The Trith

Species suggestions, story ideas and contributions.
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Zanzibar
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#16 Post by Zanzibar »

So, no "You don't hurt us as much as race B over there, so we will kill you last" sort of approach?? Ahh well, would make things easier ;)

Nightfish
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#17 Post by Nightfish »

The Trith have a thumb rule considering who is killed first: If your race is closer than to us than the other race we kill you first. If both are equally close they toss the Trith equivalent of a coin. :wink:

Impaler
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#18 Post by Impaler »

Is their any safe distance at wich the though waves are low enough in "volume" for the Trith to be unaffected and hence unprovoked? I belive I have read in the Foundation series that telepathic though waves do not openy the Inverse square law (presumabley because they are not in our 3 dimentional reality). Ofcorse that dosen't realy matter, I am wondering about the range of the game play effect here, is something that spans the galaxy, is it short star next door or very short system based kind of thing. I am very curious as to how this will effect your game when you play the Trith. Would you be discouraged from expanding rapidly or encouraged? Would I want to contiualy move population (by what ever means alowed, do not debate migration in this thread) from my core worlds that are presumably less effected by thought waves and can thus breed more outward to my fringe worlds that can breed because they are too near the other races?
Fear is the Mind Killer - Frank Herbert -Dune

Nightfish
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#19 Post by Nightfish »

If it travels through space, it doesn't matter where it is. The Trith's "hearing" is very acute in that departement. It's just like you said, it doesn't matter if real life psy waves would diminish or not. In matters of gameplay the Trith's ability only exists to give them a reason to hate everybody (other than "we hate everyone because we hate everyone) and to make their space combat behave a little weird. I kinda like the idea of a race that has a legitimate reason to kill everybody else.

Your agenda when playing the Trith would be careful expansion. Keep in mind that you're going to be at war with 90% of the galaxy, you can't just expand like crazy if that's the case. You need to expand, dig in, then expand again. Always maintaining a strong military and never showing a sign of weakness (except when you want to lure the enemy out).

In gameplay I think the Trith would gain one unit of population on each planet they "liberate". I'm not yet sure how I'll justify that. Maybe they collect the psychic enemies or they go into a mating frenzy everytime they "liberate" a world. Anyway, who care where baby trith come from? *g*

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#20 Post by Impaler »

Mating Frenzy - I like that

I also like the idea that they dont "hate everybody because we hate everybody" idea (we alrady used it with the Eaxaw to the full extent anyway).

I think it would be ironic the the Tirth were infact very nice, friendly lovable aliens who are just forced to do this out of survival. I think yoy may be leaning in this direction already? Perhpas in the very late game their is a tec you can discover that can give them "The Silence" lets call them Telepatich Ear plugs. The Trith no longer suffer any telepathic pain and they now want peace (unfortunatly and Ironicly everyone hates them now cause of the bad reputation they built up for so long)
Fear is the Mind Killer - Frank Herbert -Dune

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utilae
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#21 Post by utilae »

I'm wondering about the 'pros' of this race, especially with all of the headaches ( :lol: ) this race must get.

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Krikkitone
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#22 Post by Krikkitone »

Well I'd say Trade (Penalty to neutral the dislike of others countered by the free info)

Omniscience (if the game is set up right this could actually be a good pick)

Probably spying should be a simple bonus, rather than bonus and increased cost, since they wouldn't have to get that close to another race to spy on them.

Probably Lithovore's with penalties to farming. (as they don't need food, and would probably maintain only the most minimal telepathic shielded 'farms' growing materials for industry from whatever organisms Do live on Radiated worlds.. farming always at low focus as they don't need it)

High Unrest supression.. (from fanatical following of the government for their survival, and possible vulnerability to Mental Attack Police, trained to focus their thoughts on one person enough to kill them.)

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pd
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Re: The Trith

#23 Post by pd »

I'm going to visually develop the Trith. I've also made some minor changes and additions to the story part, which I'll post later.

