crush their enemies’ exhausted militaries afterward appealed to the Yor’s calculated self-interest. The robotic Yor fleets joined the Drengin in smashing the Terran and Arcean empires and their allies, and now hold joint military supremacy over the galaxy.
As lead designer Paul Boyer describes the Yor:
The Yor don’t get enough credit for their menace. They are perhaps the greatest known threat to the galaxy. Other races tend to think of the Drengin when they think of evil, but the Yor can make them look like look downright friendly. The Yor are often mischaracterized as reasonable because they have such a long-term outlook. They will work with other races, and almost seem like friends, because the Yor know they will simply outlast them. And when their “friends” are no longer useful, they have no qualms with wiping them out utterly.
Their aggressive, psychopathic nature is reflected in their starships. The triangular theme denotes the sheer menace of the builders, leaving one with the feeling that just bumping into a Yor ship could easily leave one with no skin. As a race that is constantly upgrading and refining not only their ships but themselves, the Yor design in a very modular fashion. This lets them quickly upgrade them if needed, or scrap them and use the separate components elsewhere.
Yor ships are also somewhat unique in the galaxy as they have very few crew. Often, a lone pilot is the only Yor aboard and serves as a brain for the huge and deadly vessel.
(click the image for a high-res downloadable version)
Yor ships, as you can see, reflect their primary motivation: the cleansing of unclean meatsacks. The Yor hold organic life in the greatest contempt, and the efficient removal of it from the galaxy is their highest calling. As one of our talented artists, Akil Dawkins, puts it:
The Yor are a race of aggressive sociopathic machines. So we went with a triangular theme for these ships as opposed to the square or circular theme, because triangular shapes connote aggression. Because the Yor are constantly upgrading themselves, we wanted to show some of their tech in between the large triangular shapes.
The circular lights at the front of the ships are reminiscent of the three-eye design of their leaders and drones. The centered eye was inspired by HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was also an unfeeling sentient machine. The violet color scheme is similar to the Yor color scheme from Galactic Civilizations II, but de-saturated to reflect their cold and calculating nature.
The completed ships you see blocked out in this image are just two of the limitless possibilities our ship designer enables. The candy-colored images on the bottom let you see all the individual parts that make up that sleek battlecruiser. Players have full control over their ship designs in Galactic Civilizations III, so you can snap these pieces together however you like – but the designer helps you out with easy tools to do things like automate symmetry.
Our goal is to keep a unified design aesthetic for each race so that Yor ships still look like Yor ships even after players get a hold of the ship designer. We’re pretty happy with how the Yor fleet is turning out – but as always, please tell us what you think in the comments.
Sitting here waiting to comment that the Yor are starting to remind me of HK-47... and look at Madao4life's avatar...
Also, for anyone confused with the idea of ship styles:
Each race had different ship models, but every core hull design (what you start with when designing ships) and the faction components came from only 5 sets of different ship design components. The Terrans and Arceans used the same hulls and the same components, but they had different ship templates for their various stock ship classes.
In GalCiv III they are going to each have their own ship style, meaning a different set of decorative ship components and ship hulls would exist for each faction. Technically, if you didn't stick to a particular style when designing ships, you will not notice this change specifically but rather as an increased number of components and extra stock ship templates.
I did't like the Yor ship designs in Twilight. I also don't like purple colors.
Probably there should be colour-customizing. At least for single player.
Also lets change the shape of the ship. In Galactic civilizations 2 Dread lords or Dark avatar there were like to original Silons in Battle star galactica. I wouldn't mind seeing designs like the new silons, but change the shape of their current ships in Twilight of the arnor.
Thanks Mormegil. I can't wait either. But, I guess patience is indeed a sterling virtual. Wish I had more of it.
MAybe we will be able to change design ourselves. I hope Stardock won't start selling us sexy combat lingerie new races' designes DLCs like some other companies do.
Unless for reasonable price.
I love purple.
I agree that it would be nice to be able to pick our own colors for ships, or even for ship modules. Wysiwyg editors allow you to pick font, highlight, and background colors from a pallet that permits a gross number of colors. (0-255 blue, 0-255 red, and 0-255 green.) It may be too late in the development cycle to do this for the base release, but perhaps it could be done for the first DLC?
I like the purple with the Yor hulls,though it's hard to imagine these hulls as bright purple.Maybe a purple/grey color would work.
New Mass Effect 3 endings - yellow, orange, and purple!
We could already do that in GalCiv 2 (along with the ability to customise the colour of our race and the interface). I see no reason why this ability shouldn't be in GalCiv 3.
You are right. I hadn't noticed the color pallet being available in Twilight. Perhaps I was remembering an earlier release that didn't have it, and since it hadn't had it earlier I just failed to notice the change.
However, the colors are only for the overall scheme of ships, and can not be tailored for specific modules or differently for specific ships. And there is the idea of "smart paint" like in David Weber's Honor Harrington series, where a ship's paint could be programmed to another color electronically any time they want and any portion of the ship's external surface they want. As to whether any Navy would take advantage of such a thing, even David Weber seems to think the idea is of little use, but there you go. They have it anyway, and I think it could add to the fun of a game for some people.
