Primitives are not a... terribly underdeveloped area in Stellaris.
You can by voyeurs watching from the space-bushes with binoculars, you can do unspeakable things with your probes, you can tell them that Materialism is totally in this year and won't they abandon that spiritualist nonsense before they ascend as Fanatic Purifiers, you can wear their skin like suits as you take their place. And then you can just go in and shoot them with lasers.
There's a variety of events. There's knockoff X-Com, knockoff Avatar, knockoff Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. There's the option to save them from a meteor (Which was never updated to work with the new starbases in 2.0...) or from smugglers or from the Worm's loving embrace or... you get the idea.
But despite all this, there's still something missing from Primitives. And given that they're on Mr. Moregard's list of things to flesh out, here's my stab at it.
This is the general outline of what I think a Primitives Storypack would look like. Please do let me know what you think!
You can by voyeurs watching from the space-bushes with binoculars, you can do unspeakable things with your probes, you can tell them that Materialism is totally in this year and won't they abandon that spiritualist nonsense before they ascend as Fanatic Purifiers, you can wear their skin like suits as you take their place. And then you can just go in and shoot them with lasers.
There's a variety of events. There's knockoff X-Com, knockoff Avatar, knockoff Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. There's the option to save them from a meteor (Which was never updated to work with the new starbases in 2.0...) or from smugglers or from the Worm's loving embrace or... you get the idea.
But despite all this, there's still something missing from Primitives. And given that they're on Mr. Moregard's list of things to flesh out, here's my stab at it.
The crux of it all is knowledge. How aware are the primitives of your giant observation station floating in the sky?
If the primitives are not aware of you, then primitive interaction is mostly the same as today. You set your Observation Station's mode in accordance to how much of a bad guy you are, then sit back and watch the Society/Slaves roll in.
But if they are aware of you, things change in that you can actually open up a diplomatic screen with the aliens.
They'll function mostly the same as a normal empire in that regards, though with obvious restrictions on your options to engage with them - No, Machine Age mammalians, we appreciate you wanting to use your primitive tanks to protect us in a defensive pact but let's be real here. We'll happily sign a nonaggression pact saying we won't blow you up with a Colossus, though!
Egalitarian primitives will be upset with Authoritarian Tyrant FTL aliens, most of them will find a Hive Mind FTL creepy, and so on. If you're actively probing them, they'll have an opinion penalty and a Trust Loss over time, with a few exceptions like Authoritarian primitives that don't particularly care if you abduct the lower class rabble. Maybe you came and conquered the previous owners of the system and the primitives Love you for chasing away their old oppressors, or Hate you for beating up their good friends. Etc.
If the primitives are not aware of you, then primitive interaction is mostly the same as today. You set your Observation Station's mode in accordance to how much of a bad guy you are, then sit back and watch the Society/Slaves roll in.
But if they are aware of you, things change in that you can actually open up a diplomatic screen with the aliens.
They'll function mostly the same as a normal empire in that regards, though with obvious restrictions on your options to engage with them - No, Machine Age mammalians, we appreciate you wanting to use your primitive tanks to protect us in a defensive pact but let's be real here. We'll happily sign a nonaggression pact saying we won't blow you up with a Colossus, though!
Egalitarian primitives will be upset with Authoritarian Tyrant FTL aliens, most of them will find a Hive Mind FTL creepy, and so on. If you're actively probing them, they'll have an opinion penalty and a Trust Loss over time, with a few exceptions like Authoritarian primitives that don't particularly care if you abduct the lower class rabble. Maybe you came and conquered the previous owners of the system and the primitives Love you for chasing away their old oppressors, or Hate you for beating up their good friends. Etc.
So first and foremost, there's ways for primitives to learn about the FTL in orbit of them.
Sometimes they can find out about you on their own in a randomly triggered event and contact you, though only really advanced Primitives can both use their telescopes to find your observation post and then translate your language. The Stone Age people will just have to keep wondering what that new star in the sky is.
Another way, however, is for observation events to go wrong. Already there are events for Passive and Aggressive observation and such where the aliens find your people. A simple tweak to these events where, say, a piloted ship crashes and they demand technology in return for science can result in an opinion penalty if refused.
