Old factions rework - public brainstorming :D

[Luzario]

Ooh, just thought of another cool faction trait. This could be a good one for a research-focused faction such as Ackdarians, but could apply to a crafty people like the Teekans as well, if it makes more sense.

Faction Trait: No Knowledge Wasted
Whenever this faction suffers a critical research failure ("pursuing the wrong course"), they receive some advancement on a (random? same-category?) lower-tier technology that they haven't yet researched.
[Conceptually, the "wrong path" they were pursing inspired someone else to continue down that path to discover something unexpected and new]

These are all great ideas and I agree that they are even more in line with what is being done in the current DLC!

[frankycl]

To be fair, Eric says in the DLC stream that the dev intention is to revisit the original seven factions and enhance their "uniqueness" to bring them more in line with the direction of the new factions (provided it is well received, of which I am very confident).

Yes, this would be a dream come true , but I'm also affraid that SOME things won't be included in the changes the DEVs already planned for - and therefore will still need modding.

Examples might be:

- unique texts/dialogues for the different races, based on their difference in culture, mindset or attitude, or even their anatomic possibilities to communicate/generate words and sounds, etc.

- unique music for different races and/or different situations/locations in-game,

- unique techs that can only be researched/used by specific races - and can NOT be traded,

- unique features or game-functions for different races for all kinds of economical-, miltary- or colony-related aspects, based on their difference in culture or societies, etc.


... or maybe we'll see (at least ?) parts of this in future updates/DLC or expansions, I don't know - but if so, it'll certainly not be very soon in the future, I guess... - We'll see...

Therefore, this thread is a totally valid and potentially helpful place to discuss our desires for faction differentiation without just saying "make a mod". It is clear that the devs are listening to player feedback, and this thread has a very real potential to influence their official dev direction. It is a conversation worth having, for sure.

Yes, of course - or had somebody said anything against it ?

(...) some potentially relevant Teekan-specific tweaks could include:

Faction Trait: Trademark Infringement ("Copyright? More like 'copy right'.")
When the Teekans have an established trade treaty with another faction, they receive (either a unique research bonus or access to a unique espionage mission) to [certain?] technologies already known by that faction.

Hm - why "access to a unique espionage mission" ? - What does their ability/tendency for trading have to do with intelligence ? (other than gathering gossip-info during their trades; - just curious - no criticism ! )

[Luzario]

Hm - why "access to a unique espionage mission" ? - What does their ability/tendency for trading have to do with intelligence ? (other than gathering gossip-info during their trades; - just curious - no criticism ! )

I believe its just ment to implement some kind of research aquisition bonus trough already available game mechanics ... so research or espionage.

[Luzario]

Hey people, I forgot to check up on DW 2 in a couple of months.

Do we have any ideas when / how the old factions will be reworked or improved?

[thegreybetween]

Humans will be the first overhauled faction, and they are currently working on it. I haven't watched the latest stream yet, but as of the last update I did hear, there has been no indication yet of when we may see these make it to the game.

Here's what we know:
- Quameno/Gizurean DLC drops on Sept 7
- After that, the primary focus seems to be the next full DLC. This will center around the Shakturi and will be the first major feature expansion for the game. It should be released in late 2023.
- The two factions for the third pack seem to have been internally decided, but not announced. There was a small discussion as to the possibility of opening up a poll to determine future faction releases.
- The first two faction packs are exploring just how different/unique the factions should be. Response to the first pack was positive but indicated that the variation could go even further, so the Quameno/Gizurean pack adds even more distinction to the new factions. Depending on where the devs (and community) land on the best balance for faction differentiation, that will inform just how much each of the original factions need to be modified.
- The modified original factions will probably come out in staggered releases whenever they are ready. Humans will be first. There hasn't been an update as to which faction(s) will be next, nor how much time to expect between updates.
- The overhaul will focus on gameplay features to make the faction playstyle more unique. It is unlikely that there will be much of an adjustment to the current artwork for ships/characters (though I personally hope the Human overhaul will finally include artwork for female characters).

I imagine that the devs might be open to the idea of a poll to determine which original factions the community would like to see overhauled first (after Humans), but this is just speculation on my part.

Anyway, I'm excited to see where it all goes, and I'm eager for the first peek into what the overhauled Human faction will look like. No idea when to expect it, but it is in the works, so hopefully soon-ish.

[Luzario]

Thank you for that extensive reply.

I too can't wait for the Humans update!

[tofudog]

Just because it was mentioned a while back:

Can anybody point me to a case of slavery not being ultimately self-defeating in our planets history?

