Oolite Bulletins

PhantorGorth wrote:

Ok, what you are saying sort of makes sense, but if we have the three way war we need:

a) Who are the protagonists? We have Thargoids but the other two. I have suggested two races with Gal 4 and GalCop in the middle but that may not be best.

Originally I was going ideologies commies Vs democracy. Seems to work quite well in the real world. Also they are the slightly more likely of all the political systems to band together in groups if threatened.

PhantorGorth wrote:

b) How come these two/three protagonists' war leads to the removal of half the government types? Anarchies proliferate due to chaos of war. Multi Govs. also could arise due to civil war or because coherent single government hasn't had time to arise out of anarchy yet. I see no reason for feudal to never occur or be removed unless they take too long to form. Democracy and communism could be as suggested ideological memes that spreads from world to world. Confederacies and Corporate States are quite sophisticated so would take too long to form. Dictatorships do seem easy to form so I can't see reason for none of them.

Trying to ascribe reason to a randomly generate fibernachi sequence is (as we are discovering,) fraught with difficulty. Lets be honest my solution is like a ill fitting jigsaw piece, crude and ungainly. But then so is any explanation, your method doesn't explain the lack of confederacies which a race war would be most likely to produce. This map doesn't make sense (but I hear it made a hell of a lot more sense than some other randomly generated garbage that the generator spat out in the early 80's)

So here we are hammering square pegs into round holes.

PhantorGorth wrote:

c) The Rift idea needs explaining. If rifts are Thargoid tech then why do we not see them in other galaxies.

Rifts? No rifts just a opportunistic invasion force.

PhantorGorth wrote:

I suggest the Lizard and Feline Empires have been at war that spills over into the GalCop Gal 4 sector that sits roughly between them. After years of war, both sides exhausted, an uneasy truces forms between them with a few limited battles now and then. GalCop is able to re-assert it's power over Sector 4 and a period of regrowth occurs. Large numbers of the worlds were reduced to anarchies. Some worlds rise again to multi governments and also ideologies spread democracy and communist on many worlds that rise out of anarchy first. (Something like the overthrow of many aristocracies/monarchies (loss of bloodlines) and dictators during the war prevents the return of feudal and dictatorship worlds.) The Thargoids see the weakness of these two races and GalCop in this region of the galaxy and chose to take advantage. They battle all and sundry with the strongest attacks in the regions worse affected during the "Lizard-Feline" war, i.e. the fronts in that war (including Razor's Edge) and least defended worlds (anarchies).

Phantor Gorth

Ok as far as I can see to vaguely explain this map we do need a war. Of some description.

In that case it's down to the wider community, they're the ones writing the oxp's. Quite frankly whatever gets the creatives juices flowing.

I will spend some time looking up feline and lizard systems. It'll take some time though (delaying G5), unless you already have the positions say marked up on one of the wiki maps?

Of course you could have a map wracked with species and political tensions. We didn't thing of that one. I always knew this map was going to be a pain in the fat one.

ClymAngus wrote:

So here we are hammering square pegs into round holes.

Yeah, I am seeing that.

ClymAngus wrote:

your method doesn't explain the lack of confederacies which a race war would be most likely to produce.

Not sure that's true. As the wiki says:

A Confederacy differs from a Democracy in that although each region of the world has its own government, they are all essentially the same and follow the lead set by a centralised seat of officials.

I personally don't see how a species war would do that. It looks like some that takes some time to be derived at. Probably from a previously multi-government setup.

ClymAngus wrote:

Originally I was going ideologies commies Vs democracy. Seems to work quite well in the real world. Also they are the slightly more likely of all the political systems to band together in groups if threatened.

That I can see and I think that is a good idea as part of the answer.

I am seeing major war reducing most worlds to anarchies and limited time since to preventing the re-emergence of more complex government types. I have more trouble with feudal and dictatorship government types.

ClymAngus wrote:

I will spend some time looking up feline and lizard systems. It'll take some time though (delaying G5), unless you already have the positions say marked up on one of the wiki maps?

I have a spreadsheet in ods format (OpenDocument format -> use OpenOffice):

Oolite galaxies.ods

And here is the version converted to Excel which is about 8 times bigger and I haven't tested it in Excel:

Oolite galaxies.xls

This spreadsheet is based on the algorithms I got straight from the source code for Oolite and from the wiki.

If you change the galaxy number in cell B1 in the first sheet "Galaxy Data" (change to 4 in this case) you will see the data for that galaxy and the second sheet which shows the map will plot the worlds.

