Territorial Rights |
This isn't a bug per se, but I don't know if it can be changed through modding, and would probably require some code to make it work: Thus it's a request.
I often choose to play as a Gas Giant race. This means that I am not in direct competition for planetary resources with Terrans and other rock dwellers for years, if ever. It seems that the AI is not considering the benefits of friendly coexistance with a race that won't be needing their planets.
Is it possible to set up some sort of weighting for territorial instinct, based on both innate xenophobia and also recognition of competitors vs cooperators?
Any intelligent life form ...
Any intelligent life form that can expand its empire and technology and build huge warships should be considered competition and a possible threat. But also a possible ally.
Termites can build their
Termites can build their mounds thousands of times their size, with complexity that is only bested by humans. With a natural climate control system that allows them to cultivate their own fungal crops...yet they are not intelligent. Their minds only follow a very simple set of instructions.
The ability to expand and build is not a good indication of intelligence. Also those kind of life forms might not fit into either three of those catagories of competition, threat or ally. They may simply just exist to continue their existence.
Your lord and master (below Foamy) LordHavoc
I did not say that the
I did not say that the ability to expand and build is a good indication of intelligence.(Although your comparing mounds to science and technology.) I said, "Any intelligent life form that can expand its empire and technology and builds huge warships...".
Meaning, an "Intelligent" life form that also expands its empire, "technology", and "builds huge warships".
Alien Technology
Influenza virus should count as a hostile life form. They feed on Terrans every year, and the Terrans are almost helpless to do anything about it.
And the flu genetically engineers new strains to counter any new antigens the humans develop. They beat the Terrans by NOT building big targets for humans to shoot at.
Yes, when they start researching Gas Giant colonization. Everything before that point is just hypothetical, but once research efforts go into developing it, then they are serious about using Gas Giants.
For a game where all players are the same, that makes a lot of sense.
Why have separate planet styles that others cannot colonize? This feature makes a race that doesn't live on my worlds a potential ally and a good candidate for friends and neighbors, much more so than someone who lives on worlds that I want.
One is an enemy by it's very nature, competing for the same resources. The other is not naturally in opposition to my goals. It seems fitting that this should adjust treaties between races.
More to the point though: The current system enforces a philosophy that war as the only destiny available. Appropriate for the xenophobic Terran destroyers, but maybe too limiting to express all relationships in the universe.
Cross-environment threat
Then, of course, there are the robo-miners...
Re: Territorial Rights
While the game does enforece a philosophy that war is the only destiny, this does not venture out of the realm of science as we know it today.
Every living thing on this planet fills some ecological niche. When you have several species in the same geological area that want to occupy the same ecological niche, you have one or more of several things happen.
1 ) One specie is better suited to the local environment, and is able to survive and thrive better, and the other dies out or moves elsewhere
2 ) Both species engage in life or death combat whenever they encounter one another, typically over food
3 ) The species are related (such as two different types of ducks in the same area) and with the abundance of food, mate together. One specie's traits dominate, and the other is wiped out only to exist as recessive genes in successive generations
While you do have intelligence as an additional factor in a game such as SE, look at humanity's history. Wars are fought over land and resources (either to sieze them or to deny them to someone else who wants to sieze them) mostly between different groups (or tribes, or races, or nationalities, or ethnicities, or religions, whatever). It is hard to find any decade in recorded human historywhere there isn't some war somewhere on the planet.
Space games like this one basically transpose different racial- and national- ethnicities with different races altogether, and unite Humans (if we make an appearance at all) as one single unified race. Add in a few sci-fi details (such as that group eats rocks, and this other group over here breathes methane instead of an oxygen/nitrogen mix) which obviously add both flavor and disguise to just which human society was the model for the race, and its easy to see Iranians becoming one race, Iraqi's another, Syrians a third, etc.
Re: Territorial Rights
I'm not sure if this is designed into the game or not, but in my present game as a rock world race, I allied with both and ice race and a gas giant race very early in the game with little trouble. I sucesfully pressured my two allies to ally with eachother. We three are now trading partners and each has worlds in a number of systems. This has worked out fantastically when one of us is at war. I have had allied warships protect my colony ships from certain death on a number of occasions and I even had an ally pitch in on a major battle once. Another result is that once one of us colonized in a new system, the other two would rapidly arrive and the system would be filled quickly, such that outside competitors have no place to land. So this synergy that the OP is looking for can be done. I dont know what will happen once one of us learns to colonize another world type, but I dont intend to be the once that breaks the alliance.
This is a good question.
This is a good question. The other point would be - at what point would you be considered a threat? When they research or acquire Gas Giant colonization tech?