Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Shadowlord]

Look at a housefly

A HOUSEFLY!??!

Spoiler: my reaction (click to show/hide)

[Retropunch]

I'm completely fine with them having both, they can have as many statement-genders as they want, but the question asked was 'why' they did it, especially when there isn't any difference outside of human.

I'm not being inflammatory by saying that there would be a backlash if aliens didn't have alternative genders (cue Mass Effect), so it's easier to just give every race that even if there isn't a difference in art/whatever.


@FD - lol at video. Much lol.

[Shadowlord]

Hey, Asari are hot - an entire species of blue alien space babes! (And at least there's a reason for it)

says a person who has not "dated" Liara in any of the mass effect games

[Persus13]

I'm not being inflammatory by saying that there would be a backlash if aliens didn't have alternative genders (cue Mass Effect), so it's easier to just give every race that even if there isn't a difference in art/whatever.

Or maybe the programmers found it easier to have two genders coded in for every race, and not just humans, and then the artists decided they didn't want to have to do twice the work on alien portraits by varying by gender instead of them worrying about some imaginary "backlash"

[JumpingJack]

Or maybe the programmers found it easier to have two genders coded in for every race, and not just humans, and then the artists decided they didn't want to have to do twice the work on alien portraits by varying by gender instead of them worrying about some imaginary "backlash"

Perhaps, though Paradox has shown themselves to be conscious of sensitive matters before. Sieg Heil! And, of course, backlash is only imaginary until it happens.

[Sirus]

So this game has been released for a while. What sort of mods do people recommend?

I actually built a necessary mod list while we were working on the multiplayer
These are the mods I feel are necessary right now for an interesting, immersive game. I run a plethora of other ones, but I could play without them. I don't really want to play without these ones.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=709259214 - Binary Systems

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=682691478 - Namelist Compilation

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=711825958 - Fox Portrait Dimorphism

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=683851819 - More Technologies

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=682426091 - One Sol System

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=693402022 - Civilian Trade

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=717791256 - Flag Compilation

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=727000451 - More Events

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=682776251&searchtext=beautiful+battles - Beautiful Battles

Alright, finally got Stellaris working again and I'm checking out the mods. Installed some, ignored others.

Main question is: no mods to improve sector AI? Combat balance? Planetary invasion? I thought consensus was that those were some of the most lacking things in the current version of the base game.

[Karnewarrior]

So this game has been released for a while. What sort of mods do people recommend?

I actually built a necessary mod list while we were working on the multiplayer
These are the mods I feel are necessary right now for an interesting, immersive game. I run a plethora of other ones, but I could play without them. I don't really want to play without these ones.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=709259214 - Binary Systems

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=682691478 - Namelist Compilation

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=711825958 - Fox Portrait Dimorphism

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=683851819 - More Technologies

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=682426091 - One Sol System

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=693402022 - Civilian Trade

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=717791256 - Flag Compilation

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=727000451 - More Events

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=682776251&searchtext=beautiful+battles - Beautiful Battles

Alright, finally got Stellaris working again and I'm checking out the mods. Installed some, ignored others.

Main question is: no mods to improve sector AI? Combat balance? Planetary invasion? I thought consensus was that those were some of the most lacking things in the current version of the base game.

Beautiful battles handles Combat balance adequately, IIRC. There is a planetary invasion mod, though it doesn't seem to change much of anything as far as I can tell. Possibly, I'm just shit at invading planets.

Sector AI seems mostly untouched AFAIK. There's an Asimov AI mod, but it was too large to put on the list; like I said, I was developing that list for a multiplayer match and I didn't have 3 hours to wait for everyone's grandmother's dial-up to download the biggest mod since Sid Mier's Beyond Earth.





As far as the fox tits goes, I knew I forgot to remove something. It was either Sprin or BFEL who wanted it on that list, so blame them. But it IS immersive, in a sense; the Devs obviously had neither the time nor inclination to dimorphize the aliums, but there's little reason to expect most aliens to be non-dimorphic sexually since most earth creatures ARE dimorphic in some sense.

It's not like humans would likely be able to tell the sex of random aliens anyway? Look at a housefly and tell me if it's male or female.

