It was further up the thread. I haven’t checked in here in a while.
Hi! I’ve been following this game for years, but I’m new on the forum so let me know if this post belongs somewhere else. I just had this idea and felt that I needed to share it. 
The basic idea is that from any individual in your species, you can create a group. That individual will then become the leader of the group (or have an increase in a “social status” score). You can complicate it further by grouping groups or having overlapping groups. It’s basically just a tool for creating social networks and hierarchies, but it could be applied in lots of ways!
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Characteristics like intelligence, agression, empathy etc could determine the likelyhood of groups forming successfully or splitting apart at certain sizes or in certain structures. This also creates an organic way of transitioning to a society, since you would need to create a spieces that is social enough in the first place.
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Wars or fights are attemps to forcefully group individuals or groups of individuals, revolutions and in-fighting are results of groups/networks of groups being too large for the species to handle.
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You can decide what sort of society you would like to have: hierarchical or egalitarian, violent or cooperative, tight-knit or dispersed. To really flourish as a society you will need to find a type that works for your species.
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Groups can be set to perform tasks such as construction, research, fighting, etc.
I haven’t really fleshed it out but I think it has some potential. The advantage is that only a few basic principles are used to generate complexity, and that it feels very seamless and organic (as opposed to very constrained and distinct stages). It’s also unique and doesn’t feel like a rehash of other strategy games. I could see it messy pretty quickly, though. How would it work at big population sizes? Maybe organisations of hundreds of people could be the atomic parts? I would love to hear if anyone else thinks this is an interesting idea.
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Another option is, as your pop size grows, the groups - I’ll refer to them as chunks - Grow as well? Instead, individual groups subdivide. Kinda like the hierarchy of Nation - District/State/ect - City/Township? That way, principles of any given stage merge into the next, and provides a roadmap for control - as a single chunk reaches carrying capacity and subdivides, a parent chunk is created.
This would possibly allow for shuffling as well, someone who is interested in applying an edict to a particular region could select the chunk tied to a region, while if, say, you wanted to stratify via job type/class, you could have that as well?
Huh, I’m not sure (need to mess around with how thrive does it’s flavor of coding) but that does seem to be relatively straightforward to implement. Might have to do some SCIENCE.
(Did I misunderstand your idea here?)
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Establishing Principles of specific discrimination…
…Ready.
Here are several factors of discrimination within society, which also includes future or fictional factors :
- Skin color -------> Appearance, Racism
- Hair color ------> Appearance, Racism
- Eye color -----> Appearance, Racism
- Ethnicity or national origins ------> Fear of the unknown, Racism
- Biologism (hatred of organic beings) [Example: SHODAN] ------> Functions, Racism
- Synthetism (hatred of robotic or virtual beings) -------> Functions, Racism
- Sexism (any hatred related to biological and societal genders; might be related to reproduction too)
- Ageism (hatred of older or younger people)
- Siliconism (hatred of silicon-based lifeforms) -----> Biologism, Racism
- Carbonism (hatred of carbon-based lifeforms) ------> Biologism, Racism
- Homophobia -------> Sexism
- Transphobia -------> Sexism
…and I’m out of ideas. I didn’t know if this should have been a separate thread like the one where several power systems are suggested, but here it is. I think there are many factors that should be grouped within main branches of societal discrimination
- Ageism
- Classism [Proposed by @Deathwake]
- Racism
- Appearance
- Biologism
- Carbonism
- Siliconism
- Fear of the Unknown
- Synthetism
- Robotism
- Virtualism
- Sexism
- Fear of the Unknown
- Homophobia
- Transphobia
I decided not to include anything related to male or female gender because extraterrestrial life could have very different methods of reproduction.
What about a caste system? On earth humans have invented them before. This would be quite similar to sexism in a race with physically different castes, but a humanlike socitiy could get close. I’d say that discrimination on the basis ones birth, which I will call classism, is a major one you left out.