I sincerely wish that the physical layout of the ship and relative positioning of parts actually affected performance. Oddball ships that wouldn't be at all combat-worthy have always bugged me. EVE is perhaps more guilty of it than almost any other space game in history, though.
C'est la vie.
The only thing I'd suggest is to essentially incorporate the GCIII equivalent of Kryo's Hull System Mod as an integral part of the ship designer in game. That combined with a wider variety of more basic "generic" part shapes, would help cut down on part count, while still opening up endless ship configurations.
Also...asymmetric.
-First, no matter what, the CoM and the Point of Thrust MUST be in line with one another by default if the ship is to be controllable. You actually seem to somewhat realize this, so I'm not sure why you got hung up on the idea that I'm talking about aerodynamics.
Second, the farther the mass is spread out symmetrically from the PoT, the stronger the structure has to be to pull it all along when the mass in front of the engines wants to move and everything else wants to stay where it is.
Third, the more "structural integrity fields", extra engines, extra AG for the crew inside, and extra mass needed to keep the ship functional, the more vulnerable it is. This is because it needs more power, and more fuel, and has a bunch of systems to waste power and volume on that it doesn't need at all.
Any ship that adheres to those design constraints will ALWAYS...ALWAYS outperform those that try to get clever with them. Ships that use more efficient designs will need less power, and so carry less fuel, and be more stable as they'll need fewer systems to maintain control of the ship.
Efficiency of design is absolutely and universally superior to aesthetics. But...frequently, such a design "looks good" to us in the end anyway
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All this works fine in the game, but that annoys me because clearly too many people are having issues with separating the mechanics of the game from the way things would actually work. I'm half expecting the future of human spaceflight to result in unimaginable disasters as we start to build commercial interplanetary ships. But all this is why I prefer games like Kerbal Space Program.
Nevertheless, what I actually meant by having informed ship design that affects performance, is adjacency bonuses for parts. Put them together in the right order, get some big bonuses. Having multiple potential bonuses would mean it's necessary to choose what you want your ship to do and design it to get those bonuses. You could never "eat your cake and have it too". Additionally, a better reinforced "Rock Paper Scissors" relationship between the different weapon/defense would mean ships arranged to take advantage of certain bonuses would be vulnerable to certain other kinds, which would in turn be vulnerable to the first kinds. So it would not be possible to build a single kind of ship to dominate the universe, as it has been in GCII.
That, and no more "jewelry" of course. From that point forward, every component would have an impact. There's no such thing as "free" in design. The only exceptions would be the "invisible" hard points like in Kryo's mod. Though even using them would give greater flexibility, at the expense of adjacency bonuses, for instance.
I'd prefer also to see a "power" metric and "manpower" metric added to the requirements of ship design and the selection of parts, but that may be asking too much of the community, since they seem to be intent on waiting to be shocked by how bad they are at...everything. Also better handling of life-support and range...it's currently abstracted to the point of ridiculousness. Abstraction is necessary, I get that...but it's just nonsensical at this point.Oh well, again, c'est la vie.
What?Would it be possible to turn the shields onto a false lift body,i.e. create a wing from the shielding of the starship.And I know that everything has to be centered,I'm just saying that for only space faring craft it's not as important.I will say you may need to work on your attitude,referring to this\/.
Suffice to say that my point is, that a ship that needs all those "black box" types of features to actually function, will ALWAYS be outperformed by any ship that doesn't require them to do the same tasks.I'd just like to see a game that rewards good design, for a change.
Are you referring to the idea of rewarding good item/unit design in games, or to the fact that I've chosen not to derail the topic?
While I think this could be fun, I hope you realize that any such contest would have to be very arbitrary and could be quite contentious. Rules would have to be established, with many differing opinions as to the validity of this rule or that one. Maybe there would have to be several categories within which you could compete, such as the most aesthetic, the most colorful, the most powerful, the fastest, etc. again with many differing opinions about the validity of this category or that one. One category that would be out of the question would be "the most realistic", because I don't believe we could agree on what would constitute realism.
Some people may not wish to compete, so there would have to be a mechanic for opting in or out.
And much more.
And the end results could result in a lot of contention about the contest's fairness.
Such a contest can only occur in one of two ways, a simulation, or reality. If in a simulation, then it's the realistic detail of the simulation that matters most, which these days (in the aerospace industry) is close enough to reality that the discrepancies are less than negligible.
As such, aesthetics and related categories would be completely irrelevant unless we're talking about civilian craft, which I couldn't care less about.
I'm not sure how you could possibly contest the validity of a ship's total power potential, total firepower, maximum velocity, maneuverability, etc. These are core traits of any craft, and easily accurately measured. The only category whose validity could be called into question at all would be the craft's "overall" performance. And that too is relatively easily and accurately determined as combined derivative of all other categories.
If you were speaking in terms of designing these craft in GalCivIII...then the point is entirely moot since there is simply no way at all to conduct the contest in the game, period. Any number of rules could be devised, but there is no reliable or accurate way to measure any of it in terms of how the ship's configuration affects it, because part location on ships affects nothing about the ship in GC. So, if you were suggesting such a contest be held under those conditions, you've completely missed the point. If that's not the case, then what WAS your point?
What about a contest where the designs were sent to some judging location, such as StarDock, where the designs were judged and awards of some kind were dispensed?
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