And finally, you might just choose to talk to them directly. The Uplift button is gone, and instead a Make Contact button is in its place, and Uplifting is now a diplomatic option with primitives who are aware of you in place of where a Research Agreement would normally be. Indoctrination is also moved into primitive diplomacy, and Infiltration requires them not to know about you. And you better believe if that knockoff Avatar guy succeeds in thwarting you, they'll learn about you, and hate you with every inch of primitiveness in their bodies!
You can even send them envoys! Not sure why you'd want to, though. Plus, given their primitive-ness, they can't learn about other empires through you.
Conversely, once they do know about you, Make Contact is replaced by End Contact. Once pressed, this opens a progress bar that slowly ticks up, where your empire engages in practices to make the primitives forget about you. Stone Age forgetting progresses quickly - just bomb the few tribes that know about you. Or simply bribe them to keep quiet, pacifist coward. Early Space Agers would be a little bit harder, since you're trying to scrub your existence off their internet. Good luck with that.
Sometimes they can find out about you on their own in a randomly triggered event and contact you, though only really advanced Primitives can both use their telescopes to find your observation post and then translate your language. The Stone Age people will just have to keep wondering what that new star in the sky is.
Another way, however, is for observation events to go wrong. Already there are events for Passive and Aggressive observation and such where the aliens find your people. A simple tweak to these events where, say, a piloted ship crashes and they demand technology in return for science can result in an opinion penalty if refused.
And finally, you might just choose to talk to them directly. The Uplift button is gone, and instead a Make Contact button is in its place, and Uplifting is now a diplomatic option with primitives who are aware of you in place of where a Research Agreement would normally be. Indoctrination is also moved into primitive diplomacy, and Infiltration requires them not to know about you. And you better believe if that knockoff Avatar guy succeeds in thwarting you, they'll learn about you, and hate you with every inch of primitiveness in their bodies!
You can even send them envoys! Not sure why you'd want to, though. Plus, given their primitive-ness, they can't learn about other empires through you.
Conversely, once they do know about you, Make Contact is replaced by End Contact. Once pressed, this opens a progress bar that slowly ticks up, where your empire engages in practices to make the primitives forget about you. Stone Age forgetting progresses quickly - just bomb the few tribes that know about you. Or simply bribe them to keep quiet, pacifist coward. Early Space Agers would be a little bit harder, since you're trying to scrub your existence off their internet. Good luck with that.
Who cares about primitives, though? Like, even all the more advanced ones can make are nukes. Pfft, you've got Tier 1 Missiles that are better than that garbage!
You can trade with the Primitives, however the options are different when compared to trade with normal empires. Some things they'll not care about at all - Stone Age primitives don't give two rocks about your 'Energy Credits' without batteries to store them, nor will Early Space Agers care much for Dark Matter. But hey, even a modest gift of 200 food is enough to make that Renaissance Mollusc planet love you!
As for what you can ask for in return, other than their laughably small supply of resources, is access to their world. They have Rare Resource deposits? Yes, pretty please, we would like to build a special Rare Resource Extractor on your planet and send one of our pops there to live with you! Are you a Megacorp? Well, Steam Age arthropoids, I hope you like a branch office with Space McDonalds on your planet! Or maybe you're both slaving bastards and enact your own mini-Slave market where you buy slave pops from them in exchange for resources, at a massive discount compared to the actual FTL Slave market!
Obviously you can't get too much from primitives. They're primitives! But it's better than peanuts worth of society research.
You can trade with the Primitives, however the options are different when compared to trade with normal empires. Some things they'll not care about at all - Stone Age primitives don't give two rocks about your 'Energy Credits' without batteries to store them, nor will Early Space Agers care much for Dark Matter. But hey, even a modest gift of 200 food is enough to make that Renaissance Mollusc planet love you!
As for what you can ask for in return, other than their laughably small supply of resources, is access to their world. They have Rare Resource deposits? Yes, pretty please, we would like to build a special Rare Resource Extractor on your planet and send one of our pops there to live with you! Are you a Megacorp? Well, Steam Age arthropoids, I hope you like a branch office with Space McDonalds on your planet! Or maybe you're both slaving bastards and enact your own mini-Slave market where you buy slave pops from them in exchange for resources, at a massive discount compared to the actual FTL Slave market!
Obviously you can't get too much from primitives. They're primitives! But it's better than peanuts worth of society research.
