This is a hugely long read, and I wouldn't blame you for TL;DRing the hell out of here. But, if you're into long boring stuff, have at! 
That said, um -
I was very excited when I recently discovered that Paradox Interactive was creating a 4x game. I’m a huge fan of Europa Universalis, and City Skylines. So, Stellaris caught my attention, especially since designing aliens is something of a hobby of mine.
Since this is Paradox Interactive, my optimism is very high. All of the strategy games produced thus far have shown an intense attention to detail and understanding of empire creation, so I am very confident that would transfer over to race design.
Before I go any further, I want to make clear that my observations and thoughts are not focused on the artwork. From purely from an art perspective, I love the alien race portraits. Well done.
However, from what I've seen in the videos, the ingame race designer appears to be somewhat limited. I'm hoping that's not the case in the final release, as there is so much potential here is silly. What I’d really like to talk about here, though, is how to make this a more unique experience for the players, and to give it the breadth, depth and flavor that all other aspects of Paradox games have, while still being easy to use, and making more sense from a science point of view.
So, here are my thoughts;
One of the key features of an alien race is that they’re alien, that is, unfamiliar and unknown. Seems obvious, right? Well, not so much. In Stellaris, we have the following options:
Seems like a pretty good selection of alien types, right? Well, again, not so much. What’s the one thing that all of these have in common? That’s right! You can find every single one of them on earth. Every. Single. One. No, really - click the links. These are all basically terrestrial clades. Which, by our operative definition of “alien” makes them prime candidates for … a fantasy game.
How do you avoid earth tropes in creating an alien race? And does it really matter? After all, Larry Niven came up with the Kizin – big scary slaving cat people, so why can’t we have those in Stellaris? And, Gene Rodenberry came up with Klingons and Vulcans and Romulans, and George Lucas came up with more aliens than I can even think of. Aaaand all of them looked like humans in funny make up.
In my opinion, that’s fine. If you want to use them or something similar, go for it. Have a blast! I’m not judging. Too much.
But, if you’re like me, and you’re wanting something a little more … exotic, then read on. I think I may have solution.
I propose we go all out. Do something that no one has done before in a 4X space game, and take the race designs to the next level. #LetsMakeSpaceGreatAgain
Xenobiology
First, let’s have some ground rules:
So, what does this even mean in terms of Stellaris?
Well, it means that race design just got serious.
The first thing we want to look at are the general environmental factors that influence your race – things like the system and planet where it evolved. There are a lot of factors that come into play here.
Star type: OBAFGKM – which one is going to be best suited for your race? Hypothetically, each could have a race evolve around them, but statistically main sequence stars are going to be your best bet. The brightness (heat) of your star will dictate how much radiation your species is used to dealing with – or in other words, this dictates which stars your biosphere will respond best to – Bioforms from a hot white star will do better in systems that have a similar stellar type (A, F & G) than if they were seeded / colonized in a system with a colder star (K, M, & brown dwarfs).
Planetary Size: Small to huge. This will dictate the gravity and atmosphere retention. The larger the planet, higher the gravity, and the denser the atmosphere. There are exceptions, (Venus has a *very* dense atmosphere) but this is the rule of thumb. Also, astronomy in the past twenty years has shown that we can have a wide range of planetary sizes that we never suspected before, from "super earths" that could potentially support life, to worlds much smaller than earth - Mars is about a quarter of earth's size.
Proximity to the Primary: How close your world is will dictate what type of atmospheric composition you have, so this will be important. Earth sits at 1 AU – or one astronomical unit, or 93 million miles.
Mean Temp: What’s the temperature of your home world? If your species comes from a desert world, it’s important to know whether that’s a frozen desert, or an inferno – desert, or arid, means only that there is little precipitation. Mars, for example, is a frozen desert world.
Gravity: Gravity is dictated by a combination of planet’s size and density. You can have a large, but low density world, and a small high density world both have the same gravity. Denser worlds have heavier metals, lower density worlds have lighter metals. Earth’s gravity is 1G, or 1 gravity.
Atmosphere: The atmosphere your world has is going to be influenced by the gravity of your world, and by how close it sits to your primary. The closer in you are, you’ll have gasses such as nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and sulfuric acid gas. Farther out, you’ll have gasses such as water vapor, hydrogen, helium, ammonia, methane.
