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[Chiefwaffles]

Do you only post image macros, gimli?

[Cruxador]

From Dev Diary #20:

The stuff about languages specifically isn't in a dev diary, it was in one of the press demos they did.

[redwallzyl]

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/extraterrestrial-thursday-15-00cet-https-www-twitch-tv-paradoxinteractive.915513/

[Greenbane]

Just watched today's stream, and the game looks pretty good, though perhaps unremarkable to a certain extent. Well, it's the standard 4X fare plus some known Paradox mechanics. I'm sure they'll expand Stellaris considerably with a seemingly endless parade of DLC, but the base game may not be particularly stellar, if you'll pardon the pun.

One thing which somewhat concerned me is the race portraits. They look great, and there's a lot of variety when it comes to race generation. However, there's a single portrait per race, apparently, and you see the same guy in every pop, character and officer. I realize it might seem unfeasible to ask for portrait subdivision (a la MoO2), but it looks quite repetitive as it is. I'm almost sure, however, that they're aware of this, and that their solution will be a procession of paid portrait packs, if CK2 is any indication.

[ZeroGravitas]

The oceans are useless to us, yes. Not sure what species you're a part of, but us humans don't have a use for seawater in any real capacity. Fish and sea plants are an incredibly minor part of human diets.

The report is close to 10 years old now, but according to the UN Food and Ag organization fish accounted for 15.7% of the world's animal protein intake and just over 6% of all protein consumed. A sizable portion of that comes from aquaculture, but a sizable portion remains fishing. I'd argue that's not an insignificant portion. Not sure if you're from the US, but as I understand it the US tends to be a bit of an aberration on the fish consumption front (what with our cheap factory landmeats).

I'd also like to note that overfishing is a very real issue. Again using slightly old numbers, the percentage of fish stocks that are 'underexploited' has plummeted over the last few decades from ~40% to ~15%. Roughly 50 percent are 'fully exploited', and about 28 percent are 'overexploited' (the remainder are depleted or recovering from depletion).

Thanks for that stat - I was actually looking for it myself. What's interesting is it shows just how little protein we do get from the ocean (94% of protein comes from somewhere else) but I think we could actually increase that if we had sentient dolphins.

Overfishing is a huge problem, and it's really tough to monitor millions of square miles of ocean. But imagine the reverse: we're a sentient ocean species that can't survive on land without specific equipment. Yet we really like beef. Could we send out parties to capture wild cattle or buffalo and return it to the ocean? Of course. But if there were some terrestrial species that lived above water natively, they could set up some entire industrial process by which they bred cattle, herded them, and slaughtered them efficiently. It would make zero sense for us to go to war with that terrestrial species over cattle. And they'd do a much better job of policing their own herds than we could trying to enforce our own overhunting laws.

And that's why sentient dolphins would represent an increase in net resources, not a decrease. We'd probably see a net increase (haha, fishing pun) if dolphins could industrial aquaculture and fish farming and trade with us. I bet they really love shiny metal jewelry that is hard to forge underwater, or something.

[Egan_BW]

Man, now I wish we had civilized dolphins.

[ZeroGravitas]

sadly seaquest dsv may be the closest we come for a long time

[Sean Mirrsen]

Just watched today's stream, and the game looks pretty good, though perhaps unremarkable to a certain extent. Well, it's the standard 4X fare plus some known Paradox mechanics. I'm sure they'll expand Stellaris considerably with a seemingly endless parade of DLC, but the base game may not be particularly stellar, if you'll pardon the pun.

One thing which somewhat concerned me is the race portraits. They look great, and there's a lot of variety when it comes to race generation. However, there's a single portrait per race, apparently, and you see the same guy in every pop, character and officer. I realize it might seem unfeasible to ask for portrait subdivision (a la MoO2), but it looks quite repetitive as it is. I'm almost sure, however, that they're aware of this, and that their solution will be a procession of paid portrait packs, if CK2 is any indication.

If you pay attention to their previous stream, there was a screen where you can adjust variations of the portrait. Gender, phenotype, color variant, clothes, and "style" whatever it means, were present as options. I take that to mean that there will be randomized variants for different portraits once the variants are actually available.

[sprinkled chariot]

Now this only needs opportunity to create legions of genetically ehnaced soldiers clad in power armour.

[Man of Paper]

And considering some of them insignias you can have resemble 40K army symbols, and knowing that Paradox does love their references, I wouldn't be surprised if you could create a galactic superman army.

[Dostoevsky]

From Dev Diary #20:

The stuff about languages specifically isn't in a dev diary, it was in one of the press demos they did.

I had interpreted 'establish communications' in dev diary #20 as gaining sufficient knowledge of language, but they very well could be separate things.

Thanks for that stat - I was actually looking for it myself. What's interesting is it shows just how little protein we do get from the ocean (94% of protein comes from somewhere else) but I think we could actually increase that if we had sentient dolphins.

Overfishing is a huge problem, and it's really tough to monitor millions of square miles of ocean. But imagine the reverse: we're a sentient ocean species that can't survive on land without specific equipment. Yet we really like beef. Could we send out parties to capture wild cattle or buffalo and return it to the ocean? Of course. But if there were some terrestrial species that lived above water natively, they could set up some entire industrial process by which they bred cattle, herded them, and slaughtered them efficiently. It would make zero sense for us to go to war with that terrestrial species over cattle. And they'd do a much better job of policing their own herds than we could trying to enforce our own overhunting laws.

And that's why sentient dolphins would represent an increase in net resources, not a decrease. We'd probably see a net increase (haha, fishing pun) if dolphins could industrial aquaculture and fish farming and trade with us. I bet they really love shiny metal jewelry that is hard to forge underwater, or something.

