I would like to see one or two non-humanoid alien species added to GalCiv3, why I appreciate that the lore gives an explanation of why most species are humanoid is it impossible for any non-humanoid to be sentient in the GalCiv universe.
I don’t count Thalan’s as non-humanoid by the way as just doing a humanoid with funny backwards looking arms doesn’t really count in my opinion. I seem to remember them being less humanoid in GC2 or am I wrong?
However how about adding a few more exotic species?
What about a Mollusc like life form that evolved on a low G world? As one example after all we know Mollusc’s can be highly intelligent as Cephalopods show. This is just one example.
Why four limbs? Why Bilateral Symmetry? There are so many possibilities that could be explored.
Sadly I think Stardock have always preferred the man in the rubber suit style of aliens, the one thing I didn’t like about GC2.
Regardless of what Stardock decide I intend to start work on a non-humanoid species mod for GC3 as it’s something I have lots of ideas for and I really think would be refreshing.
Wish me luck at the dentist fellow empathetic humanoids. It usually makes me anxious and a bit of a arrogant jerk, but reading the forums is something that is calming.
reading econundrums quadruple post was nice and seeing the interesting animal concept pictures PR posted was interesting.
DARCA
Oh I know that but I love to see examples of DARCA's non-logic, and I love to pick apart his statements. When I get bored with it I'll move on too I don't expect to convince him; I've never seen an example of DARCA changing his mind no regardless of any logical arguments arrayed against him.
deleted as I mangled the quotes.
One other thing wouldn't a 360 degree field of view be better than being able to look over your shoulder, so why not have 6 eyes with overlaping fields of view?
Just thinking about some of the points from DARCA's earlier reply.
All this says Alien Mod is already in the works.
I've never seen anyone so far stuck in antropocentrism.
Also I'm pretty sure Darca is russian.
This shit is real only in our extremely limited knowledge. Non-human life can function perfectly well, we just are stuck with what we are familiar with.
If you honestly have spent years thinking this over and failing, then I am not impressed with your thinking.
Only idiots assume that this planet is all there could be.
Human without it's higher brain functions is just smart food.
Grant octopus same amount of sapience as human has and it will develop means to become more than prey. That our octopus have not made that evolutionary step does not mean same is true elsewhere.
Same way we could have gigantic creatures resembling externally our spiders who could very well be capable of sentience and would not be in any way humanoid.
I shall not tell what kind of brain you have since you cannot come up with any alternative to humanoid shape as functional one, considering our humanoid body is horribly inefficient in most ways unless we back up it's shortcomings with our brain.
Implant that intellect to other creatures with sufficient capabilities of manipulation and you have similar success.
If the majority of HUMANS that will play this GAME want non-humanoid life then it would already be in the series.
Just make a Mod.
You're not correct. The law of supply and demand works both way.
When a company wants to produce something, they face the dilemma of supplying something that is perceived to be in demand (personal computers and smart phones for exemple, or to use your example, a humanoid race of aliens) or of generating a demand by supplying something that is perceived to be original and awesome(ex: google glasses, iphones before iphones were popular, or, to stay on topic, a civilization that is both credible and original, which already abund already in scifi literature *and* in nature on Earth).
There is no excuse for Stardock not to impress us with new and original content.
You could begin to concede at least some of the points we've made?
I love everyone and everything.
love is what makes fate mate great.
DARCA.
Speaking of Darca and humanoid races: Cylons. The 1980 BG Cylons look like metallic men wearing black dresses.
That much was obvious from the first few posts.
lol I'm being trolled, but why the hell not?
It relates directly into your arguments. Accusing someone of creating a strawman argument when they have not is in fact the actual strawman fallacy.
So in other words, they don't share the same body plan? That's non-humanoid.
Tell me DARCA, what do you think "Humanoid" means?
Last I checked, slugs are non-humanoid.
The Muppets are awesome! stfu! :3
No they aren't, in fact they have several attributes (like a slow population growth) that directly go against the evolutionary strategy of Ants.
There have been many non-humanoid forms in much of the best-selling fiction ever made.
And? Do you think only Humanoids can have both? We have examples of animals on Earth that have both for Christ's sake!
Deluded, Tergon isn't a fluid solution.
Amalgamation. And again;
Please show me analogs with Earth life. I'll wait.
Science fiction often mirrors reality in uncanny ways
Watch
So you agree with his hypothetical?
Then why do you disagree that non-humanoid aliens can be intelligent.
No you don't, and simply stating it doesn't make it fact.
That's by necessity; alien life is completely outside our experience, so it's not like we're able to use any example from the real world to base our conjecture on. We can, however, extrapolate probable courses of evolution by looking of examples of convergent evolution on Earth, which shows the solution in question is preferred by natural selection and not a fluke.
In that vein; eyes, limbs, skeletons, fins, aerodynamic bodies and their ilk are likely to be found on other planets.
Competition. And Humans actually evolve very slowly relative to many faster-breeding living things, in fact we are faster at the process than only a minuscule portion of all animals. The only relevant sense in which we are 'evolving' is in terms of technology, and it remains to be seen if technology will destroy us.
