Will you be able to play as a parasitic life form (Halo's Flood for example)

This could also apply to later stages. For example playing as a parasitic life form in Multicellular stage.

You have a “spore” it laches on to another multicellular organism and takes control of it; some time passes an said organism becomes part of your species, than it produces more “spores” and cycle repeats. It could also be that as you take over more organisms you become more intelligent.

I usually reply to ideas with “sure we can add it, but it won’t be high priority”. But this is something I don’t think is realistic.

First off parasites are something that will likely be added. However, if the player wants to be a parasite they basically have to wait for other species to overtake them in order to be a parasite on them (and thus lose the chance to win the game, this makes being a parasite a low priority thing as it doesn’t lead to winning the game). The second part is still realistic to some extent, however that ant parasite fungus that exists gets only some control over its host. And then I find the last point about gaining intelligence based on the number of infected creatures, just not realistic at all.

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One thing we may add to the microbe stage along these lines is a “straw pilus” which can be used to suck out nutrients from other cells, that would allow for a parasitic lifestyle, if you can get close enough :slight_smile:

In terms of later in the game I really like the flood however I agree it’s a bit hard to image. I’m not really sure it’s possible to imagine building a society without collaborating individuals. Though I guess it might be possible to have a caste system, for example, where one caste is a humanoid and the other caste is a fungus type thing which grows into trees the humanoids can get food from and live in or something. I think that sounds kind of crazy and also I don’t particularly see a reason it’s not possible.

I was listening to an In Our Time about parasites and they said that apparently 50% of species on Earth are parasitic which is much more than I thought.

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Well we already have thermoplast (which isn’t out of bounds of “life as we know it” like flood is), so something simmilar could be possible. And other things cast system you meantioned also sounds pretty cool to me.

The thermoplasts are, well, physically possible according to our current understanding of science. The flood is, simply put, not.

There is Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the fungus that infects ants and then forces them to do its bidding. Yeah, it’s not a 1 to 1 comparison, but it’s the closest real life counterpart to what OP was talking about. And yeah, fungus ants aren’t going to space any time soon, but it’d still be kinda fun to mess around with.

Fungi like that don’t really ‘mind control’ them tho. They make them move towards the sun or something simple like that, not literally control their every muscle to the point where it’s precise enough they can talk according to the fungi’s bidding.
Also, ant/snail brains are very simple, and a fungus like that which will be able to infect something as complex as the human brain would be even more difficult, and that’s without the level of control mentioned earlier.

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Mabye flood-like thing could be an end-game enemy before ansecnsion. Like “remnants” of some god-race, like flood are remnants of precursors in Halo.

Well yeah, it wouldn’t be a way of getting to a normal win state, but it would still be a fun thing to play as if you choose to be a fungus. But yeah, a space-age, hyper intelligent, parasitic mushroom (which would be a 1 to 1 comparison of what OP is talking about) is definitely not possible in any context outside of sci-fi.

Being the flood would be fucking cool
Really i think the way to balance out being the flood is due to your simplistic way of life you need to become intelligent by cobbling together various other creatures to combine their intelligence to become smarter (like the Flood proto gravemind) or to reach a future stage infect a creature in that stage to gain it’s intelligence via a similar method
and space stage would be a matter of

  1. infecting a creature on your home planet that has reached that stage
  2. cobbling enough creatures together to be smart enough to invent spaceships
  3. Hop onto sum starfaring alien’s space ship that just passed by and stay aboard until they go to another planet (presumably theirs) and begin to infest
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Another idea I got for this. Maybe parasitic life form like a xnenomorph.

Eggs->Facehugger->Host->Larva->Mature Being

i like that idea also don’t curse on the forum use the word or emoji Belgium

:black_large_square::yellow_square::red_square:
:black_large_square::yellow_square::red_square:
:black_large_square::yellow_square::red_square:

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I thought most curse words were allowed, also I use the Antarctic flag because :antarctica: you

Belgium is just a reoccurring gag in the forum, to the point that it became the censor button and the “Oh my Belgium!” sort of situations.

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I see that I was the fool all along :pensive: Belgium Belgium-ed me

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I’ll just tell everyone again, just in case someone doesn’t know. It is a reference to this:

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image
I’m mad at myself for not getting this reference now