Atmospheric Pressure: this is how thick your atmosphere is. There are several different methods of measuring atmospheric, including pascals, pounds per inch, and millibars. For our purposes here, we’ll consider earth’s atmospheric pressure at sea level 1atm. Mars by comparison (if I did this right) would be about .06atm. Or, a fraction of what earth’s is. Venus on the other hand, which is comparable in size to earth is 90atm. So, terrestrial species would explode on Mars, and be crushed on Venus, all as a function of it’s atmosphere. Fun times!
Climate/Planet Type: Where your planet sits in relation to its primary will also dictate its climate. Is the species you’re designing from a hot or cold world? Or, like us, a temperate one? (Never mind that there have been points in earth’s history where our planet has been both very tropical and a frozen wasteland). And, never mind that we have multiple climates right now - from frozen wastes, tundra, temperate, desert, and tropical all existing simultaneously. Earth is really what I like to call a Class M planet - Multiple Climate.
But, we can also look at planet type as rocky / water / frozen / gas giant. Type is the defining characteristic of the planet combined with the climate. So, you can have a frozen rocky world, or a frozen water world (Tran-ky-ky). And, you can have a rocky jungle world (Hivehom). Carrying this further, earth would be a Class M rocky world.
Tied closely to climate is hydrographics (below). Depending on where your planet is in the system, and what your climate is, you may have something other than liquid water on your world. You may in fact have liquid methane, or ammonia, if your world cold enough with a dynamic atmosphere. Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, has methane lakes: http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/the-methane-habitable-zone
Hydrographics: How much of your world is covered by liquid? Earth is 76%, which technically makes us a water world.
=================================================
Ok, so now we have the basics of what our home world is like – we know our spectral class, distance from our primary, gravity, atmosphere, climate, and what type of and how much liquid we have on the world. But, this tells us literally nothing of our race.
Any space faring alien species that you run into anywhere is technically a tool using animal. Humans for example are evolved from apes.
To clear things up really quick, let’s define what an animal is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal
Boom. We good? Good. Let’s move on.
Fortunately for us, people have been studying animals for quite some time, and while we have been limited to our terrestrial fare, it's still pretty cool. One of things that we've discovered is that there are certain traits that seem to be evolutionary universal (physical things like eyes, limbs, scales, skin, and etc.) - this is called convergent evolution, and means that similar traits can evolve in unrelated species. That's important, because that means that we'll see things that we understand in other species - like eyes, limbs, scales, etc. Exciting stuff!
So, let's start with what and how your species eats.
Diet: Put simply – how does this tool using animal get its food? And, why is this important? Probably more than anything, how a species eats is what defines them the most – Look at it this way – diplomatically, this dictates whether or not you’re food to them. Put another way – we love cows and chickens. Right next to the mashed potatoes. If an aggressive race sees you as nothing more than food, then diplomacy is going to be … interesting.
There are four main diet types:
Scavengers:
How something eats can be just as important as what it eats, plus it gives some local (ahem) flavor (cough):
Ingestion Mode
Ecotope/Ecosystem - Knowing what environment your species evolved in will tell us how it approaches the rest of the universe. An aquatic species will not see the world the same as a subterranean species. This will dictate what types of colonies your species will need to create, and what worlds they will favor.
Side note: Below this point, I pretty much just have lists of various things that would be useful for race design. You may want to skip this stuff, as no normal person is going to be interested in it, unless you really like this sort of thing (like me >___>) or you're someone who's interested in creating a mod.
You have been warned. I mean, for many, this is worse than Vogon poetry.
Really.
=================================================
Phenology, body plan and morphology
Size – Size will dictate resource and food consumption needs. The larger the species is, the more it will require, but typically the slower its metabolism. Though, not always. Nature has a way of making weird trade-offs. This can greatly affect ground combat. A tiny species will not fare well against a gargantuan one, unless they swarm them. Which means hordes of tiny ground troops against one gargantuan trooper.
Also, higher gravity worlds will typically have smaller species, while lower gravity worlds will have taller species.
Stature: Does your species stand upright, or is it lower to the ground?
Centralized on
Speed: Like size, this can and would affect ground combat – the faster a species is, the harder it will be to hit.
Reproduction
=================================================
So, using the above, let’s take a fresh look at our friends, the Blorg!
Wow. You read the whole thing? Good god, what’s wrong with you?
Thank you, though. I do appreciate the effort! I hope you enjoyed yourself?