Here is an early idea, depicting a member of the race in profile view, going through the first stages of dematerialization.
Image

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Sui Generis
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Re: The Trith

#24 Post by Sui Generis »

Excellent! It really helps bring a few lines of conceptual text to life!

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The Silent One
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Re: The Trith

#25 Post by The Silent One »

Well done, but imho this looks far too human. The Trith originate from an inferno world, so I would presume that they are rugged, have some sort of carapace, a multitude limbs or eyes or none at all and only distantly resemble humans.
Rather than having small windows from which light emits I would imagine that several parts of their body would look transparent, showing that there is some mysterious light/energy/spirit whirling through them.
If I provided any images, code, scripts or other content here, it's released under GPL 2.0 and CC-BY-SA 3.0.

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pd
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Re: The Trith

#26 Post by pd »

Doing my first steps in character design, I purposely went for humanoid aliens. The sketch above is actually based on a distorted human skull scribble. As mentioned previously, I did some changes/additions to the backstory:
  • - lived on a terran planet, therefore do NOT feed on radiation, but something else
    - when telepathy evolved and "The Noise" appeared for the first time, they destroyed all life on their homeworld in a desperate strive for silence, turning the planet into a radiated piece of rock
    - now with other species doing starlane travel, "the Noise" has come back, because telepathy and starlane travel yada yada yada
    - in an idle state they are completely made of matter, when using their active telepathic abilities or possibly when experiencing anger/pain/rage they transform into pure energy from the inside out
Those guys are getting some serious attention from me in the coming weeks and I intend to finish with a couple of ships(concepts first, models later). If somebody wants the help out a bit and put the notes from above down more eloquently, then go for it.

I'll probably post future sketches in the dev blog forum and link to it from here.

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Krikkitone
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Re: The Trith

#27 Post by Krikkitone »

The Silent One wrote:Well done, but imho this looks far too human. The Trith originate from an inferno world, so I would presume that they are rugged, have some sort of carapace, a multitude limbs or eyes or none at all and only distantly resemble humans.
Rather than having small windows from which light emits I would imagine that several parts of their body would look transparent, showing that there is some mysterious light/energy/spirit whirling through them.
There is no reason that a species from an inferno world would be "rugged"... they would very simply have a drastically different chemistry.

However, just because the chemistry is different doesn't mean such things like anatomy, psychology, and sociology would be different (for example the Tobn'vi)

the could still have an internal rigid skeleton with four limbs, some food procuring end that passes food through to another end, lots of sensory apparatus near the food getting end, posibly at the top of the organism with two limbs.... note how none of this is specific to a carbon-water biochemistry based organism.

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pd
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Re: The Trith

#28 Post by pd »

Some time ago I found out about certain reoccurring patterns in evolution. The human eye is supposedly very similar to the eye of an octopus, however the last common ancestor didn't even have eyes. There are numerous other examples. So very similar mechanisms are developed again and again independently. This suggests that alien life could in fact be very similar to what we have here. I don't remember how this phenomenon is called, but I'm sure I can dig it up, if there is interest.

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Tortanick
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Re: The Trith

#29 Post by Tortanick »

Actually what it says is that alien life might have something in common with humans, and everything else completely different. Octopuses are the perfect example: they have eyes in common with us but everything else is completely unrelated, they don't even have any bone.

And even if you got evolution all the way up to primates they might not evolve intelligence, there are lots of reasonably smart animals on Earth but only one ever evolved intelligence, maybe on this other Earth parrots ended up with the big brains. In short 2 human aliens is pushing it, a game full of them is practically flat out impossible.

Still though, its too late at night to go over the whole human aliens argument again, maybe I'll pick myself up by writing a new species I've had a nice idea for a psychopathic race that's smart enough to realize evil is a bad survival strategy. I just need a biology, a really odd one :)
Last edited by Tortanick on Wed Jun 03, 2009 11:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: The Trith

#30 Post by Geoff the Medio »

pd wrote:I don't remember how this phenomenon is called, but I'm sure I can dig it up, if there is interest.
In general:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution
In particular:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye

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