To see just the worlds for a single species use the filters on the columns X and Y ("Base Species" and "Human Colonists?"). Filter "Base Species" for "Felines" or "Reptiles" (yes I have renamed the species as this spreadsheet was originally for my private use) and filter the "Human Colonists?" column for "0" (i.e. not a Human Colonist world). Now the star chart on second sheet shows just those worlds.

Yes the geographical bias between the species is limited but there.

Phantor Gorth

For me you've created the first ever document that killed my copy of Open Office (2.3 under Ubuntu 7.10)

Hmm, that was one of the reasons for putting in the thargoids because feudal and dictatorships are unlikely to ask for help (as they are military based) and this puts them at a massive disadvantage in the face of a unified attack.

On reflection I firmly believe that a galactic war split along species AND ideological lines is plausible (RW; WW2 being a prime example) the species difference was only a 'perceived' one, but that didn't stop the genocide. When there is some actual physical and genetic differences..... It'll be like "V" having a fight with "Wing Commander"

Think of it this way race splits the galaxy, ideology stops the races from forming into a cohesive force. So your more likely to see what we have here: Even when unified the groups have separate political tensions. The other races in the mix just make things worse. (we have a fair number of humans and colonials in here too).

This is annoying, on the planet information shields it's the one bit of information that is left in text format making it difficult to extract areas and regions. Arses. 14.2 MB excel document hu? Well boys looks like we'll be hanging out in G4 for a while, feel free to visit executive spaceways whilst we're here in the soon to be labelled "stormeye region".

@DaddyHoggy

Sorry it killed your software but the document was created using OpenOffice 3.0 on Ubuntu 9.04. Try loading the Excel file it also works for me.

@ClymAngus

ClymAngus wrote:

Hmm, that was one of the reasons for putting in the thargoids because feudal and dictatorships are unlikely to ask for help (as they are military based) and this puts them at a massive disadvantage in the face of a unified attack.

I get why you wanted Thargoids involvement but if in game time we are at the start of the Thargoid attack then there would still be some feudals and dictorships about. To work properly you need the reason to occur before the Thargoids and part of the earlier war.

Think of it this way race splits the galaxy, ideology stops the races from forming into a cohesive force. So your more likely to see what we have here: Even when unified the groups have separate political tensions. The other races in the mix just make things worse. (we have a fair number of humans and colonials in here too).

Concur with you there.

BTW I have no idea why an .ods spreadsheet doc that is under 2Mb when converted to Excel is now 14.2Mb. I will reboot into XP later today and have a look at it in Excel. It has redundant sheets that were for calculating the links between worlds but I couldn't get it to plot on the graph (though I have done this sort of thing in the past in Excel) so I may drop those two sheets and and re-post the files.

ClymAngus, if you can open one of those files it would save you a lot of time and effort.

Phantor Gorth

I'm not sure about the idea of a race/species/genus war – at least not as far as "Felines v. Lizards" or whatever. You could argue that it might even be more likely for Felines to fight other Felines, since they'd be more likely to compete for the same resources.

However: one species-based possibility, which might introduce some interesting decisions for a lot of players, could be a coalition of non-humans v. human colonials. It's obvious that throughout all the eight sectors it's the humans who are (or at least have been) expansionist, settling all over the place. We're the roaches of the galaxy. Now, maybe in chart 4 we overstepped the mark. Maybe some humans pushed another race's colonists off an otherwise uninhabited planet, or maybe there was even human settlement on someone else's home world. Perhaps some races began to talk about "the Human Problem". There would be neutral human colony worlds, of course, struggling to maintain good relations with all their neighbours. Then there would be those who were tooling up and getting aggressive, even if they're not under immediate attack, thinking that they might well be next. Then there would be the systems where fighting was a regular occurrence.

The Co-operative Navy, containing a high proportion of human pilots and troops, would be potentially hamstrung. Any major intervention to protect human worlds would risk them being perceived as siding with the humans; any intervention against human worlds might risk mass mutiny.

There would be the possibility of running missions for one or both sides (pro- and anti-human); of trying to stop the conflict spreading to other worlds; and of working with the Co-operative to try to restore peace.

Disembodied wrote:

However: one species-based possibility, which might introduce some interesting decisions for a lot of players, could be a coalition of non-humans v. human colonials. It's obvious that throughout all the eight sectors it's the humans who are (or at least have been) expansionist, settling all over the place. We're the roaches of the galaxy. Now, maybe in chart 4 we overstepped the mark. Maybe some humans pushed another race's colonists off an otherwise uninhabited planet, or maybe there was even human settlement on someone else's home world. Perhaps some races began to talk about "the Human Problem". There would be neutral human colony worlds, of course, struggling to maintain good relations with all their neighbours. Then there would be those who were tooling up and getting aggressive, even if they're not under immediate attack, thinking that they might well be next. Then there would be the systems where fighting was a regular occurrence.

