Policies by Phenotype?
- Thread starter Turin the Mad
- Start date
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Rainy week here in continental Croatia, if all things go well there might be Blorg-kin in the woods soon.
BLORG? NOM NOM NOM!
If you play as humans everything will look edible, from avians via mammals to mushrooms. Don't forget to order the fried mollusc rings.
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90 something percent cosmetic. You get a little diplomatic bonus for your phenotype
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wiz said so, in the first blorg stream, during race customization
but i have not seen it in the game
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Maybe not by phenotype, but by species. If I have a large empire and, say, wanted to let the penguins migrate and not the owls because of homeworld reasons, then I'd like to restrict it. Also for RP reasons I'd like to be able to choose which species had shown their loyalty and could become leaders.
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there is possibility for some unique phenotype only interactions. especially if you add more "out there" ones like crystal based life. But overall i'd rather have it all represented in a way that any phenotype can access. Since it doesn't really make sense to restrict all mushrooms to reacting in a given way when someone might want it otherwise. i feel like it takes away from the immersion and roleplaying if you want your space mushrooms to be peaceful / violent and those options aren't available
i do want to see more unique governments and playstyles though. As is its currently great, but the potential for future expansions seems really great and fun. i have a few ideas, like some kind of real hive mind. Or a really nomadic race that has its population on giant ships rather than on planets (extreme unhappiness from being located on planets, requiring slaves or robots to work planets for them).
i do want to see more unique governments and playstyles though. As is its currently great, but the potential for future expansions seems really great and fun. i have a few ideas, like some kind of real hive mind. Or a really nomadic race that has its population on giant ships rather than on planets (extreme unhappiness from being located on planets, requiring slaves or robots to work planets for them).
(a) the game-as-currently-built explicitly has the kind of exploitation on otherness as the primary feature of Xenophobia. i.e. that is what it is "good for".
(b) I am very unsure that these are practically separable. Certainly not in the case of human beings (race is Bad Terminology really).
Xenophobia is the more traditional "racism" of humans. There is the privileged in-group and then there are foreigners. So the mechanics don't appear to necessitate racism (classification system).
The latter racism certainly requires the former and while I'd like to quibble that the former doesn't entail the latter, it has certainly been the invariable outcome in practice, the explicit aim of many of its creators, and it's hard to imagine any other use of a way of arbitrarily grouping all human groups into a handful of visually recognizable categories.
Race is a synonym of variety and breed, if you want to use other words. Variety is less emotionally charged, and has the nice bonus of being the term preferred by Darwin. All refer to groups within a species that differ in some manner and should not be used to refer to separate species.
"Racism as in classify according to race" doesn't sound right to me either. A neutral classification of varieties would just be... classification.
"Racism as in classify according to race" doesn't sound right to me either. A neutral classification of varieties would just be... classification.
I understand that part of what xenophilia helps ameliorate is the "they are different" happiness hit from being of different phenotypes than themselves.
If that understanding is correct, different species of fungus inhabiting the same planet have less penalty than, as in the Blorgstream, fungi and avians living on the same planet.
Adding salt to wound for the avian pops their xenophobia makes them even more miserable.
Having a heck of a time attempting to find that part of the Blorgstream though to catch the tooltip display...
If that understanding is correct, different species of fungus inhabiting the same planet have less penalty than, as in the Blorgstream, fungi and avians living on the same planet.
Adding salt to wound for the avian pops their xenophobia makes them even more miserable.
Having a heck of a time attempting to find that part of the Blorgstream though to catch the tooltip display...
No, I'm talking about the system in which humans are divided into mostly arbitrary, but visually distinct, races according to perceived notions of genetic relation. The words Negroid, Mongoloid, Caucasoid, etc, weren't just old timey ways to skin color, but part of a system that grouped and then ranked humans.
It would be utterly bizarre for an alien species to adopt anything resembling this system and then declare that aliens, total genetic strangers with no shared history at all, were part of the group they placed themselves into.
Let's just imagine racist humans and aliens, for ease. Look at the mammalian portraits for a minute. Do you think that a human racist, who believes there are white people, black people, asians, native americans, and maybe is even aware of Middle Easterners, Polynesians, Austronesians, or Dravidians but doesn't know which arbitrary race to assign them to, is going to just accept that Flying Monkey, Pig Monster, Six-Eyed Ratdog, Click-Clack Eyebrow, and Blind Platypus are in the same category as white people? Simply because they look like they warmed blooded, furred, lactating, sweating mammals whether or not they actually are?
This is what I mean by racism does not make sense as applied to aliens. You would have to throw out your pseudoscience and replace it with pure aesthetics. You'd get the Racist Humans & Sexy Aliens Alliance, securing the dominance of humanity across the galaxy and also being cool with sexy aliens having the vote. They could have gone full racist and enslaved the sexy aliens, but they didn't feel right about wanting to have sex with something that was legally forbidden denied citizenship, I suppose, so they just enslaved members of the Union of Aliens That Humans Don't Find Particularly Relatable.
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It should be easy enough to emulate the first contact policy in my OP for my beloved space arachnids.
" Now that we understand the Alpha Aliens ... oh look, Food! / oh bother, Not-Yet-Food/ cool, Fellow Invertebrates/ GAAAH, fungi!! RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY! "
" Now that we understand the Alpha Aliens ... oh look, Food! / oh bother, Not-Yet-Food/ cool, Fellow Invertebrates/ GAAAH, fungi!! RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY! "
Borderline derail now but I think taxonomy is much more politically important than some people. Possibly because I more or less work on taxonomies for humans.
Game-wise xenophobic ethics seem to me to about utilising Others (in this case other sapient species) for economic gain. We have yet to see more of the mechanics or how they might change.