Re: [glob2-devel] Globulation Lore v1.0

[Quinn Yee Qin Teh]

My answer to the steam-power problem is this - it's not steam. The machinery works like steam engines, but instead of steam they use the same material that globs are made of. And in the centre of every glob there's a core which is a micromachine that can manipulate the shape of that material around it, which gives the globs form and movement.

 

Also, this doesn't mean globs are directly controlled by humans. They're only created by humans but they are all autonomous agents that work together in a hive mind.

 

They don't have to come from diferent companies, they could have come from different countries or different human factions. However I will have to come up with a new explanation for prestige wins.

 

Anyway, since the original aim of the game isn't war-oriented, I guess that's all not very important. We can basically come up with any story for the campaigns provided we can implement the elements (like other races, neutral creeps, etc) consistently into the game. And as for the current form of the game (custom map style) I don't think players will be too fussy about the storyline as most RTS games have a custom mode with 0 storyline anyway.

 

On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 11:19 PM, Stéphane Magnenat <address@hidden> wrote:

> 1 why has a company who can use hyperspace jumps sent steampowered
> machines to fight other companies and not nuclear powered drones for
> example?

Creating a self-deployable, self-sustaining, and self-growing autonomous
colony is a very difficult problem. So we could explain the mix of bio-
engineering and 19th-century tech of globules societies this way.

However, I am not that convinced by the company story.

Maybe we should think about a campaign where globules do not compete versus
other globules, but rather versus environment first and versus adverses species
after.

The original idea of globulation is not to make a war-oriented game.
Globulation is an economy-oriented game, with war as an additional way to win
(with conversion and prestige). If we center the game too much on war, players
will ask for more micro-management and the whole concept will collapse.

About the emergent/complex-system-ish theories, my view is the following:
You can perfectly have the implementation of the reasoning distributed over
the individual physical agents but a unique hive mind abstraction. In the end,
until proven otherwise, that seems to be the way that our brains work. This
has the additional goodies to allow scenarios where the hive mind is splitted
at some point but re-united afterwards.

Have a nice day,

Steph

--
http://stephane.magnenat.net


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