Not bad. My species idea came from having one next to each sector which would have left one spare, which meant two near one sector. I thought this would be a good reason for conflict. Felines should be the strongest non-human race in this sector just to keep in with Lovecats.oxp but there is no reason that the other race isn't humans. Humans are the most expansionist and agressive with Felines probably next. That would be ripe for conflict. With the other races likely to side with the Felines your idea could certainly work.

Then we can throw the Thargoids in to force both sides to come together.

Phantor Gorth

PhantorGoth, I still have trouble with the idea of treating Felines (or Lizards, or Frogs, etc.) as a single species, or even a single pan-species. They're all so different (yellow, blue, slimy, bony, horned, fat etc.). I know there's your idea of a different sector for each species-group, but ... I don't know, it seems too tidy to me! And the distribution of the various types across the eight sectors is (naturally enough) random.

Partly I'm wary of the idea that all members of one group are essentially the same, so that it could be said that Felines were all generally expansionist (although not, obviously, as expansionist as the humans). There are all these planets with Felines on them, and some are Feudal, some are Communist, some are Corporate States, some are Democracies, and so on. Within even, say, Feline Corporate States there could be huge differences: one might be in the hands of Mafia-style industrial robber-barons, another could be almost a huge collectivist welfare state. I don't want to lose the potential variety of having thousands of totally, even wildly different species populating the ooniverse, rather than just some variations on eight themes.

Purely my own personal opinion, of course (and not helped by the fact that I've got my own idea of where all these cats, frogs, rodents and so on all came from, one which I hope to get out in a piece of fiction in the not-too-distant future). Essentially I think there are "plot problems" with the species-sector idea – but if you ways around them I'd be interested to hear them!

hmm, it occurs to me that we need a speedy g4 map of species. Something quick and dirty but visual.

I can see where your coming from disembodied (I have a soft spot for the gene seeding idea too). That said I don't really want to be dismissive of PhantorGoth's ideas as he has spent a lot of time on them.

It's possible that after being genetically seeded similar races found their own space and some (by no means all) tended to clump together. It's all about time line, given a long enough "shake and bake" time it is possible that both theories could have a grain of truth in them.

we need that species map. From that we can have a proper chat about this based on "the evidence". I know this sounds a bit "detailed" for a game but nothing stops OXP's being made, like makers feeling their creativity is being limited.

The end goal is not the map or the back stories or the wider world. It's maintaining makers inherent importance (and enthusiasm) in Oolites continued evolution.

It is tricky. I'm not dismissing PhantorGoth's ideas by any means: I just think there are problems with squaring them against the way the Ooniverse seems to be.

A big part of the problem is the dreaded word "canonicity". There is very little that could be said to be universally or even widely regarded as "canon" in Oolite. This is a good thing, in my opinion: it keeps everything as open as possible, which for a collaborative free project like this is brilliant. I think generally I'm in favour of anything which keeps as many options open as possible. Anything that might reduce or constrain the potential variety is something that I think needs careful checking and consideration. At the heart of it, right now I'm more in favour of a galaxy made up of thousands of completely different races than I am with one inhabited by humans plus seven other species-types.

@Disembodied

I get your point. But having problems with the differences is relatively easy to explain. First Human are not homogenous we have races that are tall/short, fat/skinny, red, yellow, brown, black and white and thats before you get into further details. If you look at dogs, cats, etc these (though mostly through our intervention) have wider varieties than humans. So all Felines being one species is not out of the question. Further you have also to question the motives of those (in game) who compiled the descriptions. The planetry descriptions like "... is a tedious place" make you have to question it. As to the distributions, I have trouble with the idea that all the populated worlds are only light years apart. Either only in the sectors and regions near by or alternatively across the whole galaxy. There is no chance that the whole galaxy is populated that way that's just too implusable and then where would the species be that look like other earth species (say squid or spiders) or species that look nothing like any earth species at all. Either there are limited (sectors does that) or they are genetically engineered by humans. If they are genetically engineered by humans why are they in control of their own worlds I doubt humans would let them get that strong.

How the sectors idea works with the distribution is to let the worlds in GalCop sectors be a mixture (GalCop expansion policy) but outside of these its mostly one species or another. Yes this is artificial but it minimises the amount of artificialness.