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What about ableism? And on a related note, discrimination based on morphology (For example, pronogrades discriminating against orthogrades). While the latter would be a subset of racism, it would be different, because of the fact that the marginalized morphologies would, unlike races which share the priveleged form, be physically unable to utilize much of societies’ benefits
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I always had a vision for the stage to be like the dark ages
Where youl creat new epires like befor the dark ages like the time of aleksander the III and then the industrial stages tho be where you make bether stuf then your old creations like from hiding on other creature as pets tho some kind of land mobil ow and fitht pandemics whit erly metisen or metisan sorry dont knowe a lot on English im not Engliah XD so and have population controlled
Shadoof was an early technology (“pump”) made from a bucket and a counterweight. It was used to raise water from the rivers up to the surrounding irrigation channels.
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How about depending on traits of your species being able to mostly be 1 large country as opposed to having a bunch of smaller countries as smaller ones will join bigger ones in part due to herd mentality and being more cooperative with the big limiting factor being communication times (hence why you might invent something like the optical telegraph in the Stone or Bronze Age.)
Basically smaller countries are very likely to join you unless you have very clashing policies or take hostile actions against them.
I will also say that it could be interesting to also be able to have an Industrial Revolution based off the waterwheel like it was for part of the 1700s with textile mills or even earlier with the Middle Ages with “factories” making plate armor via waterwheeled powered drop hammers.
Basically this could make industrialization easier without coal/oil as you modify your plants to be able to support steam engines at least to some degree or as you try to get more metal ore to build steam engines with.
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I think that it would help new player like my self if the crafting recipe icons because I’ve been stuck trying to make a society center
Hey!
Could there be mutineers or collapses of a society from the inside? (This could occur to the player or to AI societies)
In addition, could “migration” be implemented? Not only the population changes due to different fertility and mortality rates , but also due to significant migration (which can result in good or bad impacts for both the origin and the destination)
These events could be the result of the conditions imposed by the player on the society’s members and also due to external events. Since societies are already complex, these events (partial or total) could occur randomly with increasing probability by how concerning the stats of “morality”, “economy”, “crime”, … are (these are just examples which are most likely associated and incomplete).
If these events had external causes too, the player could manipulate them, using “unethical” strategies to increase the probability of them happening, indirectly causing failure and weakness on others. This could also happen just because members of a society see other societies as “Happier”/“Potentially better” then them.
Later, on further stages, this could be a main factor behind choices like dictatorships and control of the media, since no leaders of a society/nation/empire… like to lose manpower or suffer from a collapse/mutineer. Obviously it must have drawbacks like cutting relationships with other societies and slowing research/technological progress, …
I would say this would happen in Society, Industrial, … stages (even though it may become more and more unnecessarily complex as we progress in Thrive). Also, I am no expert in these concepts, but it sure would be realistic and fun to play (not to code and implement ahah) and I would hope not to make the game too political.
~This would apply for any stage really~
So there are ideas about the creatures you encounter being other players past ascended species, but the main issue with this is that lots of people might make “unwanted” types of species and they would be very difficult to filter out.
cough cough, spore.
But we now have improved technology since 2008 (“in case you couldn’t tell”)
And this problem could possibly be solved by, I don’t even want to say it it’s used so much.… AI! A model could be trained to reject a species to be shown to others if it is seen as unwanted within a certain degree of certainty,
and by my guess, there will definitely be enough training data.
A modern approach to AI requires a monstrously powerful GPU to run it. So we’d need to have a really powerful AI server online at all times to process and filter created Thrive creatures.
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Additionally you need training data. Option 1 would basically be to take an image describing AI, feed it the output of high definition renders from several angles and while doing several common animations (you can imagine a sea anemone-thing that defaults to something perfectly normal but inflates one tendril and curls all the others into two balls when threatened, someone would try that to get around bans), then, take it’s output, and run it into an LLM like llama to tell us if the description seems amiss (adding the middleman bc LLMs I’ve messed with don’t work too well with diverse images, and image recognition software doesn’t understand concepts like decency/lewdness or following instructions). This results in three very GPU intense processes all at once. The first one at least doesn’t need much vram, which costs more than rent these days, but thats still three GPUs worth of work. The alternative is to train our own AI, perhaps one that understands the creature file format natively and sorts things itself, instead of describing them to an LLM. That sounds good, right? Down to one GPU of effort? Not really. You’d need a TON of GPU-hours to train the thing, and worse yet, you’d need training data. Do you wanna be the guy coming up with new vile ways to make a creature or get around decency rules? Do you wanna be the guy sitting there labeling all the creatures people uploaded for 40 hours a week, because we’d need both guys, and we’d need to pay them because both jobs suck. Eventually the AI might take over and only occasionally need tuning up, and the GPU costs would then drop from unconscionable to just kinda wallet draining, and then we’d have the requirement to never change the file format creatures are saved in ever again or we’ll have to start over.