The specific reference in my mind is Xenophon (very biased I concede, because he was the (semi-)democratically elected leader of a mercenary army), who notes the difference in combat effectiveness between his volunteer hoplites and the persian conscripts.

Wouldn't it be time to lay that tired old trope to rest and acknowledge that on the way to the stars you just need the initiative that only free beings show? No matter how many tentacles your ancestors have.

[maggiecow]

Can anybody point me to a case of slavery not being ultimately self-defeating in our planets history?

Are you suggesting the USA has been hampered by it's slave-owning past? I mean, the slaves' descendants have been hampered, the state not so much.

Modern lowkey slavery systems in China and the Middle East also don't seem to have done any harm to Dubai or Saudi Arabia when it comes to footy/soccer tournaments.

Historically if you look at the longest lasting empires, like Rome or Egypt (slavery "abolished" in 1877, yeah right), they mostly all had slavery some for the entire life of the empire. In Rome's case I think it was at least five hundred years.

Slavery tends to exist to get stuff done quickly when you want your people focused elsewhere than manual labour eg fighting, but mature civilizations grow out of it because it's likely more efficient to have consumers than slaves. When your population are largely captive consumers why put yourself through the headache of owning them, when they'll beat themselves with sticks to get shiny things anyway.

The Soviet system of Communism wouldn't be considered slavery by most people, but it effectively took away most people's freedoms and forced them to exist in a tightly controlled environment like ants in an ant farm. To be fair, that system definitely didn't last long.

So, the slavery tech tree should start at "whips and chains" and end with "online shopping". Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

[Nightskies]

Also, nowhere in Earth's known history is a comparable situation to an entire world being enslaved. A whole society composed of slaves doesn't remotely exist.

I can imagine several ways this could work that don't involve online shopping, especially if introducing mindreading, and possibly manipulating ability.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Can anybody point me to a case of slavery not being ultimately self-defeating in our planets history?

Are you suggesting the USA has been hampered by it's slave-owning past? I mean, the slaves' descendants have been hampered, the state not so much.

Modern lowkey slavery systems in China and the Middle East also don't seem to have done any harm to Dubai or Saudi Arabia when it comes to footy/soccer tournaments.

Historically if you look at the longest lasting empires, like Rome or Egypt (slavery "abolished" in 1877, yeah right), they mostly all had slavery some for the entire life of the empire. In Rome's case I think it was at least five hundred years.

Slavery tends to exist to get stuff done quickly when you want your people focused elsewhere than manual labour eg fighting, but mature civilizations grow out of it because it's likely more efficient to have consumers than slaves. When your population are largely captive consumers why put yourself through the headache of owning them, when they'll beat themselves with sticks to get shiny things anyway.

The Soviet system of Communism wouldn't be considered slavery by most people, but it effectively took away most people's freedoms and forced them to exist in a tightly controlled environment like ants in an ant farm. To be fair, that system definitely didn't last long.

So, the slavery tech tree should start at "whips and chains" and end with "online shopping". Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

Just because slaves can and have been useful does not mean the opposite would not have been better. To me this is a bit of a backtracking flawed logic.

Slavery is just one way to move the wealth from one group of people to another at the detriment of the whole group.

In general the overall wealth will be better if everyone cooperates and treat each other as equals and I'm not talking about forced equality as in communism here.

Such a society would enjoy more total wealth and surplus goods and services and a larger group of people that enjoys the fruits of it.

Thus forced labour and less freedom will ultimately be detrimental to society.

In real life it is mostly about one group of people wanting all the power and wealth and not wanting to share it with others. In a game that is ultimately the player in most cases, the player want as much of the resources of their empire to be at their fingertips and do with it as they please. In real life slavery works because there is a system that keeps the slaves or oppressed part of society in line or docile. It is not about maximising resource output for the benefit of all but only for the few.
Sure... a slave society can potentially restructure their society to a potential war footing and production quickly but ultimately they will never be able to outproduce a society where people choose to put their society into a war footing voluntarily and who also enjoyed a much higher total production output to begin with, even if most if it is useless luxury items to keep the people happy and content.
A good example of this is the US versus USSR in world war two. The USSR managed to force their society to produce war materiel at staggering rates and did so very fast, people were mostly forced to do what they did. While the US just repurposed their civilian luxury industry that was already very productive and pretty much dwarfed everyone, but it took more time for them to really come on line. At most people had to reduce their consumption of luxury items for a while, in USSR they had no luxury to begin with and it just meant more work for even less return, mass poverty and whole regions of the empire was depopulated, persecuted or starved to death.

I think one should be very careful about seeing the positive things about slavery as it actually working, because in general terms it never did.