Earth isn't the property of anyone, it belongs to nature, we are not 'heirs' in any sense.
No we're not, the Human body plan is one of the most inefficient ones in nature. The only things we're good at are; talking, thinking, walking and grabbing. Other animals have us beat in the latter two categories by miles.
A third of all childbirths prior to industrialization resulting in the death of either the mother or baby? Joints prone to arthritis? Weak and minuscule muscle mass? Superfluous internal organs?
Many animals otherwise untouched due to their place in the food chain are often mobbed by many members of 'weaker' species. Lions and hyenas regularly get trampled or gored by their prey, whales and sharks get swarmed by various animals which disable them by butting their stomaches.
There's no complacency involved.
There have been many 'birds' of prey vastly superior to the Hawk.
Go fight a Hawk DARCA. You won't win.
Like Humans?
Hawks and other birds/analogs like them are widespread on nearly every continent. That doesn't happen through lack of flexibility.
If the infrastructure of Human civilization was destroyed (done effortlessly through gamma ray bursts, severe solar activity, a radical climate shift, or meteor impact), more than 7 billion people would be doomed, and the survivors would revert back into savages easily smashed by any number of disasters.
When you look around, society seems pretty stable and immutable right? Wrong. It's balanced on a knife-edge, and all it takes is a small push for things to fall apart.
Insects and other invertebrates often have hundreds or thousands of eyes, and their brains are literally a million times smaller than ours. My desktop computer, which is about as powerful as 1/100th of my brain, could handle input from 8 cameras pretty effortlessly while running many other processes.
This guy has no eyes, seriously entirely blind to visible light. And he's been evaluated by biologists to be completely viable in the ecosystem he's part of.
Almost every multicellular animal that has ever existed, barring some in the early Cambrian Explosion, have had extensive systems of detection used to sense the environment. It's a non-issue.
Don't see how that's relevant.
Then you're painfully wrong.
He wasn't agreeing with you, he was addressing the in-game issue.
DARCA, you never write clearly, and you never address any points without diverting to another subject.
Ny your criteria, if you insert high intelligence into the following they should be dandy;
lol, wrekt.
No you're not DARCA
You know, in Startrek, they admited that the only reason they made boring humanoid aliens was budget constrain and nothing else.They knew even back then that the diversity of worlds out there was likely to generate species widely different from ours.
Here's a short story by canadian author Peter Watt, called Blindsight. The aliens depicted in it are the most "alien" I know of in scifi litterature, and you might enjoy reading it.
The story is freely available on his website.
Your problem Darca is that you're not aware of how the domination of Earth by a species like humans is the product of pure dumb luck and that there was nothing predetermined about it. My point with the ants is that non-sentient species are capable of technology.
Also, I dont think I'm the only one who is made a bit uneasy by your logic, which could also be used to support creationism, social darwinism and other pseudo-scientific bollock. I mean, come on:
5. Would,a shoulda, coulda, they aren't smart because they aren't fated to be. Europeans enslaves Africans, Africans dont enslave us. They could be tent times more numerous than us, and they would still be slaves. You need technology to bahblahblah
Yikes.
DARCA...
Let's put an end to this thread shall we by settling on the fact that we simply do not know.
We have zero empirical evidence about what other Alien civilizations are like. We do not even have any evidence that there are any at all.
Even if what you say was true, you cannot prove it. Evolutionary biologists do not all agree on this because it is theory, no observation can be made to verify those theories.
Even though your theory might make sense if you look at it through the logic of convergent evolution, that still does not prove anything in the absence of actual evidences. And even if it turns out that most technologically advanced aliens are humanoid. Suppose we meet 10 of them and they are all humanoid, that still does not prove it is the only type in the universe. There are millions of billions of billions of stars in the observable universe.
Delete
What I say and what is fact are different. There is a Sovereign truth to all this. I can only say what I believe, and I did listen to everything said...i just don't agree with most of it.
Fate is real and it encumbers everything everywhere all the time iggore. Everything from winning the lottery to the electrons in your genes is of its power. May the light bless your eyes to see this.
I know I told you this a few seconds ago in chat, but that's pretty crazy DARCA
DARCA,
I'm well aware of how our brains process visual information there is quiet a lot of research available on this and we dedicate a larger area of our brain to this than non-primate mammals who dedicate more of their brain to smell. However what you fail to see is an alien brain could infact be larger than ours and dedicate more of it's area to visual processing having an arbitary number of eyes.
We have one example of the evolutionary process here on earth since all life is related here, we do not know that evolution would produce the same series of forms if run some where else under slightly varying conditions. I've yet to see any scientist suggest that only a humanoid life form can be sentient or develop technology.
It is extremely unlikley that we would find life exactly conforming to the same Kingdoms, Phylla other sub-categorisation used to describe species in our ecosystem in an alien one yet alone organisms conforming to the exact same body plan.
You also seem unsure what Humanoid means to you, can you give me your definition?
