Woah, there’s only 4 topics in the industrial tags, and none are dedicated to robots?! Absurd! Robots are hecking neat! Let’s talk robots! I can’t be the only one anticipating robots in game.
So like, they’re two vastly different robots I’m really thinking of- robots designed for a goal, and robots designed for sentience. (and i guess robots designed for both). All of which can be utilized by numerous types of civilizations.
Of course, the most obvious that comes to mind are militaristic societies. Robots here would most likely be mindless, but intelligent, and also designed to be very deadly. They would buff up armies so no/less civilians die, roam the streets and keeping order, and act as body guards for the higher ups. (haha i made this very distopian). Robots, in this setting, would clearly fight back against any uprisings, though I think it would be neat if something were to happen differently. Maybe some freedom fighters reprogram the robots enmasse, and the player can witness a massive overthrowing of the govt., robot style.
Or, if not, and we still have our militaristic, distopian society laden with robots, imagine the space stage! Right off the bat, other species may interpret us differently based on our robots. And if we come in with robots looking to raze the place to the ground? Lack of communications or not, that will send a message to everyone else.
(imagine if another species got their claws on a robot tho? and reverse engineered it, gaining our technological secrets…)
I understand, evolving our species is probably the most exciting aspect thus far for everyone, but there’s the whole rest of the game as well! And…! Robots!!
If you guys are excited about robots, how will you try and create them, if they’re added to the game? Fierce, bloodthirsty robots, sentient robots designed after your own species, or pacifistic robots that save lives and perform difficult healing surgeries? Or maybe something else? What do you think will be the pros of having robots in game, and the cons?
For example, maybe a pro is that your species has more free time to be creative/innovative, now that the robots are doing all the menial work. And a con could be that creating sentient robots simply to perform labor makes the species less empathetic/sympathetic to others, or that they forget the value of putting aside immediate happiness in order to complete a vital job.
I like robots too.
One thing I wonder is “how do they really change things?” For example a conflict between a repressive state and freedom fighters is much the same if both sides don’t have robots or if they do. Same with war, pre-robot and post-robot war I think might look much the same, two sides pit their industrial might against each other. Maybe the robots are just a better weapon.
Same with highly intelligent robots, sure they boost the intelligence of your society a lot (just like computers do now) however what does that really change? How do you notice from the outside? The society still solves problems and invents new things, just faster.
I suppose what I’m saying is what would be the fundamental differences between a society with a lot of robots and one with none. They’d have better productivity, better at war, faster computation. Are there things beyond this? Maybe they can go to more places as robots help with exploration (like the mars rover).
Yeah, you’re right. Robots are cool but they do need more reasons to be in game, ones that aren’t similar to other things.
I do like the exploration one! Definitely something that would justify the robots. As we all know, there is only so much an organic body can handle, and that severely restricts travel. Robots could travel places that are inhospital to our species’ bodies. This would (as far as I can imagine anyway),
-boost scientific knowledge. Robots wouldn’t be distracted by fatigue and other bodily restrictions, and would hypothetically have much better senses than our species at the time of exploration, meaning they could discover more.
-access things our species cannot, like certain items or materials. Maybe our species cannot travel to them, or sense them, while the robot can?
-minimize population loss
-diminish the possibility of bringing back new disease, either through the destruction of the robot or by extreme decontamination of it.
I also feel like the robots could free up, or replace certain populations. For instance, in the space stage, we will need populations of people on new planets we acquire. These could be our own, organic population, or our robotic one. This can be beneficial because,
-we won’t need to seek out certain workers to populate the planet (doctors, builders, waste management, regular civilians, etc) as we can just program the robots for certain jobs
-if the planet is invaded, the only loss will be robot loss, no organic casualties
-also no outbreak of new diseases that slipped through the cracks, as the population is robotic, not organic
-the planet will not necessarily need to be hospital to organic life to acquire it, if the population is entirely robotic. This leaves us with less work while still accessing the planet and its resources, or we can have a population on it before we terraformed the planet (and leave that work to the robots to boot)
That’s all I can think of for now- I’m sure there’s more though, and will write more when I think of more justifications for the robots to be in game. (or maybe someone else will pitch in? I’d love to hear what everyone else has to offer!)
Yeah these are all good points.
I wonder if one path for an advanced civilisation is to become entirely composed of robots, maybe they just find the robots are better in every way and merge themselves with them and shed their biologicial bodies completely. That would be an interesting spectrum, some species might choose to keep their original biological form intact and never change it and others might become entirely robotic.
OH THE BIG NECRO! The First Nation to invent military robots might get a powerful advantage, assuming you want to take over the planet through war, if you are the first person to invent actually powerful military robots and begin mass producing them you would get a HUGE leap in technological advancement, you also would reduce how many casualties you take in the war by a lot compared to the other nations. Also, while humans take a long time to grow for war, making wars of attrition based on man power and food, robots can be produced faster the more factories you control, so the more land you take, the more factories and mines you have, the faster and more robots you have to fuel the conquest.
I would really love to see robots. They could autonomously do tasks, maybe kill you, maybe you become a cyborg, now the big question:
If there are robots, how would we program them?
I doubt that the devs would implement an entire coding language for the robots, as that would deter less experienced players. I’d say there could be either a building-block system or a node editor for controlling them.
One thing I’ve seen happen in quite a few cases where non-programmers have wanted a system that would allow non-programmers to program. And it invariably ends with non-programmers not managing to use the system. Only a very limited programming like thing that reminds users of messing with configuration options works in getting non-programmers to use it. So the return on the investment of making some programming system (other than literally just letting the player input code in AngelScript that controls the behaviour) is very bad use of time in terms of what we get out of it.
I reckon there should just be some values that can be tweaked.
Or do what stellaris does with creating the mindset of alien species, having certain attributes to build the function and drawbacks of the robots.
But what is the purpose of making robots sentient? They were made to accomplish tasks without asking any question! They will remain to be our unsentient slaves, mwahahahahahahaha! (biosupremacist quote)
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