[maggiecow]

Can anybody point me to a case of slavery not being ultimately self-defeating in our planets history?

Are you suggesting the USA has been hampered by it's slave-owning past? I mean, the slaves' descendants have been hampered, the state not so much.

Modern lowkey slavery systems in China and the Middle East also don't seem to have done any harm to Dubai or Saudi Arabia when it comes to footy/soccer tournaments.

Historically if you look at the longest lasting empires, like Rome or Egypt (slavery "abolished" in 1877, yeah right), they mostly all had slavery some for the entire life of the empire. In Rome's case I think it was at least five hundred years.

Slavery tends to exist to get stuff done quickly when you want your people focused elsewhere than manual labour eg fighting, but mature civilizations grow out of it because it's likely more efficient to have consumers than slaves. When your population are largely captive consumers why put yourself through the headache of owning them, when they'll beat themselves with sticks to get shiny things anyway.

The Soviet system of Communism wouldn't be considered slavery by most people, but it effectively took away most people's freedoms and forced them to exist in a tightly controlled environment like ants in an ant farm. To be fair, that system definitely didn't last long.

So, the slavery tech tree should start at "whips and chains" and end with "online shopping". Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

Just because slaves can and have been useful does not mean the opposite would not have been better. To me this is a bit of a backtracking flawed logic.

Slavery is just one way to move the wealth from one group of people to another at the detriment of the whole group.

In general the overall wealth will be better if everyone cooperates and treat each other as equals and I'm not talking about forced equality as in communism here.

Such a society would enjoy more total wealth and surplus goods and services and a larger group of people that enjoys the fruits of it.

Thus forced labour and less freedom will ultimately be detrimental to society.

In real life it is mostly about one group of people wanting all the power and wealth and not wanting to share it with others. In a game that is ultimately the player in most cases, the player want as much of the resources of their empire to be at their fingertips and do with it as they please. In real life slavery works because there is a system that keeps the slaves or oppressed part of society in line or docile. It is not about maximising resource output for the benefit of all but only for the few.
Sure... a slave society can potentially restructure their society to a potential war footing and production quickly but ultimately they will never be able to outproduce a society where people choose to put their society into a war footing voluntarily and who also enjoyed a much higher total production output to begin with, even if most if it is useless luxury items to keep the people happy and content.
A good example of this is the US versus USSR in world war two. The USSR managed to force their society to produce war materiel at staggering rates and did so very fast, people were mostly forced to do what they did. While the US just repurposed their civilian luxury industry that was already very productive and pretty much dwarfed everyone, but it took more time for them to really come on line. At most people had to reduce their consumption of luxury items for a while, in USSR they had no luxury to begin with and it just meant more work for even less return, mass poverty and whole regions of the empire was depopulated, persecuted or starved to death.

I think one should be very careful about seeing the positive things about slavery as it actually working, because in general terms it never did.

You're looking at slavery from a retrospective viewpoint and hypothesising about how much better things could have been. That's as fantasy as anything in DW2. The USA without slavery would probably look positively Scandinavian now. Without the Socialism.

The USA kept the USSR afloat during WW2, FWIW.

"Thus forced labour and less freedom will ultimately be detrimental to society."

Hence me pointing out that making people willing economic slaves is much more efficient. I'm not advocating for old school slavery here. We basically agree but I think you're looking at history as a variable when it is very much a fixed thing. It happened.

History is largely a record of trying lots of different things and seeing what works. For a time slavery clearly worked for the major empires. The alternative was probably mass slaughter. I digress. You don't get to wag a finger at the Romans and tell them they could have done SO much better. They gave up slavery when it was economically, and philosophically, expedient. Primarily because they adopted Christianity on a wide scale. Not like religion has ever caused any problems. Or is it another form of slavery?

"In general the overall wealth will be better if everyone cooperates and treat each other as equals and I'm not talking about forced equality as in communism here." You are literally talking about Communism, it's just it hasn't and likely never will exist in the pure theoretical sense that it was imagined by other dreamers, like you. Out of curiosity, what would you call your halcyon system? Niceism? It's Communism, baby! Communism can't work because the apparatus required to ensure everyone gets treated fairly naturally creates a stratum of watchers and an over-class to watch the watchers. It's classic.

We're all (and forgive me for drawing stereotypes if anyone reading this isn't part of the mainstream West) pretty much bonded servants in an increasingly monopolistic, "Capitalist" society.

You're getting too wrapped up in slavery meaning manacles and whips.

