Print

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

[Alkhemia]

the like the humans crossed with the hivers they FTL is like a mass accelerator

A gate that doesn't require an end?

yes
you can see it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAvG2FhZeuY&feature=g-all

[Tres_Huevos]

Ack, yeah, I guess that is an important detail in this game. Yeah, acceleration gate with no end needed is apt. You slow down after a few turns, though, but can build gates (out of cubes, the resource you form ships from) midway to keep speed up on longer trips.

The official lore on the race: http://www.kerberos-productions.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=36433
If anyone is interested in that sort of thing.

[Alkhemia]

They also start with AI pretty great I wonder if they can have AI rebellions

[BigD145]

you can see it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAvG2FhZeuY&feature=g-all

You can see someone failing at SciFi.

[Alkhemia]

yeah but it the only one I could find

[lastverb]

Ok, here are my 3 cents on Loa (and they are pretty much unplayable atm):
- Last patch made costs of their fleets enormous. There is a little bug that ships worth x cubes is much cheaper than x cubes, but it still costs a lot.
- Early game expansion is slowest of them all, mainly due to those enormous costs - you have to pay for gates between systems and inside them.
- Ftl drive is too slow, you need gates (hiver speed without gates) and even with those gates they are not that much faster than humanz (while hivers teleport). Next bug is not helping.
------- Enormous bug with pathfinding. Your ships IGNORE gate network and just go straight in line (remember hivers not using their gates closer to target?).
+ Your fleet are everything. Build them once and transform! Need missile ships, you got a fleet of them next turn. Don't have a colo'a'nizer? Now you got.
+ I like their different from all colonizing method.
They still need a few patches to be playable.

edit: Oh and those gates you build everywhere in deep space - they are indestructable for others.

[motorbitch]

i had no problem with pathfinding. maby some clarification on how this drive is working is needed:
the accelerator gates will accelerate the cubes to max speed when they pass through, after this, the cube will start to slow down slowly down to 0.75. this is why loa will build gates within a distance of 5 lj between systems. however, after 5 lj the speed of the cube will *not* yet have dropped to 0.75.
so, if you have a gate at one system, it is well possible that the fastest route to another system indeed is the direct route, even if there is no additional gate enroute and the cube will slow down significantly during the travle.
if its faster to use an alternative route with more gates, the cube will take this way.


as for the costs of the ships, remember that loa never have to scrap any ship... all your ships will always be up to date, and you can use them for any task without the need to build support ships.

its true the loas *income* expands very slowly at game start. mostly because the population grow is realy slow, and linked to the tax rate (more taxes, less grow).
this will leave trade as the best option to increase income during the early game - but loa frighters cost roughly 3 times as much as frighters of other races. loa players indeed have to be very careful what they spend money on.
on the other hand, loa will never pay upkeep for colonies with bad living conditions - they just can colonize every planet they find without bothering about develpement costs. if this is exploited right, a loa player will see a massive income increase once the new colonies start to generate income.

i think loa are extremely fun, and proalby will become my favorite race to play. however, right now there is an annoying bug with will will always spawn loa ships at the default position, regardless where the fleet is placed within the battle manager. this makes defense against random encounters or invaders extremely difficult. i suggest to wait for another patch before realy plaing this race.

[Niveras]

The official lore on the race: http://www.kerberos-productions.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=36433
If anyone is interested in that sort of thing.

That's pretty great. Writing a 'synoposis' of a race like that is easier than a full story or novel, but still very unique. The race has enough parallels to how we live (or how we expect carbon-based life to exist) to be relatable, and yet is sufficiently different to be truly alien. I didn't notice any glaring issues in terms of logic holes, where the way they do something is too obviously some human thinking about how a non-corporeal being would do it, but I could have easily missed any such holes. I especially like the whole "terraforming is eradication" angle, making empty, barren rocks the most hospitable sort of planet for a synthetic race.

