Population and migration( hence game should support colony system, or close species jump system)
so why couldn’t sea animals do the exact same thing?
@Deathwake Other species on other planets could be lucky, and could be apex predators.
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Yes they could, but the amount of luck we are talking here is astronmical ( pun intended )
First game should support this ( which i think it should)
Then the player should be smart and would need to have multiple run before becoming remotely succesful.
us humans were extremely lucky. in fact the chance that life would evolve is extremely low. so i dont see why underwater settlements would be a problem.
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Life started in ocean way before it started on land,
So if it was indeed so likely we should really have mermaids running for presidency election. (Joke)
On land a species actively improvise and optimize for survival.
In ocean, many thing are there which works just enough to avoid the pressure for having agriculture.
Also with agriculture to thrive the species need tech advancement and knowledge share.
For either of them you need stages
Stone age > bronze age > iron age
etc.
If we never had Coal we wouldn’t have been able to make nuclear.
So stages are also important
i never said it was likely. I actually said the opposite. Sapience is so rare, it is a miracle us humans achieved it.
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This thread a lot of biases and assumptions here so far. First off, it assumes the build for hands is less favourable than fins. The thing is, the hand is just a special type of fin, and the only reason fish don’t have them is because they don’t have need to evolve if you can easily catch up things from your mouth and swim high up to food instead of reaching out (as well as the fact they don’t have to walk on terrain and grab for traction). This doesn’t mean fish can’t have hands, it means most don’t need to. It also takes in factors that have all show to be beat up here on land such as settlement. Even more annoyingly, there was the claim that since aquatic creatures rained longer, they would’ve grown into every possible niche. This is in no case guaranteed or true. Also going on as of luck, is it not clear to you that sapience in itself is a lucky trait? Sapience is what allowed smart moves to avoid predators in the first place. If we are going off luck to anything in this game we might as well get rid of all of the stages accept the first three. Just to be pushy with this, here is a frog fish, a fish that walks on terrain and has specifically evolved webbed-hand like fins: 
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While there might not be pressure for agriculture in-universe, there would certainly be a heavy pressure towards agriculture due to the player needing it to progress through the game
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may I remind you of something?
octopuses can manipulate the environment around them with their tentacles
they don’t have hands, and they are smart
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I agree, but I think the player might try to be more like Posideon than of octopus.
But I really don’t know, unless someone really makes it real.
There are several rather fish-like creatures which have grasping structures that could easily be replaced with hands, such as squid, cuttlefish, and dolphins
In all of those cases, hands would look pretty cursed. I see it more for a stubby reef fish, like the frog fish i’ve shown. Just segment the bones in the fins into bendable fingers, control with some tendons, and you have a hand/foot able to grasp better.
Hands are easy, tentacles are common enough in mollusks, with pincers in arthropods. Chordates have evolved even more solusions to this problem, from the opposable thumbed hands of higher mammals and the claws of Mesozoic reptiles on land, to the tails of seahorses and the frogfish under water. Players are going to have enough of these hand analogues, as prehensile organs are a convergent features that have evolved many times. Also I think that most sentient aquatic animals will evolve during a change in ecosystem either from or to a kelp forest or a reef. This is due to the fact that most smart animals (humans, dolphins and ravens/crows) all evolved during a change from one habitat to another (arborial to open plains, land to sea and i-don’t-know to urban respectively) and many smart sea creatures (octopuses, cuttlefish and probubly something other then a mollusc) live in kelp or reefs.
How about doing it in a whale fashion.
First become land animal, get all what you want.
Then go back to ocean and stay there.
atalantic
Once you enter the awakening stage, you wouldn’t be able to evolve much, certainly not enough to become aquatic
Yes but actually no. You see, we don’t just stop evolution after we learn to talk to each other about ideas, that’s not how that works. It’s simply the progression of technology is more exponential while average rate of mutation seems the same. This makes things look like they go really fast, but really after a few generations you are still kind of evolving. There are unique cases of adaptations we humans share as well, and some obviously beneficial. I all depends on how thrive condenses time, and how time will be taken.
While there still would be evolvution, there wouldn’t be enough time between creating a stable society and leaving the planet for a species to become aquatic. And even if they could, it is quite likely that something important to their society couldn’t be translated into an aquatic form
What advantage does going under water have for a land bound civilization? If climate change is sinking their continent, it’s possible. Two limits on that though: One: boats, if you are civilized boats are far quicker then evolving, also if you live on a boat for three generations (a pointlessly liberal estemite) it is unlikely for you to evolve anything but a increase in the efectivness of untrained swimmers to the point they don’t imidiately die. Two: time, if you are already a, say, fishing critter (crocs, penguins or sea sloths) who spends hours a day under water, coming ashore to roast your fish and warm up by the fire, a sinking continent the takes two million years might, and I say might, not will, let you become say, turtle or seal level aqaticness, that is, still breading on land. But, that is only possible if you have only just discovered fire when you begin to be selected to live underwater. Any more advanced and you will be too advanced to evolve at the normal game pace. Any less advanced and you will have to discover fire underwater, and we pretty much have a whole thread or ten for that and have no conclusive answer. Also you actually have to have a player playing the creatures as nature wouldn’t see any advantage to keeping your fire when there is little land to like it on and little time to use it. Anyways that’s my two cents.
This seems off-topic; This thread was about societies forming underwater, not societies forming on land and going underwater
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I know, it’s odd. I fine with it, as there is no dedicated thread for it yet.