Both of these ideas suck. Better idea: all new creatures that would be eligible for this stuff get dropped in a website somewhere. People can add or edit tags on them. In an awfully out of pocket analogy, I’ll mention that I have almost never read something I really didn’t want to read on AO3 unless I was ignoring a dead dove warning due to the compellingnsss of the other tags or the work was just horribly tagged at had like two tags. When this would start to come into effect the game would offer to upload your creatures, (opt in ofc) and go download others creatures. You could choose to download creatures from a manually vetted collection someone ran, download creatures with given tags only, have a blacklist, ect. I’d say specific good options would be only creatures that have been checked out by enough people without them reporting the tags as inaccurate/changing them, and a minimum amount of tags, lots of tag based services break down when the people doing that tagging just don’t do their part.
Why I think this works better is kinda obvious, though maybe a bit controversial to say out loud in a very sanitized space, like these forums. NSFW stuff is rampant in such circles as 3d models, mods, fanart, fanfic, independent art and literature, ect. This rarely bothers anyone, because with the exception of fanart and maybe horribly moderated independent written works, the NSFW people are willing the cordon themselves off. Most creeps would prefer to share with other creeps and be left alone. Saying everyone can share with everyone with no config or ugly consequences means saying the relative creeps can share with the relative kids. That by proxy either means no non-repressed creeps, or no kids and we’re making a belgium game. Just adding config and a place for creeps to do their thing means they won’t pollute the main stuff as much. Plus, this should be opt in, 100%.
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Not sure if I should put this here or the industrial stage, but should there be an requirement of these 20-something many factors to enter the industrial stage from society stage? Or should we make the transistion not require this many elements?
Edit: Now that I looked deeper into this, there seems to be less of a consensus about how many such requirements exist
The official start of the industrial stage is:
The Industrial Stage officially begins when the player’s nation discovers the technology Steam Power (and builds the first industrial machine)
So there absolutely is consensus but again the community is just discussing something silly rather than reading the wiki… 
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I was talking about the requirements to unlock the steam power and actually use it for industrializing. Having steam power doesn’t automatically mean that you’ve achieved the industrial stage, or that you’re even close to achieving it (see Aeolipile).
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In Thrive it absolutely does. Our stage transitions are supposed to be extremely smooth. So we just pick a specific point for the stages to switch and that’s it. The game is mostly divided into stages just to make talking about different parts easier. This is exactly the same as the space stage technically starting when the first rocket reaches space. At that point your species is not capable of doing any fancy space stuff, but it still has reached the space stage because we have to have some specific point to select when the stages switch. So the exact same thing is selected for the industrial stage: once you have steam powered machine / manufacturing thing that’s it: you have entered a new era. It would be way more complex to like require you to have like X amount of factories or Y% of basic manufacturing using powered machinery. Now that would be an endless debate on what would count. We simply avoid that by saying that you get to industrial stage once you have steam power. End of debate.
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I would say once you have “useful” industrial machines, since if you only count the requirement of steam power, you could argue that Rome did manage to achieve early Industrial Stage during the Empire era.
Also what happens if your civilization hits a recession right after inventing steam power / IS requirement and degenerates, causing the loss of this technology?
Idea: you enter the stage when you unlock it’s features. You don’t necessarily have the political capital to build a thousand factories, or the coal reserves, you might need a century to build up some capitalist ideology or a dictator who can make it happen. Similarly, after you get binding proteins and go multicellular, your cell might not be optimized or efficient enough to make huge creatures or even hit the 25-cell-whichever. You might be able to go to space, but it doesn’t feel like space stage without a colony. And that’s fine. The stage has started. And if the faction with the steam engines fails to gain political favor, they get hero of Alexandria’d
What happens if you delete your binding proteins?
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