Anyway, those are my thoughts on expanding the race generation and making it awesome. Most of it would have some of effect in game - giving bonuses or disadvantages for different things. Some of it is there just for flavor. And where possible, I’ve tried to keep it more or less accurate in terms of biology. I’m open to suggestion, and hope that something like this could be looked at for a future mod or DLC.
And, obviously, this could have been disturbingly more detailed.
Again, thank you for your time in reading this, and I hope I’ve contributed to the overall conversation on Stellaris.
~S
That said, um -
I was very excited when I recently discovered that Paradox Interactive was creating a 4x game. I’m a huge fan of Europa Universalis, and City Skylines. So, Stellaris caught my attention, especially since designing aliens is something of a hobby of mine.
Since this is Paradox Interactive, my optimism is very high. All of the strategy games produced thus far have shown an intense attention to detail and understanding of empire creation, so I am very confident that would transfer over to race design.
Before I go any further, I want to make clear that my observations and thoughts are not focused on the artwork. From purely from an art perspective, I love the alien race portraits. Well done.
However, from what I've seen in the videos, the ingame race designer appears to be somewhat limited. I'm hoping that's not the case in the final release, as there is so much potential here is silly. What I’d really like to talk about here, though, is how to make this a more unique experience for the players, and to give it the breadth, depth and flavor that all other aspects of Paradox games have, while still being easy to use, and making more sense from a science point of view.
So, here are my thoughts;
One of the key features of an alien race is that they’re alien, that is, unfamiliar and unknown. Seems obvious, right? Well, not so much. In Stellaris, we have the following options:
Seems like a pretty good selection of alien types, right? Well, again, not so much. What’s the one thing that all of these have in common? That’s right! You can find every single one of them on earth. Every. Single. One. No, really - click the links. These are all basically terrestrial clades. Which, by our operative definition of “alien” makes them prime candidates for … a fantasy game.
How do you avoid earth tropes in creating an alien race? And does it really matter? After all, Larry Niven came up with the Kizin – big scary slaving cat people, so why can’t we have those in Stellaris? And, Gene Rodenberry came up with Klingons and Vulcans and Romulans, and George Lucas came up with more aliens than I can even think of. Aaaand all of them looked like humans in funny make up.
In my opinion, that’s fine. If you want to use them or something similar, go for it. Have a blast! I’m not judging. Too much.
But, if you’re like me, and you’re wanting something a little more … exotic, then read on. I think I may have solution.
I propose we go all out. Do something that no one has done before in a 4X space game, and take the race designs to the next level. #LetsMakeSpaceGreatAgain
Xenobiology
First, let’s have some ground rules:
- There will be no “fish”, “reptiles”, “mammals”, “plants” or other terrestrial clades on any other planet as these are unique to earth, unless they have been seeded. Each species is unique to its own world.
- The biosphere dictate biology. Biology is subject to physics and chemistry. This can not be changed.
- There is no such thing as species parallel evolution. This physically, evolutionarily and statistically impossible. Two species may be similar in morphology, have similar traits or structure, but they will not be the same unless they are directly related. In other words, sorry Gene, Vulcans can’t interbreed with humans.
- Biology adapts to the geology, then to the biosphere which is creates. Put simply; when life first evolves, it will adapt itself to the raw environment in which it arises. As it evolves, the biosphere will influence and change the geology.
- Environments are not naturally suited for any form of life. Life finds a way.
So, what does this even mean in terms of Stellaris?
Well, it means that race design just got serious.
The first thing we want to look at are the general environmental factors that influence your race – things like the system and planet where it evolved. There are a lot of factors that come into play here.
Star type: OBAFGKM – which one is going to be best suited for your race? Hypothetically, each could have a race evolve around them, but statistically main sequence stars are going to be your best bet. The brightness (heat) of your star will dictate how much radiation your species is used to dealing with – or in other words, this dictates which stars your biosphere will respond best to – Bioforms from a hot white star will do better in systems that have a similar stellar type (A, F & G) than if they were seeded / colonized in a system with a colder star (K, M, & brown dwarfs).
Planetary Size: Small to huge. This will dictate the gravity and atmosphere retention. The larger the planet, higher the gravity, and the denser the atmosphere. There are exceptions, (Venus has a *very* dense atmosphere) but this is the rule of thumb. Also, astronomy in the past twenty years has shown that we can have a wide range of planetary sizes that we never suspected before, from "super earths" that could potentially support life, to worlds much smaller than earth - Mars is about a quarter of earth's size.
