The thread about the idea of psionics giving birth to a hivemind made me think a bit about hiveminds in general.
In Stellaris it seems that the hivemind works like a giant unique entity with it's consciouness shared between all organisms.
This is fairly nice but that makes me think that the hierarchical hivemind trope seem missing and that would be cool to have it.
By hierarchical hivemind I mean that the core of the hive is a powerful psychic that control half independant psychics that themselves control lesser psychic that themselves control mostly feral/mindless drones.
A well known example of that are the zerg in starcraft where the Overmind/Queen of blade control cerebrates/queens that control the bulk of the zerg that are naturally feral using psychic relays like overlords.
This kind of hivemind could provide unique gameplay different both from hivemind and regular empire like rogue servitors are fairly different from other machines (or at least were before 2.3, did not try them since yet)
The idea could be to have the specie divided in two: psychics and drones.
The former would act like normal pops using happiness and would be mostly be used as rulers. They would also remove a lot of crime. They would also never run out of rulers jobs, generating their own if needed (like the former job for unemployed drones that made minerals and food)
Why the crime removal ? Because the drones, even if they are not using happiness and can fulfill any non ruler job will generate a lot of crime (representing the psychic strain to prevent them from going feral and destroy your colony)
So you would have to have enough psychics on your planets to control the drone population.
Also contrary to normal hiveminds the ruler would be a single individual and could die, and be replaced by an other leader if that happen.
It's not a fully fleshed suggestion and I can see problems with it not yet solved (for instance, the current pop rules would make psychics and drone both reach 50% on all planets making the whole system less interesting)
In Stellaris it seems that the hivemind works like a giant unique entity with it's consciouness shared between all organisms.
This is fairly nice but that makes me think that the hierarchical hivemind trope seem missing and that would be cool to have it.
By hierarchical hivemind I mean that the core of the hive is a powerful psychic that control half independant psychics that themselves control lesser psychic that themselves control mostly feral/mindless drones.
A well known example of that are the zerg in starcraft where the Overmind/Queen of blade control cerebrates/queens that control the bulk of the zerg that are naturally feral using psychic relays like overlords.
This kind of hivemind could provide unique gameplay different both from hivemind and regular empire like rogue servitors are fairly different from other machines (or at least were before 2.3, did not try them since yet)
The idea could be to have the specie divided in two: psychics and drones.
The former would act like normal pops using happiness and would be mostly be used as rulers. They would also remove a lot of crime. They would also never run out of rulers jobs, generating their own if needed (like the former job for unemployed drones that made minerals and food)
Why the crime removal ? Because the drones, even if they are not using happiness and can fulfill any non ruler job will generate a lot of crime (representing the psychic strain to prevent them from going feral and destroy your colony)
So you would have to have enough psychics on your planets to control the drone population.
Also contrary to normal hiveminds the ruler would be a single individual and could die, and be replaced by an other leader if that happen.
It's not a fully fleshed suggestion and I can see problems with it not yet solved (for instance, the current pop rules would make psychics and drone both reach 50% on all planets making the whole system less interesting)
