SDN Worlds 4 Commentary Thread V

[Tanasinn]

I hadn't known that the Sovereignty also practiced something like our "enhanced resocialization."

Also, I (OOC) didn't expect the Bragulans to try a more...uh, humane...approach to winning over the Outlands. That'll come as an obnoxious shock to my own centralists (IC) and the CENINTERN in general, I imagine.

[Siege]

The Sovvies are actually very good at selective editing of a person's mind. They call it mental scrubbing; CEID's mostly responsible for developing this proficiency... They use it as much on their own operatives as on crims and foreign operatives.

[doom3607]

Will try to come up with "inner workings". If you mean the government structure, it's a direct democracy. Somebody, anybody, suggests something to do, they decide. Once again- only forty of them!

Sure. So what you do is, you establish 'personalities' for some of these planet or fleet minds. Some of them may specialize, or think differently due to different conditions: the hive mind that grew colonizing the equivalent of Mars may not be the same as the one that grew on a paradise planet; as you yourself have noted, neither will be the same as a battlefleet.

Force Lord already landed his embassy group on your soil, you can work with that. You can work with the Locrians disputing about the Byzantines' posturing. And so on.

How do you mean, "work with" the embassy? I'm assuming I'd need Force Lord's input on anything to do with them. And yeah, I'm already trying to get personalities for the planets. The fleets I'm thinking would be sort of like Bolo mentality.

EDIT: Hmm, maybe an internal debate over how to respond to standard Byzantine lunacy. Oh, by the way, I need names for fleets. I mean, the planets were all individual hives from the old homeworld, but they each "birthed" the fleet that gaurds their world, so the fleets would more likely be named for their flagships. I'm thinking the Shield of Ages would be a decent name for the homeworld fleet, any suggestions?

Some ideas for you, Doom.

1. Sending a small group to nearby inhabited systems (need not be a fellow PC if you're worried about starting a war with another major power; could be a minor NPC nation that you make up) to help get a hang of what humans are like.

2. Meet up with an indepedent merchant of the nation of your choice and interact with him (trade negotiations of some sort).

3. Upon reviewing your shitload of data, try to find someone in a similar spot to yourself to interact with more fully (the Lost, the Refuge, probably not the MEH, though).

Good luck, always good to see a new player who actually wants to play the game.

1. Small groups aren't entirely sentient, remember? With us, it's a hive fleet or nothing. Well, depending on exactly how fast and what sort of bandwidth FTL communications offer. If it's high enough bandwidth over short distances to control a few drones, I'll send some sort of small courier to a minor NPC planet that set up in the middle of my space to avoid everyone. That always existed. It was definitely always there. Move along.

2. Again, assuming I'd need to speak with the owner of the nation in question, but I'm wondering if anyone in the area who's still active is open to this?

3. Will be talking to the Refuge, be talking to the Lost some more probably, MEH is saying nothing and I doubt CN has anything to say. Not that we'd want to talk to that genocidal lunatic anyway. We'll happily talk to other genocidal lunatics like the Shepistanis and the Bragulans, though.

[Darkevilme]

I have a sudden urge to try and have someone sell the entire catalogue of Haru Haru media productions to the Locri while stressing their historical nature....*evil*

[doom3607]

I think I'll have to take you up on that. We get swindled, learn a bit about you blasted felines? Namely, "Don't trust 'em."? Always good to know the neighbors.

EDIT: No guarantees you won't be ripped off from our PoV. We may give you some "historical artifact" that we mass-produce.

[Simon_Jester]

How do you mean, "work with" the embassy? I'm assuming I'd need Force Lord's input on anything to do with them.

So send him a PM and figure it out between you two. Set up Googledocs, that helps a lot with collaboration.

"Work with:" Have the Locrians say or do interesting things to the Centralist ambassadors. Have the Centralist ambassadors say or do interesting things to the Locrians. Have them both try to say or do interesting things at the same time and let hilarity ensue in the confusion. Be creative, flexible, and don't be afraid to create absurd situations.

1. Small groups aren't entirely sentient, remember? With us, it's a hive fleet or nothing. Well, depending on exactly how fast and what sort of bandwidth FTL communications offer. If it's high enough bandwidth over short distances to control a few drones, I'll send some sort of small courier to a minor NPC planet that set up in the middle of my space to avoid everyone. That always existed. It was definitely always there. Move along.

OK, but you need to be a bit more flexible about this "small groups are nonsentient" rule, I think. As it stands, you've written yourself into a corner: the Locrians can't interact meaningfully with anyone who doesn't come to them, which means they have to come to you. If other people don't deliberately take the initiative to start interesting plots with your civilization, what will you do to make interesting things happen?

Perhaps you can work out some kind of telepresence. Remember that we have in this setting AIs which operate dispersed over interstellar distances; this implies that the hardware exists for a mind in one system to keep track of what's going on in another system, if not necessarily in millisecond by millisecond real time.

Perhaps you can have the Locrians hire agents who will do things on their behalf (investigate foreign nations, whatever), then write stories about the actions of those agents.

I don't know. The point is, you should have backup plans for ways to get interesting things to happen involving your nation that don't just boil down to sitting there waiting for someone to talk to you.

2. Again, assuming I'd need to speak with the owner of the nation in question, but I'm wondering if anyone in the area who's still active is open to this?

PM and ask them. if you want to interact with the Chamarrans, for instance. Or the Klavostanis. Or the Haruhiists, or the Emissaries of XylyX. Or... you get the idea.