Proximity to the Primary: How close your world is will dictate what type of atmospheric composition you have, so this will be important. Earth sits at 1 AU – or one astronomical unit, or 93 million miles.
Mean Temp: What’s the temperature of your home world? If your species comes from a desert world, it’s important to know whether that’s a frozen desert, or an inferno – desert, or arid, means only that there is little precipitation. Mars, for example, is a frozen desert world.
Gravity: Gravity is dictated by a combination of planet’s size and density. You can have a large, but low density world, and a small high density world both have the same gravity. Denser worlds have heavier metals, lower density worlds have lighter metals. Earth’s gravity is 1G, or 1 gravity.
Atmosphere: The atmosphere your world has is going to be influenced by the gravity of your world, and by how close it sits to your primary. The closer in you are, you’ll have gasses such as nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and sulfuric acid gas. Farther out, you’ll have gasses such as water vapor, hydrogen, helium, ammonia, methane.
Atmospheric Pressure: this is how thick your atmosphere is. There are several different methods of measuring atmospheric, including pascals, pounds per inch, and millibars. For our purposes here, we’ll consider earth’s atmospheric pressure at sea level 1atm. Mars by comparison (if I did this right) would be about .06atm. Or, a fraction of what earth’s is. Venus on the other hand, which is comparable in size to earth is 90atm. So, terrestrial species would explode on Mars, and be crushed on Venus, all as a function of it’s atmosphere. Fun times!
Climate/Planet Type: Where your planet sits in relation to its primary will also dictate its climate. Is the species you’re designing from a hot or cold world? Or, like us, a temperate one? (Never mind that there have been points in earth’s history where our planet has been both very tropical and a frozen wasteland). And, never mind that we have multiple climates right now - from frozen wastes, tundra, temperate, desert, and tropical all existing simultaneously. Earth is really what I like to call a Class M planet - Multiple Climate.
But, we can also look at planet type as rocky / water / frozen / gas giant. Type is the defining characteristic of the planet combined with the climate. So, you can have a frozen rocky world, or a frozen water world (Tran-ky-ky). And, you can have a rocky jungle world (Hivehom). Carrying this further, earth would be a Class M rocky world.
Tied closely to climate is hydrographics (below). Depending on where your planet is in the system, and what your climate is, you may have something other than liquid water on your world. You may in fact have liquid methane, or ammonia, if your world cold enough with a dynamic atmosphere. Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, has methane lakes: http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/the-methane-habitable-zone
Hydrographics: How much of your world is covered by liquid? Earth is 76%, which technically makes us a water world.
=================================================
Ok, so now we have the basics of what our home world is like – we know our spectral class, distance from our primary, gravity, atmosphere, climate, and what type of and how much liquid we have on the world. But, this tells us literally nothing of our race.
Any space faring alien species that you run into anywhere is technically a tool using animal. Humans for example are evolved from apes.
To clear things up really quick, let’s define what an animal is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal
Boom. We good? Good. Let’s move on.
Fortunately for us, people have been studying animals for quite some time, and while we have been limited to our terrestrial fare, it's still pretty cool. One of things that we've discovered is that there are certain traits that seem to be evolutionary universal (physical things like eyes, limbs, scales, skin, and etc.) - this is called convergent evolution, and means that similar traits can evolve in unrelated species. That's important, because that means that we'll see things that we understand in other species - like eyes, limbs, scales, etc. Exciting stuff!
So, let's start with what and how your species eats.
Diet: Put simply – how does this tool using animal get its food? And, why is this important? Probably more than anything, how a species eats is what defines them the most – Look at it this way – diplomatically, this dictates whether or not you’re food to them. Put another way – we love cows and chickens. Right next to the mashed potatoes. If an aggressive race sees you as nothing more than food, then diplomacy is going to be … interesting.
There are four main diet types:
- Scavengers
Scavengers … scavenge. Usually feeding on anything that’s been dead a while. On our world, we have both carnivorous and herbivorous scavengers. So, think space vultures, or, you know, the Blorg. (Which may be one of the many, many reasons why they have so many challenges making friends. I’m not judging – just … saying). Scavengers need things dead. And, not just dead, but dead dead. Like Ned Stark level of dead. Deader actually. If it’s starting to decompose, good. If it’s got a whole symphony of death going, even better.