Don't have a citation for this one, alas, but as I understand it we (humans, that is) have gotten very good at freshwater aquaculture but not so much saltwater aquaculture. So hypothetical dolphins could be a gain in that regard. But there's a lot we don't know about the nutrient-exploitable potential of the ocean compared to land, so it's hard to say given an equivalent level of technology a ocean-borne species could harvest the ocean as efficiently as humans can the land (maybe more, maybe less).

On the other other hand, if we had sentient dolphins with population levels similar to the number of humans currently on the earth I suspect it would be quite difficult supplying enough raw nutrition, let alone meat.

(On the other other other hand, if we had hyperdrive-era power sources we could probably find a way around a lot of these problems through application of massive amounts of energy.)

But none of this really gets into the behavioral question - could they get along, assuming it's in their interest to do so? Given my experience with human nature it seems like the potentially-rational choice of cooperation might not be very likely, and who can say what sentient dolphin culture would be like.

[sambojin]

If you assume aliens could live in our water. Space travel (in it's early "I've got one planet" form) doesn't necessarily mean perfect environmental adaption technologies.

Fish live in our water. Some in fresh, some in brackish, some in salty. But how salty? And at what temperature and depth (pressure/gravity)? How much oxygen in the water? How much mineral content is tolerable, or pH levels?

A terrestrial/aquatic meeting might be rare in itself.  Having a remotely compatible one, for a particular environmental subset, even rarer. They may wish to "pollute the hell" out of our oceans, just to be able to live in them.


Back on topic, I'm wondering if the portraits are going to be paper-dolled clothes/paraphernalia with base colour changing options. Makes sense. Maybe 2-3 portraits a race, with 3-5 clothes options, coloured randomly (or perhaps in a base palette for that race's "hat"). It'd give a bit of variation anyway. Easier than hundreds of individual portraits certainly, and allows for clothed, unclothed, bejeweled or semi-cyborg variations of each base race.

The portraits all line up nicely pixel-wise for paper-dolling in any case.

[Dostoevsky]

[more discussion of space dolphins]

Yeah, I was just working off the assumption they happened to actually work in water (or that sentient dolphins had just always been around).

Back on topic, I'm wondering if the portraits are going to be paper-dolled clothes/paraphernalia with base colour changing options. Makes sense. Maybe 2-3 portraits a race, with 3-5 clothes options, coloured randomly (or perhaps in a base palette for that race's "hat"). It'd give a bit of variation anyway. Easier than hundreds of individual portraits certainly, and allows for clothed, unclothed, bejeweled or semi-cyborg variations of each base race.

The portraits all line up nicely pixel-wise for paper-dolling in any case.

I could swear one of the dev diaries touched on this too... ah - #6:

"Now, as you remember from last week’s diary, there are about a hundred different alien race portraits in the game. Thus, we initially felt that lesser leaders should not have actual portraits, because we could not possibly produce enough of them to provide the requisite variety. But then, the artists started to experiment with different backgrounds and clothes, which thankfully proved sufficient to allow all leaders to show a portrait.

The different types of leaders all use different sets of clothes. This helps increases variety, but also reinforces their role, with admirals having a militaristic uniform, governors being more casually dressed, and scientist being a bit more techy. Clothes are shared between some of the more similar species, because creating five unique apparels for each species is just an enormous amount of work. (Not all species wear clothes though; it would be odd if this was every alien race’s custom.)

I expect that humans will be by far the most popular race to play. Therefore, they are getting some special attention with different ethnicities, genders and hair styles. There is nothing stopping modders from doing the same for other races, of course! For example, the system could easily be used for other things, like an insect race where you have a multi tiered system, with one appearance for the ruler, a completely different morphology for your Pops, and a third for your leader characters..."

I guess this means that clothing-free species (e.g. the Blorg) might end without many different portraits?

[ZeroGravitas]

Don't have a citation for this one, alas, but as I understand it we (humans, that is) have gotten very good at freshwater aquaculture but not so much saltwater aquaculture. So hypothetical dolphins could be a gain in that regard. But there's a lot we don't know about the nutrient-exploitable potential of the ocean compared to land, so it's hard to say given an equivalent level of technology a ocean-borne species could harvest the ocean as efficiently as humans can the land (maybe more, maybe less).

On the other other hand, if we had sentient dolphins with population levels similar to the number of humans currently on the earth I suspect it would be quite difficult supplying enough raw nutrition, let alone meat.

Yeah, it's a question for sure. But ocean needs to be much, much less efficient than land to lose. The sheer scale of the ocean is a huge point in its favor. Since we really use very little of it for our current fishing, mining, and drilling operations, anything they could use would be great.

(On the other other other hand, if we had hyperdrive-era power sources we could probably find a way around a lot of these problems through application of massive amounts of energy.)

Well, that's the real issue with believe-ability for me. If you can build a thing to fly people between planets with ease, you can probably build a thing for people to live in space with ease. At that point fighting over planets is ludicrous. "multiculturalism" is pretty far down the list.

But none of this really gets into the behavioral question - could they get along, assuming it's in their interest to do so? Given my experience with human nature it seems like the potentially-rational choice of cooperation might not be very likely, and who can say what sentient dolphin culture would be like.

Much human conflict comes down to primate dominance dynamics. The question isn't "could they get along" but rather why would they fight? Conflict is a resource investment that needs to pay off. There's no reason to fight if there's nothing to gain. In humans there is always something to gain because everyone can use everyone else's resources and mate with everyone else's mates. Interspecies, not so much. But there's nothing we'd need from dolphins (or sentient arctic seals, or sentient subterranean creatures, etc) that isn't purely an economic thing. At that point there isn't much contact and it's just cheaper to trade.

[sambojin]

At least the portraits totally confirms the ability to have a mushroom with a mohawk and some bling.

"I pity the fool that sautées my brothers!"