"There is a Sovereign truth to all this". Saying this does not make it so, and I've yet to see you marshal a coherent argument around this sovereign truth you proclaim to have discovered.Your logical argument goes; Humans are humanoids, humans have technology therefore only Humanoids can have technology. Hands can grasp and manipulate things therefore only hands can be used to manipulate things. These arguments are logical fallacies, it's like you've lived in a house all your life alone with a dog and noted dogs have 4 legs so everything with 4 legs must be a dog.
By the way Octopus and Squid generally don't use their tentacles to swim, they use them for many other things including grasping and manipulating objects, disguise, as decoys and reproduction as well as for walking on the ocean bottom.
Are you five years old in the brain? Do you lack reading comprehension? Because real octopus are. Lol
The Sovereign truth refers what we don't know. You might say magic is real, I say it isn't but we both know there is a answer. Why did I use the word Sovereign? Because it just sounded cooler in the sentence and I liked it, that's what I've discovered.
I made three points before and will say them:
1 . Its difficult to make unique non-humanoids that don't resemble existing species AND can go to space. If it was as simple as dreaming them up like the pictures PR supplied then it would be a common practice. So to say it bluntly, its hard to do.
2. Seilore said to me "gas people" could exist. That is a whole new shit field I won't go deep into, but I'm not one say that they couldn't exist. I've even entertained a similar concept myself but its more complex than basing them of one star trek episode, saying they use telekinesis to build, and are entities Seilore. It takes alot of thought to make a serious species that is likable AND sellable$ Alot more than a one episode passing thought of a writer.
So to simply be non-humanoid is very easy. To make a functional body is hard, making them likable is too.
So as I said countless times before, a problem I have is not that non-humanoids are bad, but having knockoff copies of earth is. Its not a cardinal sin to mix species but I wish there was more creativity as a whole for si-fi so forums like this don't have to ask the devs about non-humanoids. Sad.
3. The primary reason. You can be a smart thousand eyed being, a gas person, a octopus, a dolphin, a elephant, a raccoon, a bird, a scorpion, a spider, a primate, a ant, a... whatever PR showed, a blob, but you still need a capacity for intelligence and a "sizeable hand like thing" to influence weighed objects. Look at primates they lack enough intellect despite their bodies, it takes both.
When you look at thalan they are similar to ant people. Its marketing. The same goes for other species of earth and non.
Everyone that said if raccoons, dolphins, octopus, elephants, dogs, scorpions, spiders, birds, can be intelligent enough to build if they were smart enough, is absolutely right. They WOULD be but they aren't because they don't have BOTH hands and intellect. I have seen many renditions of all of theses species and they all get humanized to some extent because of this.
So:
1. Making original non-humanoid species is very hard as well as selling one as a major race.
2. Having a humanoid version of existing species is common but very native. So having fish people is likeable/sellable but nothing new.
3. Making a functional non-humanoid body that doesn't have the perquisites of humanoids is zero to none, thus bringing up one and two again.
I am not anthroprejudice, just bitter towards the industry I work in.
this forum is broken, the stuff is gone.
at least I know more about the creative process and the logic of it a bit.
apart from this, I feel like what's out there today is vastly just humans with alien side kicks or as bad guys. I like what galciv has though, I want to play as ape and fish people even if it is the norm! Lol. but I just got galciv2 and other games. so I will wait for release to play as the iridium.
oh, its also hard to find nonhumaniod superheros.
Fate is what fools slap on simple matter of coincidence and come up with concept that there is some actual meaning.
Your response has apparently been lost but I got the gist of it from reply of others. Now, how about you try to for once use that brain nature gave you and THINK.
Octopus are not intelligent because coincidence did not make them smart. It could have just as well gone other way.
Mammals own the food chain only because freak accident with meteorite blasted the existing top species out of the equation. There was no fate, just freak accident which could have been repeated 20 millenia ago and left humans dead.
Or perhaps out ancestors just had died out.
Difficult but not impossible, and your claim is that it is impossible for any species to be successful if they are not humanoid. Essentially your rather idiotic idea is that non-humanoid = not able to be spacefaring. That is idiocy of greatest degree.
Only things necessary for species to be able to somehow become spacefaring are intellect and SOME kind of manipulative appendages. They do NOT need to be hands as alternatives can exist.
Look at variety of animals and you see incredible dexterity in the way they use their appendages. All they lack is smarts, insert smarts and suddenly you have species that can progress until it can reach the stars.
Elephants come close to both, they are very good at using something that is actually hugely distended upper lip and nose to very difficult things.
Their tools will not be what we would use, but they would develop tools either way.
How are they "humanized"? By adding intellect? Well whoop de f***** do. They are given brains because else it would not be intelligent alien life would it?
And as you admit yourself, once you add brains to the manipulative abilities you have alien species capable of being technologically advanced.
Which is in complete contrast to your position where you claimed that only humanoids can achieve that.
I've had an idea for a "semi-humanoid" alien.By this I mean it looks some what humanoid and at the same time not very humanoid.
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