- Herbivores
Herbivores get their nourishment from plants. For our purposes here, we’ll say they get their nourishment from simple non-ambulatory bioforms or “SNABFs”.
- Omnivores
Omnivores eat pretty much anything – alive, dead, rotten, ripe, animal or SNABF! In other words, humans. Chances are, if it’s stationary for five seconds or less, we’ve stuck it in our mouth. Omnivores are probably the most adaptive when it comes to diet – they can live off of SNABFs, or other animals. Or, you know. Each other. Soylent green, anyone? - Carnivores
Carnivores! Everyone’s favorite for some reason – these guys tend to like their meal on the hoof, or wing, or fin and preferably alive and kicking. And screaming. Their diet requires them to eat fresh meat for nourishment. Doing otherwise can have very detrimental effects. So, they’ll need very specialized agriculture worlds to raise their prey animals.
Scavengers:
- Carrion-eater: real life death eaters.
- Saprotrophic: the process of nutrient acquisition most often associated with fungi – in other words; The Blorg.
- Forager: Foragers look for their food, eating what they can find when they find it.
- Display: Display scavengers will typically scare their competition away with a display of some sort – either visual, audio, or through another manner like a feather plum or mane. Hyenas, and male lions come to mind.
- Cannibals: Cannibal scavengers eat their own. Solve a lot of problems right there.
- Consumers: Omnivore consumers can be dangerous in that if not mitigated, they can lay waste to large areas. They will eat anything and everything.
- Gatherers: Gatherers collect food for consumption at a later date.
- Persistence Hunters: Persistence hunters follow their prey until it dies of exhaustion. Humans and sharks are persistence hunters
- Hunting: Carnivorous Hunters hunt other organisms for immediate consumption
- Ambush Hunters: Ambush Hunters are hidden until the moment is just right, then attack suddenly and unexpectedly. Cats are ambush hunters.
- Deception Hunters: Deception hunt by use of some form of lure. Terrestrial deception hunters would be carnivorous plants, or angler fish.
- Trapper: Trappers use traps of various sorts to entangle their prey. Terrestrial examples would be spiders.
How something eats can be just as important as what it eats, plus it gives some local (ahem) flavor (cough):
Ingestion Mode
- Filter Feeders
Obtaining nutrients from particles/organisms suspended in water / atmosphere by straining through a filter of some sort. (Baleen Whales) - Deposit Feeders
Obtaining nutrients from particles suspended in soil (SNABFs) - Fluid Feeding
Obtaining nutrients by consuming other organism’s fluids. (Mosquitoes / Spiders) - Bulk Feeders
Obtaining nutrients by consuming part or all of another organism (most animals we’re familiar with). - Ram / Suction Feeders
obtaining prey via the fluids/atmosphere around it. During ram feeding, the prey remains fixed in space, and the predator moves its jaws past the prey to capture it. This is a common feeding method with most fish.
Ecotope/Ecosystem - Knowing what environment your species evolved in will tell us how it approaches the rest of the universe. An aquatic species will not see the world the same as a subterranean species. This will dictate what types of colonies your species will need to create, and what worlds they will favor.
- Subterranean: A species that evolved underground – the surface is largely irrelevant to these guys
- Terrestrial: A species that evolved on the surface
- Aquatic: A species that evolved in liquid
- Aerial: A species that evolved suspended in the atmosphere (atmospheric floaters – think jelly fish for dense atmospheric worlds. Who said you can’t colonize a gas giant?
- Type I Amphibian (aquatic / terrestrial): A species that evolved adaptations to both aquatic and terrestrial environments. (Frogs / newts).
- Type II Amphibian (aquatic / Aerial): A species that evolved adaptations to both aquatic and aerial environments (flying fish)
- Type III Amphibian (Aerial / Terrestrial): A species that evolved adaptations to both aerial and terrestrial environments (birds / bats / flying insects)
- Triphibian (aquatic / Aerial / terrestrial): A species that evolved adaptations to all three environments (certain insects – water nymph to flying insect which lands).
Side note: Below this point, I pretty much just have lists of various things that would be useful for race design. You may want to skip this stuff, as no normal person is going to be interested in it, unless you really like this sort of thing (like me >___>) or you're someone who's interested in creating a mod.
You have been warned. I mean, for many, this is worse than Vogon poetry.