Some of the existing events would be remade to accommodate this new system. The rogue scientist goes down and stirs up trouble? Surprise! They know about you, he's their God Emperor ruler, and with a hefty opinion malus. Even when you, ahem, get rid of the rogue scientist they still have minus Opinion for taking away their savior.
However, there would also be new events to take advantage of this new system. Did you try to conquer them with ground armies but for some reason only sent a single half-dead Slave Army and got beaten back? Guess who knows about you now.
Maybe the primitives will discover a relic of the First League and offer it to you, for the astronomical price of 100 Minerals.
Or maybe the Early Space primitives you've had good relations with for decades, with your people working on their world to funnel you Rare Crystals, finally gets to FTL and you get a choice of events to let your people remain there and let the primitives reap the rewards of the Rare Resource Extractor, or maybe take your people back but welcome them to the galactic stage, or more, some locked by ethic and gestalt-ness.
Or, maybe an Atomic Primitive is determined to blow itself up, so you plead with them to send you a pop so they won't go extinct, or insist on stepping on their toes to prevent nuclear war, or take any of your people on their world out of there before they get caught in the crossfire. (Or maybe you totally don't infect the silos with a virus and make them launch missiles on their own).
However, there would also be new events to take advantage of this new system. Did you try to conquer them with ground armies but for some reason only sent a single half-dead Slave Army and got beaten back? Guess who knows about you now.
Maybe the primitives will discover a relic of the First League and offer it to you, for the astronomical price of 100 Minerals.
Or maybe the Early Space primitives you've had good relations with for decades, with your people working on their world to funnel you Rare Crystals, finally gets to FTL and you get a choice of events to let your people remain there and let the primitives reap the rewards of the Rare Resource Extractor, or maybe take your people back but welcome them to the galactic stage, or more, some locked by ethic and gestalt-ness.
Or, maybe an Atomic Primitive is determined to blow itself up, so you plead with them to send you a pop so they won't go extinct, or insist on stepping on their toes to prevent nuclear war, or take any of your people on their world out of there before they get caught in the crossfire. (Or maybe you totally don't infect the silos with a virus and make them launch missiles on their own).
A long requested feature has, of course, been Hive Primitives and Machine Primitives. I see no reason these shouldn't be implemented, without requiring Utopia or Synthetic Dawn much the same way you don't need Megacorp for the Materialist FE to have a cityworld.
Hive Primitives have access to the full range of tech levels, from Stone Age to Early Space, however their buildings would be slightly different, as would their primitive jobs to match, as well as their primitive civics and primitive government types. They even have a chance of generating with the Devouring Swarm civic, for fun times ahead! Though with such a pathetic defense, who's to say you won't get a Special Project to forcibly gene-mod the Devouring Swarm's hunger away and get an eternally grateful Former Swarm?
They'd have the restrictions on normal diplomacy that you'd expect from a Gestalt. You'll still be able to send a pop down there to work the Volatile Mote fields, though, because they're living on a part of the world separate from the Gestalt and therefore don't need to be enslaved.
They'd have the restrictions on normal diplomacy that you'd expect from a Gestalt. You'll still be able to send a pop down there to work the Volatile Mote fields, though, because they're living on a part of the world separate from the Gestalt and therefore don't need to be enslaved.
Machine Primitives would come from two sources. One, they're already there, but only able to spawn as Machine Age or higher level primitives. Two, an event on a sufficiently advanced Primitive causes them to rise. Either the primitives nuke themselves and the Machines are the only ones hardy enough to survive, or there's just a straight up robot uprising in a variety of flavors, which you can help squash down in a special project or sit back and relax.
Either way, you get a Machine Primitive that's either normal, Exterminator, Assimilator, or Servitor, with similar swaps as the Hive Primitive. So early in their developments, the Machines may be... malleable. Give the Exterminator therapy so it gives up on its still-nascent -1000 opinion, or as an Exterminator convince the Assimilators and Servitors that meatbags are more trouble than they're worth.
Either way, you get a Machine Primitive that's either normal, Exterminator, Assimilator, or Servitor, with similar swaps as the Hive Primitive. So early in their developments, the Machines may be... malleable. Give the Exterminator therapy so it gives up on its still-nascent -1000 opinion, or as an Exterminator convince the Assimilators and Servitors that meatbags are more trouble than they're worth.
This is the general outline of what I think a Primitives Storypack would look like. Please do let me know what you think!
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