(This applies to Awakening+ stages)
(For example) If your species is carnivore and violent will this affect your species’s civilization. For example number of wars, division sizes or similar?
Maybe.
I’ve also heard theories that in order to manage to build a civilization a species needs to have innate traits about being cooperative. So an extremely violent species, where it would have major impacts on war policy, might not be possible.
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Yeah something like that.
For example more violent and less cooperative species will better work in smaller unit sizes, while more cooperative species work better in bigger size units.
I think it’s one of the big challenges of the civ stages to make it feel like your choices up to that point are still having an impact. We absolutely don’t want to say “ok you made it to the first city, now you’re playing a generic civ game from here on”.
I think stellaris’ traits system has some cool examples of things you can do. Like having your leaders lifespans be longer or shorter (earth would be very different if humans lived 10 or 1000 years) or maybe having tradeoffs about conformism vs innovation, or happiness vs industriousness.
I agree with hh though, you need to be super cooperative to build a space faring civ imo.
Also where you can build cities is important. Maybe in one game with an amphibious creature you love archipelagoes whereas in another your horse like creature makes plains very attractive and the oceans hard to navigate.
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I read that, it sounds pretty cool.
It could also be, like if your civilization values the looks of something comparative to it’s usefulness, or vice versa.
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This remind me of the “Split” race in the X-franchise. They are a warmongering race that haven’t even left the clan-mentality behind them. They aren’t very fond of cooperating and generally unfriendly towards races they think are “weak”.
Edit; the eternal battle against bad grammar continues… 
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Has anyone here played the (ancient) video game SimEarth? It implements something similar to what tjwhale is talking about. There’s a few phylums which can emerge in the game, and they all have a linear path of evolution which, if they manage to get through it, leads to intelligence. Anyway, each of the phylums has affinities for various biomes, which translate into how big cities on that biome can get later in the game. For example, insects are so-so in every biome except icecap, and as a result intelligent insects can build only medium size cities, but can build them almost anywhere.
We’re dealing with arbitrary creatures, though, which makes things more complicated. It’ll be hard to programmatically anticipate the effects of physical traits like that, let alone psychological ones. Civilization is a highly emergent phenomena.
One thing that I suppose would be easy to capture is the effect of size. Larger creatures could have an easier time with strength-related tasks during awakening, for example clearing trees, but have more trouble with building bridges strong enough to walk across.
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For a while, I’ve been thinking about how the consequence traits in Spore correspond to frames of mind that the archetypes embody. You have the idealism of green, the opportunism of blue, and the refusal to compromise that is red.
- Shaman: Pure green, believes that everyone is part of a greater whole.
- Diplomat: Green and blue, believes in considering everyone’s interests to reach an outcome that’s best for everyone.
- Trader: Pure blue, concerned with profit above all else.
- Scientist: Blue and red, believes in cold hard facts.
- Warrior: Pure red, concerned with securing their own survival.
- Zealot: Red and green, takes idealism too far and tries to force it on others.
And then you have the “two of one” archetypes with a spin on their pure counterparts.
Cool, but a bit cookie-cutter (you’re railroaded into the same narrow set of government types and personalities as the AI).
So I thought of something similar based on how your species has evolved to make its decisions, by peers (innately social), by reason (innately observant), or by self-interest (innately competitive).
- Holistic Mindset: Evolved to factor the motivations of others in setting their own.
- Consensus Mindset: Evolved to be confident in the emergent majority of informed decision-makers best serving the greater whole.
- Reason Mindset: Evolved to base their decisions on the world around them.
- Pragmatic Mindset: Evolved to take the most practical approach to securing their interests.
- Aggression Mindset: Evolved to place self-interest above all else, giving them a ruthless streak.
- Dogmatic Mindset: Evolved to gauge the motivations of others, but only in the sense that ones contradicting their own are unacceptable.
Just throwing this out there. It’d just be neat to make evolutionary decisions matter in a way that’s still conducive to roleplaying (so one example of a dogmatic species could be the rabid fans of a particular music genre dead set on forcing it on the rest of the galaxy (woe betide anyone that didn’t evolve ears; they won’t let that stop them)).
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