Really.
=================================================
Phenology, body plan and morphology
Size – Size will dictate resource and food consumption needs. The larger the species is, the more it will require, but typically the slower its metabolism. Though, not always. Nature has a way of making weird trade-offs. This can greatly affect ground combat. A tiny species will not fare well against a gargantuan one, unless they swarm them. Which means hordes of tiny ground troops against one gargantuan trooper.
Also, higher gravity worlds will typically have smaller species, while lower gravity worlds will have taller species.
- Tiny – Mouse sized (.1524 meters to 1 meter)
- Small – Dog or cat sized (1.1 meter to 1.5 meters)
- Medium – large dog to human sized (1.6 to 2.5 meters)
- Large – Large human to horse (2.6 to 4.5 meters)
- Giant – Elephant to Paraceratherium (4.6 to 8 meters)
(video of a Giant species giving a Medium species a love tap: http://i.imgur.com/CgwXQXJ.gifv) - Huge – Camarasaurus (8.1 to 15 meters)
- Gargantuan – Kaiju (15 meters plus)
- No limbs (snake like)
- Monopod: One limb.
- Biped: two limbs (we’re bipedal, but not bipeds)
- Triped: three limbs (Pierson’s Puppeteers from the Ringworld series)
- Quadruped (we’re upright quadrupeds!)
- Quintaped – five limbs (sea stars)
- Hexapod – six limbs (most insects / fish – number of fins)
- Septapod – seven limbs
- Octopods – eight limbs (octopi & cuttlefish)
- Novempod – nine limbs
- Decapod – ten limbs
- Invertebrate – no skeletal structure – favors higher G, wetter worlds
- Endoskeleton – skeleton is internal – favors mid G worlds, temperate worlds
- Exoskeletal – Skeleton is external – favors low G worlds, and arid worlds
Stature: Does your species stand upright, or is it lower to the ground?
- Upright – the species is upright like a primate, or tree
- Horizontal – the species is horizontally structured like most insects or animals we’re familiar with.
- Radial – Sea stars
- Bilateral – most animals we’re familiar with
- Trilateral – Pierson’s Puppeteers
- Asymmetrical – the Blorg / Vegetation / SNABFs
- Body/trunk – one structure which contains all organs and from which all limbs originate from
- Torso/thorax & abdomen
- A-thorax, B-thorax & abdomen
- Segmented body – each segment mirroring all other segments, with the notable exception of the ends.
Centralized on
- a head
- the body (no head)
- the limbs
- specialized stalks
- a head
- the body (all over the body)
- over the limbs
- Adorable
- Attractive
- Beautiful
- Graceful
- Powerful
- Majestic
- Intimidating
- Frightening
- Terrifying
- Horrific (nope. not putting links past this).
- Disgusting
- Repulsive
- Vomitus
- Bioluminescenct communication
- Audio communication
- Visual – visual cues / dance display
- Olfactory - smells
- Electrocommunication
- Tactile – touch
- Seismic communication
- Autocommunication
- Thermal communication
- Radio – I’m hypothesizing evolved natural radio transmitters, since radio seems to be fairly basic natural occurance. Other species may perceive this as extrasensory communication.
Speed: Like size, this can and would affect ground combat – the faster a species is, the harder it will be to hit.
- Stationary / Stands Ground: Once stationed, does not move until dead.
- Slow: Slug paced
- Medium: Human equivalent.
- Fast: Horse
- Very fast: Cheetah
- Extreme: Peregrine Falcon
- Sudden: No earthly equivalent.
- active
- energetic
- hyperactive
- sluggish
- passive
- lethargic
- Lungs: elastic sacs with branching passages in which an atmosphere is drawn. They’re also super effective, especially if their internal.
- Internal
- External
- Gills: respiratory organs through which specific gasses are extracted from the surrounding atmosphere flowing over the surfaces within or attached to the organism.
- Anaerobic: Not needing to breathe
- Absorption: Atmosphere is absorbed through a membrane.
- Cilia: Short microscopic, hairlike structures
Reproduction
- Oviparous: Egg laying
- Viviparous: bringing forth live young that have developed inside the body of the parent.
- Asexual: offspring arise from a single organism, and inherit the genes of that parent only
- Budding: is a form of asexualreproduction in which a new organism develops from an outgrowth or bud due to cell division at one particular site – however, the bud may be fertilized by another organism. The new organism remains attached as it grows, separating from the parent organism only when it is mature, leaving behind scar tissue.
