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[Rex_Nex]

I'm looking for games (preferably RTS, but anything works) where humans are not the default "vanilla" species. Games where they are portrayed as different from whatever "normal" is; perhaps they are considered extraordinarily regenerative, reproductive, enduring, whatever it happens to be. This is mostly out of curiosity; I find these scenarios pretty neat!

[pisskop]

Scarcraft did good there.  They aren't 'normal' because there is no normal.

Most games that make humans 'special' seem to make them either weak, backwater, or excellent diplomats/tacticians.

[sambojin]

Rather than the standard diplomat/trader route most space-4X games take on humans, Stars! went with massive potential population sizes, good balanced starting tech and inbuilt tech-upgraded scanners on low end ships. The default "Humanoid" race did anyway (it had the Jack of all Trades PRT). Still a great TBS game if you can get around the interface, the lack of graphics and the number-crunchyness of it, with a pretty reasonable AI opponent for once.


It's hard to say if they're more or less vanilla, because everyone gets advantages. Cheap/excellent minelayer/scanner frigates, great scouts and hefty colonization strategies are the outcome of the above, along with a pretty explosive start in war or expansion. That might be vanilla as it gets. The race creation setup allows for a fairly large variety of races, but the default "Humanoid" race is pretty different from all the others (though admittedly not very well designed).

[Gunner-Chan]

I don't have any suggestions, but I think a good concept for the human 'hat' would be that they are more ruthless and aggressive than any of the other species in the game (whatever that game may be; I'm imagining something SMAC-like here) We like to place ourselves in the role of the good guys, but given our history, it doesn't seem so implausible that humans could be the race that's the most likely to commit atrocities, or the ones most likely to stab an ally in the back.

While it's not exactly a game where that was relevant, that was ultimately how Mass Effect handled it.

[a1s]

The problem is when we imagine something (Orcs, Greys, intelligent dolphins) we tend to think in terms of 'how do I make it not a reskin of humans' (because we have only ever met human civilizations so far and have no basis to construct other civs from) That means that humans just sort of 'end up' in the middle of most civ charts, unless you intentionally misrepresent them (there's no reason to think humans would be better diplomats, or researchers. Despite popular claims to the contrary, we all but know humans are not the deadliest warriors (think of what ants can do without having a central nervous system, to say nothing of an officer corps and despair!). And, of course, they're only bad at magic because that's not something that exists in our world- I'm sure if it did, we'd find a way to be good at it)

[Sonlirain]

Hmm well in Drox Operative humans are expansionist economists that translates roughly into "randomly aggresive crazies".
In battlecruiser 3000 they are considered to be "slightely aggresive".

Outside of games there is the "veil of mandness" story where humans get to be galactic boogymen.

[Sonlirain]

Oh yeah, first contact with a non-insane species is with a species that, like us, lives outside the area of space filled with crazies.

And our ship had a malfunctioning communicator and came out of that area, so they thought we were insane.

We eventually adopted the distorted voice and stuff for diplomacy to scare everyone else into doing what we wanted. After all, we were a powerful species that had a horribly garbled voice and came from an area of madness. They probably thought we'd declare war on them as soon as they did something we disliked.

Maybe you read a never refined version. In the one i read humans lived INSIDE the veil of madness and quickly advanced in tech by reclaiming tech from civilizations that were lost to madness... that and having a larger population tham most other space faring races since the planets inside the veil were literally uncontested led them into have more advanced technology than everyone around.
All in all the scare was the same.
Insane hi tech civilization of demons emerging from the space bermuda triangle.

[BFEL]

Advent Rising, the game I never got to really play (My Xbox died right after I bought it. And 360 didn't backwards compatible so....yeah) had humans as the Crystal Dragon Jesus hilariously.

Basically, all the other races saw humanity as telekinetically powered space gods, meanwhile they were actually just bog standard default spaceguys, but the main character DID end up as a telekinetically powered space god come the end of the story, so I guess it counts.

Also, the reverse for the Halo series.
In that, aliens thought we were the devil.

[lordcooper]

I've always thought that humans could be tough bastards. We can survive high levels of blood loss, can spring back from oxygen starvation, our biosphere's neuroplasticity could be fairly unique, we can have limbs chopped off and still be good at killing things...

I mean, we don't think of ourselves as exceptionally tough, but I always think that if there's one incredibly tough species out there, they probably think the same of themselves.

I don't know about that, there are plenty of physically tougher species on this planet alone.

[pisskop]

we are enduring in our adaptivity.

And ambition is a thing we do well, often to tge detriment of tge collective

[TempAcc]

Humans are tough in a different way though. Of course a lion is far stronger and more agile then any human, however a lion lacks the phisical endurance to sustain phisical exertion over a long period of time, and need to eat A LOT to maintain themselves working at an optimal level, plus, they aren't very adaptable and will succumb to changes in environment and climate rather quickly.
On the other hand, many indigenous human populations from across the whole world have been known to stalk prey for days at a time and maintain a high level of phisical exertion for hours. There's also new studies that show that humans can be as strong as the big apes, but we have a "neural limit" to how much muscle fibers we counciously use at a time, since our brain evolved to make more fine motions rather then the all our nothing explosive muscle usage of gorillas and chimps, so our brain limits the ammount of muscle fibers we activate at once. That neural limit is only supressed at times of great danger, which is why we'll ocasionaly find news articles of normal people doing incredible feats of strenght in certain dire situations, like that guy who pushed a huge bolder off his body and over his head when he got into a hiking accident.

Anyway on topic: X3 did humans decently I think. You get the more "vanilla" humans the argons which got separated from the earth based humans for such a long time they might be considered a different species, and follow the diplomacy and trade route, and the earth based humans who are very defensive of their systems, suspicious of other races and have very powerful ships and weapons of their own design, which makes most races fear them. Additionaly most of their vessels can't use commonwealth equipment, they can only use human produced equipment.

[Sharp]

My problem with humans in multi-species games is they are seen as jack-of-all trades but everyone else is one-dimensional. If you look at humans in general there are always stereotypes for different people, Chinese people seem smart, Germans are efficient, orderly and strict, Japanese people are honourable like samurai, French people are snobs, Americans are strong and stupid, Canadians are nice, British people are posh, Australians are easy going and put shrimps on barbecues.

Et cetera

Aliens however can only have one stereotype, they don't extend into different cultures or subcultures.

[10ebbor10]

Yup, the aliens are always, hat species, while humans are often very diverse.

[Neyvn]

we are enduring in our adaptivity.

And ambition is a thing we do well, often to tge detriment of tge collective

This is why in most games Aliens fear humans... I find it an interesting trait that we devote ourselves too in fiction...

[Teneb]

I think Sword of the Stars does this, though it's a 4X rather than a RTS. Humans are xenophobic and more intrested in conquest than anything else and are quite non-average.