I'm not sure on houseflies, but if you look at a spider and it's larger than usual, it's usually safe to say it's a girl spider. Likewise, cattle with large horns are usually male, and female dogs tend to have softer curves. Just because they aren't extremely dimorphic like humans doesn't mean that most species /aren't/. And if you spend enough time with them, you can usually end up telling them apart with a reasonable degree of success. I imagine that once you fully integrate those space-suit birds into your population, and people start seeing one or two a day, and going to school with the birds, and eating lunch with the birds, eventually it would become reasonable to expect your average human to be able to tell the difference between a male bird in a space-suit and a female bird in a space-suit.

[stabbymcstabstab]

Christ you would think learning the difference between genders on aliens would be one of the more important things for the people running a stellar empire to learn, you know so those pathetic pacifist xenophiles don't accidentally start a war.

[Eric Blank]

I fear that, if any species out there is likely to start a war because a human hit on them/didn't realize they were female, then war is inevitable.

[IronyOwl]

I'm completely fine with them having both, they can have as many statement-genders as they want, but the question asked was 'why' they did it, especially when there isn't any difference outside of human.

I'm not being inflammatory by saying that there would be a backlash if aliens didn't have alternative genders (cue Mass Effect), so it's easier to just give every race that even if there isn't a difference in art/whatever.

Would there, though? Mass Effect is a pretty popular RPG with rather relevant mechanics to issues of gender and sexuality. Stellaris is a somewhat more niche, uh, space opera 4X trying for immersive sandbox elements, I guess? I'm not sure it knows either. But I doubt they'd get anything substantial, because I don't see a lot of places to latch onto.

Case in point: Mass Effect got on the actual, television news for being a rape simulator or whatever. Stellaris is probably not going to get on the news for being a fascist training simulation. The odds of people bitching about waifus and the equipment thereof is therefore probably way, waaaaaaay higher for the former than the latter.

Finally, even if they were concerned about that, they still would have needed to consider that before artistic concerns or been leaning towards leaving it out for that to be the answer to 'why'. Given that they included a fair variety of aliums and bothered to animate them, neither sounds very likely.

I fear that, if any species out there is likely to start a war because a human hit on them/didn't realize they were female, then war is inevitable.

To be fair, you could say that about pretty much anything. I'm not sure that means it's wrong.

[EnigmaticHat]

I mean humans are just another alien race in Stellaris.  If the other aliens didn't have gender, that would make humans special snowflakes, which in this universe we aren't.

[IronyOwl]

So here's a question for everyone, and I'm not gonna say LW in particular but I am gonna laugh at something.

Suppose, hypothetically, that you have some intelligent, militaristic, fanatically xenophilic birds living on an arctic world, only to be visited by beings from the stars- charismatic, sociologist, individualist, fanatically xenophilic ocean-dwelling molluscs. These benevolent squid overlords raise their new featherfriends into their own crummy little dominion on their own borders. Eventually this empire actually spreads to a few nearby worlds, migration treaties are approved, and in the end our four-eyed feathery friends control 12 Pops located among three planets.

...eleven of which are chubby molluscs, while a lone, solitary avian bravely mans the capital, a second bird pop growing at the vigorous rate of 0.1 per month. Even their two colonies are pure, 100% overlord stock. The vast majority of the galactic snowbird population dwells on the cooler tentacle worlds, where they migrated about the same time aliens were flocking to their own world.

So the thing that really got me thinking about this, though, is that the bird empire is still primary species leader only. That's some apartheid-level shit on the numbers, everyone likes each other on both a species and empire level, it's the bird's homeland and holdings but they were raised up by the molluscs... I'm not sure what that society looks like, and I'm now really, really curious. Are the birds slightly pissed that everyone else left? Are they thrilled to have so many pet aliens? Do the molluscs care that they can't rule the bird's empire too? Are there royal bird families, or do high-end government jobs have an arbitrary restriction on them? Are there bird hardliners who think it's absolutely vital that birds remain in control of birdland, and if so why? Because it's theirs? Because they have to catch up to their squishy cousins? Because their good soft friends are too figuratively soft to do what must be done?

This has become a weirdly fascinating question for me.

[Teneb]

Make Birdland Great Again. Clearly.

[JumpingJack]

Make Birdland Great Again. Clearly.

Vote Donald Duck 2216!

[Persus13]

They're both fanatic xenophiles, so they probably consider it to be a symbiotic relationship that works fine, with the flying birds better qualified leaders due to their ability to fly and move around faster. Since these are birds, new ones are probably raised in some sort of family nest until they're sent out on their own to lead the mollusks, or get kicked out of nest to find new territory and decide to immigrate to the mollusk empire.