Is this talk about space whales or (hopefully) about moons of gas giants?
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I was talking about how gas giants probably shouldn’t be an available place for the player to evolve in.
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That’s absolutely a thing (i.e. gas giants not being an allowed starting planet). There’s a reason why space whales is a joke discussion.
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I still do wonder if some primitive autoevo species could be present on rare ocassions in gas giants, it could even just be an ON/OFF state for if there is life or not.
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What do you mean by “mars’d”?
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Getting their cores cooled down into temperatures too low, causing the magnetosphere of such planets to dwindle and eventually their atmosphere to be blown away (low gravity also adds to that), in the end making such a planet go thru a similar story to Mars.
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Is that the newest theory? I saw a special a decade ago that posed a very different theory, thought I can’t remember the name of the special to find it.
Also, isn’t Mars half the size and 1/9th the mass of Earth? That seems a lot smaller than 2/3rds.
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Even if such a small planet can retain it’s magnetosphere, the gravity may still be too low to retain the atmosphere anyways.
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That would be a good candidate for subterranean life then. Assuming it can find enough iron or whatever other element it needs underground.
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Now the question is if a subterranean civ can reach for the stars…
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Would they know what stars are? Especially if they need to hide from surface oxygen or something else that makes underground necessary form their survival?
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Exactly. If such civs can’t get into the space stage, they will be deemed as an unnecesary effort by the dev team.
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But if burrowing is a thing, and building cities is a thing, then how would the devs stop a burrower from building an underground city without spending extra time an effort programming a block on it?
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I mean I guess they could just lock those civs to industrial stage like how underwater civs would be locked to society stage. Not completely removing them but still making them not viable for ascension.
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Are they even going to “lock” underwater civs? Not programming a path that one can use to move forward and taking the time to program a block to moving forward are two different things. Would the extra programming of a “lock” even be needed?
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Locking underwater civs is required because there is no way for them to advance past society stage as of our current understanding (which likely will keep standing). Possibly every such “impossible-to-reach-ascension” civ type will need it’s own “civ progression lock”.
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Perhaps I phrased my question wrong. The ability to progress has to be programmed. If there is not a programmed way forward, is it necessary to program a block to using the non existent way forward?
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From the current prototypes, when you try getting into awakening whilist being underwater a warning pops out about you being limited to society stage. Meaning that the path forward would continue until whatever problem arises that should put an end to such a society’s advancement.
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Ah, a warning label. Yeah, that makes sense. I would think, if a method of making a steam engine underwater isn’t intentionally programmed into the game, then players just simply wouldn’t be able to do it. As opposed to something checking whether or not the player is underwater and actually removing the option to make a steam engine from the tech tree. If the circumstances necessary to make it just can’t be met, there shouldn’t be a reason to block it from being made. But a warning label/achievement for dead ending, that definitely makes sense.
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I guess you could somehow make your species decline in intelligence when in such a dead ending and after getting back to aware you’d evolve features needed to properly progress into the space stage, but I doubt the devs would spend time on adding that.
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