[Jorgen_CAB]

You're looking at slavery from a retrospective viewpoint and hypothesising about how much better things could have been. That's as fantasy as anything in DW2. The USA without slavery would probably look positively Scandinavian now. Without the Socialism.

The USA kept the USSR afloat during WW2, FWIW.

"Thus forced labour and less freedom will ultimately be detrimental to society."

Hence me pointing out that making people willing economic slaves is much more efficient. I'm not advocating for old school slavery here. We basically agree but I think you're looking at history as a variable when it is very much a fixed thing. It happened.

History is largely a record of trying lots of different things and seeing what works. For a time slavery clearly worked for the major empires. The alternative was probably mass slaughter. I digress. You don't get to wag a finger at the Romans and tell them they could have done SO much better. They gave up slavery when it was economically, and philosophically, expedient. Primarily because they adopted Christianity on a wide scale. Not like religion has ever caused any problems. Or is it another form of slavery?

"In general the overall wealth will be better if everyone cooperates and treat each other as equals and I'm not talking about forced equality as in communism here." You are literally talking about Communism, it's just it hasn't and likely never will exist in the pure theoretical sense that it was imagined by other dreamers, like you. Out of curiosity, what would you call your halcyon system? Niceism? It's Communism, baby! Communism can't work because the apparatus required to ensure everyone gets treated fairly naturally creates a stratum of watchers and an over-class to watch the watchers. It's classic.

We're all (and forgive me for drawing stereotypes if anyone reading this isn't part of the mainstream West) pretty much bonded servants in an increasingly monopolistic, "Capitalist" society.

You're getting too wrapped up in slavery meaning manacles and whips.

No... you completely misrepresented my whole argument... if we look back to history then slavery have NEVER been a positive outcome if you see what the same society could have done with the same people in the same area without anyone being enslaved.

If you just assume these people hade migrated as labour force you would have had better productivity, development and much less social distress. The major factor in the past for any specific location was food, when food became scarce then wars usually followed by people migrating in large numbers.

An NO I did not describe communism when I said that people would cooperate... what idiotic nonsense is that. I specifically said I did NOT mean that. By cooperating I mean that people trade goods and services in a peaceful way, this is the only way a society will grow in a sustainable way. I think Europe post WW2 is a very good example of this when we compare how the previous centuries have been on the continent.

We're all (and forgive me for drawing stereotypes if anyone reading this isn't part of the mainstream West) pretty much bonded servants in an increasingly monopolistic, "Capitalist" society.

This is borderline conspiracy theory reasoning... it is the fact that we produce excessive goods and services that we can live like we do in the West society. The more excess we can produce the less we also will need to work. The amount of hour that people work have steadily been reduced while the productivity at the same time increases. Even kings 1000 years ago would be envied about the luxury even the common person live with today.

Far more people today work with something that they also are interested in compared with the past, this is because we have a much higher freedom to choose where we live and where we work.

As soon as you start treating a vast portion of society as slaves or suppress them you also loose a vast number of intellectual capacity that would have otherwise benefited society. This will ultimately be detrimental to society. The privileged also tend to become decadent and much less productive and innovation also tend to suffer as a result of that.
The more modern a society is the more important intellectual capital is not physical labour.

[Nightskies]

It appears that this discussion about slavery hinges on a "slave" being a person without choice, and this is an error, just as DW2 pirates hardly resemble real historical or modern pirates. It just means that the person legally belongs to something or someone (presumably to work); in this case, it'd be a space empire.

Though the request for the discussion was to bring up real precedence for slavery not being self-defeating, this request is akin to looking at fuel for cars and asking for a comparison to historical cases of horse diets.

Imagine how AI, universal monitoring, the absolute lack of the wealthy elite, very different values, and somewhat practically infinite sustainable energy can allow for an entire society of people all of whom are owned by an off-world entity.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Sure... we could call it something else as well. But slavery in itself will probably in general mean something specific to most people and not to some abstract Borg like hivemind "slavery" of people.

The most important thing of a modern sci-fi setting is how you maintain ingenuity and driving progress. There are many things that will kill it. Physical labour will not really be something you will want in a high technology society from biological createures, at least not from a rational perspective. I would say that using biological life for any form of physical labour (other than recreational) in distant future will likely be net negative for society.

If I were to make my own game and I would sort of look into the crystal ball about advanced economies of advanced intergalactical species they would not be driven by consumption economies, luxuries or any physical labour or masses of people in general... those resources and means to provide them would be near infinate and everyone would be able to get whatever they like anyway. It would likely be more of a machiavellian scheming setting where people vie for power of cultures, ideas and progression of technology... those would be the resources to fight over.

But I digress...