Anyway, I was thinking about how the tetrads concept could be implemented into the game. Tetrads is a notion of culture, which basically describes a cultural element (what does it replace, what does it reject, etc.). I think implementing this concept as a feature might help creating a culture in the game.
I have questions, more than ideas. How would Thrive tackle education? Will you have to build schools? Or will it just not be factored in? In early villages, you pretty much know every resident, so would each citizen be assigned a specific job, like a teacher? How will we know when your population is too high to micromanage each unit?
I just recently talked about this in https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/the-new-miscellaneous-talk-that-doesnt-deserve-a-new-thread-thread-thread/41/3083
but I think that eyes or lack-there-of should deeply impact the growth of any self aware organism in Thrive, most specifically when referring to stargazing and related subjects. Any blind organism could easily think that their planet and theirs alone was the only thing in the universe, and likely wouldn’t look for anything else anyway. Also, it’s hard to steer a spaceship when you literally don’t have eyes.
What about using echolocation for sensing your environment? Wouldn’t such a species be able to do a lot of things we can do by having some kind of “seeing” at a distance. They could also wonder why there’s no response when you send sound waves up and they could discover space by either inventing planes and trying to go further up, or they could make radio telescopes.
Well, maybe, but space travel specifically would be a lot more challenging because sound, smell, and a lot of other senses require mediums in order to be useful.
Edit: should this thread be in the ideas for the spacefaring stage?
I agree here. Not only is there nothing they can ‘see’ which they’ll want to go towards, (a big reason for astrology and space travel and the like,) even if they did try space travel, all they’d know is that ‘if you go high enough you reach a point where your senses pick up literally nothing’, which they would probably just see as ‘the end of the universe’. The only way would be if they discovered a way to measure light and turn it into a medium they’d understand, which they would then for shits and giggles try to use to measure the sky.
The way a blind civilization would likely discover light would probably either be A. They discover energy in what they deem to be a complete vacuum or B. They discover another organism that can see.
I would like to point out that we discovered radio without us having any senses to detect it. Granted, the idea of radio telescopes might be overlooked without first knowing that there are stars.
Radio is still electromagnetic waves though, which is rather comparable to light. The ways of discovering radio-waves were also through light, namely through the colouring of certain materials as response to the waves, which would again only be noticed through light. It may be discovered, but it would be a massive coincidence, and every step would be pretty experimental with not a whole lot of reasons to actually keep going that way except for purely curiosity.
ngl, I’m starting to get underwater civ vibes from this discussion. (not that it’s going bad, it’s just refreshing to see people discuss a new concept)
The transition between the rts aoelike substage to hoi4like sub stage :
There world you inhabit after the begging of the awakaning would be a some sort of map but the map would be a square and there are other squares that you need to explore the more you explore the more you are able to see the map would expand like a puzzle the and how will it go in the later substages?
The more you explore the bigger the world gets, as I already said but then you will hit a problem how do I control some thing way more far away?
There goes my idea that you’ll have governors for the economy and the generals for warfare and the mote you explore the more these helpers. And also I would like to go so deep that youll be able see the battlefield. (Just for my liking)
An eyeless species would still be influenced by light, if only by other creatures reacting to it. So, they would most likely create some sort light detector, and someone will eventually use this device to look at the sky, and find out about space.
I find it pretty unrealistic to not evolve, even basic eyes, as long as the surface of your planet (assuming you live there) has light. Even bats that have echolocation also have pretty good eyes, because they are just so useful.
For the Awakening Stage (Tribal) you play as the leader, and can tell the members of your tribe what to do. In the space stage, you play as your entire empire. My idea is that for the society stage, you play as an in between. You would control the leader of your country, as well as your country.
You could move your leader to certain places (like cities, towns and military bases) to do certain things like motivate people, etc. You would have certain buffs/debuffs from the leader you are playing as. You could gain or lose them from certain situations. For example: 75% of peiople voted for you in the election so you have +5% happiness. There could also be certain buffs/debuffs from government forms: Oligarchy: +5% income, -5% happiness
Problems:
Certain types of government wouldn’t have a leader.
Adds entirely new system to be made on top of a normal civ- type game.
Any Ideas? This isnt very fleshed out, but i think it would be a nice addition to gameplay.
I like the idea of making movement from stage to stage seamless, and having politics and leaders in between playing an organism and a society is no exception. Crusader Kings by Paradox is a great example of how that might be made into gameplay.
On the eyeless issue, stars should eventually be discovered, but it would have to wait for modern or near-modern levels of technology. Think how we discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation or neutrinos. Distant stars are very dim and it’s actually amazing we can even see them.
Even an eyeless creature on an Earth-like planet would likely be aware of their sun, though. They would notice the heating effects of it, as well as the way plants respond to it. Moons (or your planet if you’re on a moon) might be discovered a bit sooner too, using chemical reactions that respond in a detectable way to light, maybe through taste or olfactory stimulus.
In any case an intelligent species not having eyes is probably a weird edge case that won’t be a priority to include. Also, small correction, radio waves were theorised as a result of investigation into electricity and magnetism, not optics.