=================================================
So, using the above, let’s take a fresh look at our friends, the Blorg!
- Star type: F - The Blorg appear to have a main sequence white star. So, they would favor brighter, warmer stars. Which makes sense since they come from a Jungle world.
- Planetary Size: Medium - I suspect that the Blorg’s homeworld is comparable in size to earth.
- Mean temp: unknown - The average temperature of Blorg is never stated, though we can infer that it is very warm.
- Gravity: unknown - The Blorg’s gravity is never stated, however, by inference, we can reasonable assume that their homeworld gravity is within range of 1G – either slightly above, or slightly below.
- Atmosphere: unknown - Again, the Blorg’s homeworld atmosphere is never talked about. However, based on where it sits in the system, we can reasonably guess that it has a carbon dioxide / nitrogen / oxygen mix, with trace elements of other gasses and industrial pollutants.
- Atmospheric Pressure: unknown - Once more, we do not know the specifics of the Blorg’s homeworld. In this case, I’m going to estimate that it is again comparable to earth. Probably somewhere within five atmospheres either way, and probably on the denser side.
- Climate/Planet type: Tropical - The Blorg homeworld has been stated to be a tropical world several times.
- Hydrographics: Unknown – Above 0% (arid world), but below 100% (water world) - The Blorg homeworld is probably high in hydrographics – at least on a par with Earth (76%).
- Diet: Deposit feeding saprotrophic scavengers - The Blorg are noted to be a fungus like species, so I’m assuming they have a fungus like diet.
- Ecotope/Ecosystem: Subterranean: A species that evolved underground - My guess is that the Blorg evolved underground, and at some point in their history – perhaps after the development of more advanced party technology, they moved above ground to find more friends.
- Phenology, body plan and morphology
- Size: Giant – Elephant to Paraceratherium - At first I suspected that the Blorg were about two meters in height, but then I thought, no, they’re friendly giants. Which makes sense why they have so much trouble making friends. They can be a little intimidating.
- Limbs: Biped: two limbs - All photographic evidence suggests that the Blorg have two limbs.
- Skeletal Structure: Invertebrate / no skeletal structure / favors higher G, wetter worlds - The Blorg, being fungal like, have no skeletons, and therefore are invertebrates.
- Epidermal: For species that do not have an exoskeleton: damp skin - The Blorg appear to be covered in a damp epidermal layer
- Stature: Upright – the species is upright like a primate, or tree. - The Blorg appear to be an upright species.
- Structure: Asymmetrical - The Blorg body structure appears to be asymmetrical in nature.
- Body plan: Body/trunk – The Blorg appear to have a single solid trunk without a discernable head.
- Location of senses: Decentralized on the body (all over the body) - The Blorg do not appear to have a centralized location for their senses, which may be dispersed over the entirety of their body.
- Appearance: Vomitus - Really. Do we need to discuss this? I’m attempting to eat.
- Communication method: Visual - Have you ever seen the Blorg Friendship Dance? May the gods have mercy. It’s as if someone choreographed Vogon Poetry, and then shot themselves on the stage, while strangling themselves with their own intestines. Other than that, it’s lovely.
- Coloring: earth tones
- Speed: Slow: Slug paced - The Blorg are slow. Painfully, epically slow.
- Metabolism: lethargic - I just don’t see the Blorg running a marathon – do you?
- Respiration: absorption - The Blorg absorb the atmosphere through their skin.
- Gender: TBD - WE DON’T KNOW. WE DON’T WANT TO KNOW.
- Reproduction Budding - The Blorg appear to reproduce by budding. Ew.
- Life Span: 200 years +?
Wow. You read the whole thing? Good god, what’s wrong with you?
Thank you, though. I do appreciate the effort! I hope you enjoyed yourself?
Anyway, those are my thoughts on expanding the race generation and making it awesome. Most of it would have some of effect in game - giving bonuses or disadvantages for different things. Some of it is there just for flavor. And where possible, I’ve tried to keep it more or less accurate in terms of biology. I’m open to suggestion, and hope that something like this could be looked at for a future mod or DLC.
And, obviously, this could have been disturbingly more detailed.
Again, thank you for your time in reading this, and I hope I’ve contributed to the overall conversation on Stellaris.
~S
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