Further with the species sector idea there would be many other species dotted about the galaxy that we haven't met. Three could easily be found within the loop of the 8 sectors based on the distributions I have shown so far of the known species. (Yes those three if they exist would most likely be wiped out by the Thargoids in my scenarios.)

Phantor Gorth

Disembodied wrote:

It is tricky. I'm not dismissing PhantorGoth's ideas by any means: I just think there are problems with squaring them against the way the Ooniverse seems to be.

A big part of the problem is the dreaded word "canonicity". There is very little that could be said to be universally or even widely regarded as "canon" in Oolite. This is a good thing, in my opinion: it keeps everything as open as possible, which for a collaborative free project like this is brilliant. I think generally I'm in favour of anything which keeps as many options open as possible. Anything that might reduce or constrain the potential variety is something that I think needs careful checking and consideration. At the heart of it, right now I'm more in favour of a galaxy made up of thousands of completely different races than I am with one inhabited by humans plus seven other species-types.

Why yes, with that perspective it could be said that PhantorGorth's maps don't go far enough, only documenting the reaches of the "Human" and their reforged genetic infection. Thargoids are but the first race of truely alien species, the first among many waiting for man and his creations.

With this perspective the annexing of all these ideas becomes easy, whilst not drawing a line under the extent of sentiency in the ooniverse.

I am not being dismissive of the genetic idea either if it can be made to work. All I have heard so far on that is a random seeding idea which I hard to go without a good explantion. The idea of human finding other species out there is more common a Sci-fi and science idea. For the genetic idea to work we would need a good explanation of how they go from just an oddity in the human sphere of influence to populations and power only a magnitude or two less than humanity. You are also more likely to get mixed species worlds. None of the worlds in GalCop are mentioned as being not of any particular species.

Further, the genetic idea also begs the question of what is outside the sectors 2 to 8. The simplest is 7 additional regions of space the same as Earth's expansion from Sol. Gal-Drive would allow anyone from one region to move to the next therefore expansion in one fuels expansion in the others. In this case what if the political setup in those regions? Gal-Fed and others have mirror positions in all other 7 sectors is then the simplest.


Phantor Gorth

True, humans are not homogeneous, but there's not quite such a large variety amongst humans as there is amongst the various blue/yellow/green/red/furry/bony/slimy/horned/bug-eyed etc. felines out there. Also, the whole mixed variety of human beings can currently be found on one planet. I have a kneejerk antipathy towards the idea that you might find an entire planet populated by one ethnic type of humans, or one ethnic type of Felines, for that matter. Or just by fat people.

Within each sector, the inhabited planets are only a few light-years apart – that's obvious from the maps. The distribution of the eight sectors themselves is something that's open to interpretation. Personally I don't see them as being adjacent: I think they're much more likely to be hundreds or thousands of light-years apart, little island clusters scattered across the galaxy.

As you say, the idea that the various races were engineered by humans doesn't really work. But the genetic seeding idea does work if you assume that the seeding took place tens of millions of years ago, by ... whoever or whatever. The thousands of various species have evolved from a variety of genetic seeds, originally from Earth. That's why we can all breathe the same sort of air, and eat the same sort of food (which makes the idea of interplanetary trade a practical one: not much use in shipping Laveian Tree Grubs to Tionisla, say, if the Tionislans' DNA spirals another way): we all use the same four base-pairs in our genetic code, and we're all ultimately made from the same stuff.

A purposeful seeding of the sectors, by some powerful, ancient and (perhaps) vanished entity or race, explains the artificiality perfectly. It looks artificial because it is artificial.

The Thargoids could still be the first "true" alien race that the numerous and various descendants of Earth are facing (or perhaps they're not: maybe one bit of the experiment ran faster and better than all the rest). Perhaps they're the gatekeepers, set up by ... whoever and whatever ... to keep us in our place. Or something else entirely.

Given that Oolite is a game, and therefore has an artificial setup,; and given that it's based on a very old game, and therefore has an even more artificial setup than it might otherwise do; I think it's easier to work with that artificiality, and to assume that it's a necessary part of the game background, rather than trying to create something "natural" out of it.

Suppose there was an unseen species, or one of the participating species, manipulating all the others into war for their own nefarious ends?

Or, all the species are descended from the same common ancestor (after all, they all seem to be similar at least one Earth genus) and the unseen uber-race are either trying to stop the war, or encouraging it as a means of accelerated development.

Just thought of a related question: Is there already a backstory about which is the OLDEST Galaxy?