I'd love to see a Mote-like book, using that template as a basis for the alien race. Probably start with the initial rebellion.

[BurnedToast]

I see a pretty big logic hole:

Random assortment of 1's and 0's? Perfectly capable of being copied. Assortment of 1's and 0's that just happen to make up a sapient intelligence? can't be copied because magic souls DMCA quantum mechanics.

I get it, they probably didn't want your standard "boring" AI race with one monolithic personality that just copies it's self but come on, that's just silly.

[Jopax]

Well who's to say that they're 1's and 0's at that point?

I mean, an artificial inteligence isn't exactly easy to make using binary, as we've learned so far. So I think it's closer to being an organism in an artificial body which then molds the body to their personality making it rather hard or in this case impossible to copy.

Hopefuly they patch most of the big bugs by the time Christmas comes around ^^

[majikero]

I think it's more of random assortment 1's and 0's that constantly keeps changing. They're constantly learning so it's more like a program that keeps reprogramming itself on the fly.

[Shooer]

And they do cover duplication under reproduction.  They can copy themselves, but the new individual is exactly that, a new individual.

[Niveras]

I'm okay with handwaving consciousness as a non-corporeal (and sapient algorithms are corporeal; electrical energy executing code is still a part of physical reality) construct to get around the issues of replication. I agree that it is a pretty weak argument; ideally, an actual work of hard science fiction based on this race might touch on the ethics of a race of beings that can replicate themselves flawlessly: maybe all the duplicate entities really are still considered "one" entity (kind of an ultimate form of multitasking) and it is only the race's internal ethics and resource consumption (e.g. energy requirements) that prevent any given individual from ballooning themselves out of control. Maybe that ballooning has happened and they had to deal with the ramifications and an internal rebellion around it, where finally the survivors all intrinsically agree never to do so (just as we might agree not to kill other people - at least, not generally on a whim).

But given humanity hasn't quite answered (or necessarily agreed to, as a race) the question of consciousness or souls, and as this is only a spot piece made as a backdrop to a minor game, I'm okay with glossing over the details.

[BurnedToast]

I'm okay with handwaving consciousness as a non-corporeal (and sapient algorithms are corporeal; electrical energy executing code is still a part of physical reality) construct to get around the issues of replication. I agree that it is a pretty weak argument; ideally, an actual work of hard science fiction based on this race might touch on the ethics of a race of beings that can replicate themselves flawlessly: maybe all the duplicate entities really are still considered "one" entity (kind of an ultimate form of multitasking) and it is only the race's internal ethics and resource consumption (e.g. energy requirements) that prevent any given individual from ballooning themselves out of control. Maybe that ballooning has happened and they had to deal with the ramifications and an internal rebellion around it, where finally the survivors all intrinsically agree never to do so (just as we might agree not to kill other people - at least, not generally on a whim).

But given humanity hasn't quite answered (or necessarily agreed to, as a race) the question of consciousness or souls, and as this is only a spot piece made as a backdrop to a minor game, I'm okay with glossing over the details.

Yeah, I know it's glossed over because it's a game, not a physics or philosophy paper, but tossing "quantum physics" out how they did is really annoying to me, and also strikes me as lazy. It feels to me no different then if they'd just said " oh they can't copy themselves because wizards did it".

Especially since what you described as a more hard scifi version seems like it would be a lot more interesting then what they did end up with.

[Majestic7]

Regarding handwaving Loa existence, keep in mind SotS-verse is filled with (boringly cliche) *SPACE MAGIC*. Suul'ka eat souls and there is assorted Christian underlinings (like aliens turning Catholic...) in the lore. SotS is not hard scifi, it is space opera / space fantasy. I just ignore the lore and play the game.

The lore doesn't manifest in the game in any kind of way anyway. Like the ghost ship is just a random encounter, you never learn the background story. There should be special research projects into menaces and stuff revealing their stories like autopsies in X-com... What good is background story if it doesn't manifest in the game, ever?