For tiny nations right by your borders, with only one or two planets, you have the freedom to make those up- pretty much everyone who's been actively involved in the game so far has done so.

[doom3607]

Very well. I hereby declare we have enough FTL-com bandwidth to command a small ship full of drones at short distances, more once we can start restoring the repeaters we left all over the place in deep space. Would repeaters in deep space be an issue? I'm thinking maybe a year's timescale for me to get full reactivation so I can actually have a plausible excuse for not being able to send out embassies early on, but have the ability to send small groups out later. I'll get to work on trying to work with Force Lord and, given Darkevilme's comment, hopefully the Chammarans, to come up with some stuff for the Locrians to get involved with. Internal politics will happen, and I'll start up on some tiny isolated bunch of humans I can talk to. Not devour. I swear we aren't Karlacks. No, this is not a human corpse I'm eating. Move along.

[Simon_Jester]

Very well. I hereby declare we have enough FTL-com bandwidth to command a small ship full of drones at short distances, more once we can start restoring the repeaters we left all over the place in deep space. Would repeaters in deep space be an issue?

Not really. You might gain time by working on trying to interface with the existing galactic communication structure. Again, the existence of AIs capable of coordinating bodies over interstellar distances suggests that the bandwidth is already there, if you can make the hardware and software protocols match.

Talk to the United Solarian Sovereignty; they're the galaxy's reigning experts in the field.

[doom3607]

I'm just using this for time, but I may start talking to the USS.

[Shroom Man 777]

I hadn't known that the Sovereignty also practiced something like our "enhanced resocialization."

Also, I (OOC) didn't expect the Bragulans to try a more...uh, humane...approach to winning over the Outlands. That'll come as an obnoxious shock to my own centralists (IC) and the CENINTERN in general, I imagine.

Bragulans will do anything to gain an advantage. Think of Daleks, except with the metal cases replaced with bear. They can go "have pity! have mercy!" before powering up and go "BYZONINATE! BYZONINATE!"

[Akhlut]

I thought if you weren't human, they could treat you, uh, inhumanely? While humans are treated humanely with extreme prejudice.

[Mayabird]

Next time, inhumanism!
[line 2]

[Shroom Man 777]

Considering that they're meeting a bunch of ravenous all-consuming insect hordes, I say that meeting went very well indeed. They dealt with trust issues, and agreed to see each other again. Other people don't even get past the "not getting eaten" part. I call that a success.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

*Checks the list of tortures and slow painful deaths should the Centralists up the ante*

[Shroom Man 777]

It's like those Holocaust survivors! Fattycaust!

[doom3607]

Oh dear god, the HORROR! The world's greatest liposuction! Such an atrocity cannot go unpunished! (Can I have one?)

[DarthShady]

Considering that they're meeting a bunch of ravenous all-consuming insect hordes, I say that meeting went very well indeed. They dealt with trust issues, and agreed to see each other again. Other people don't even get past the "not getting eaten" part. I call that a success.

Indeed, quite a success. And about time I got back to the game.

So, the Locri... interesting.

[Darkevilme]

You know. IF the Locri actually bring up with the Karlack the idea that the Karlack are a rogue migration fleet of their own species that went unaccounted for and subsequently mutated I'd put money on the Karlack answering "oh them? we ate them, they were tastey."

[Shroom Man 777]

The Locri could be the Xel-Naga.

The original story would say that the Karlacks ate the Locri.

But then in SDNW4 2: Wings of Fattery, the Locri actually enslaved the Karlacks and now we need Infested Alyxia to save us from the Karlack... Apexai hybrids?

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

You know. IF the Locri actually bring up with the Karlack the idea that the Karlack are a rogue migration fleet of their own species that went unaccounted for and subsequently mutated I'd put money on the Karlack answering "oh them? we ate them, they were tastey."

There's more to the Karlacks than it is obvious.

[Force Lord]

I'll be sure to write another Outlands post soon.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

They don't just get cruxified and burnt alive, they get nuked, by accident.

Ah... life in this brutal galaxy is good....

[doom3607]

You know. IF the Locri actually bring up with the Karlack the idea that the Karlack are a rogue migration fleet of their own species that went unaccounted for and subsequently mutated I'd put money on the Karlack answering "oh them? we ate them, they were tastey."

Except for the part where said colony ship actually had a hyper failure and smacked into a planetoid. Kaboom. Although it might be funnier to make that the Karlacks eating them...

[Simon_Jester]

They don't just get cruxified and burnt alive, they get nuked, by accident.

Ah... life in this brutal galaxy is good....

Well, you see. Bragulans don't really care whether humans adopt Centralism or not. They just throw nukes at humans on general principles when they think they can get away with it. You persecute Centralists specifically.

In the Outlands, their main reason for opposing Centralism is that it threatens to turn the humans of the region into something it is less safe to nuke.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

They don't just get cruxified and burnt alive, they get nuked, by accident.

Ah... life in this brutal galaxy is good....

Well, you see. Bragulans don't really care whether humans adopt Centralism or not. They just throw nukes at humans on general principles when they think they can get away with it. You persecute Centralists specifically.

In the Outlands, their main reason for opposing Centralism is that it threatens to turn the humans of the region into something it is less safe to nuke.

Persecute is such a wrong word to describe the point of the "persecution". It just so happens that they are encroaching on my turf and I do not like it...

Ah well, next up, is something far worse than what most can think of.