Native life

I am wondering how firaxis will make them tough and persistent enough to last for the whole game. I am severely skeptical due to how weak the barbarians in civ5 is. They cannot even raze a city to the ground nor capture! D=

I have some guesses that they will have nests and that's it..

And plus, i've played pandora.. the natives in there is only somewhat tough until you get gauss equipment up and rolling then you will start to wipe them out very fast and easily basically at start of mechanization era.

Could anyone who has played SMAC care enough to enlighten me please?

 

My understanding is that the Harmony directed player will have some incentive to keep them alive. Likewise, there is also a dependency on using the native life to your advantage by attempting to make them hostile to another player, but I am not sure how this will work. From the sounds of most of the previews, the article-writers either tried not to bother them or destroyed them. Either way, they did not go into much detail about the battles, save for the siege worm. From the sounds of it, however, the life will be a persistent threat, especially if you want to expand and form more colony bases, as well as the issue of having indigenous life chew on your improvements and possibly even cities both purposefully and on accident.

 

In SMAC, there were a couple of relevant mechanics that helped keep native life relevant:

-Separate combat mechanics - the native life in SMAC used psychic attacks called PSI. Attacker rolls 3, defender rolls 2, plus relevant bonuses. It ignored the standard weapons and armor progression, so they were always an option to the out-matched player. If you went with the right techs, you'd get a lot of bonuses to your lab-grown native life and could use them quite effectively.

-Native life could spring out of terrain on a random chance. So if you stepped on fungus tiles, you could spawn a native creature to fight (or capture). During the beginning of the game, you'd be clearing this stuff as fast as you could because it was low production and dangerous to have around. Later in the game, with the right social engineering and tech choices, you'd plant the stuff so you could take advantage of it for rapidly (and cheaply) rebuilding your army.

-Native life could be found on ground, water, and air, so it was always a threat.

-Pollution (eco damage) had a chance to cause fungus to randomly pop up next to your city with a stack of units to attack. So, if you were production heavy and didn't have the right pollution reduction social engineering and buildings in place, you could get yourself into trouble quickly.

I liked a lot of those mechanics because they kept the units interesting throughout the game. I'm hoping to see some of this stuff, at least in spirit, in Civ:BE.

 

The thing that I find funny about the "vs environment" business is this:

Think about the most badass organisms ever to exist on earth outside of humans. I'm thinking dinosaurs. So take the most dangerous land-dwelling dinosaur, T-Rex. How would T-Rex fair against a squad of modern soldiers? Not well. He might take a few soldiers out, but the grenades would do him in. He wouldn't even stand a chance against an Abrams tank or a jet fighter.

So whatever we are going to be facing on Planet X can not only stand a fair chance of beating modern weapons, but future weapons as well. Yet, somehow these creatures come from a planet close enough to ours that we could live there. It seems surprising that a planet with similar gravity and chemistry could produce something significantly more terrifying than a T-Rex.

 

Who said it had similar chemistry? (Obviously the planet overall probably does water-n2-mineral silicon oxides, but the life could have drastically different chemistry)

Also, Apparently the biosphere on this planet is somewhat intelligent...so it may begin a 'technological/evolutionary arms race with you'.... (Late game barbs use late game units.)

If you increase their spawn rate and either
1. Keep much of the planet uncolonizable
2. Allow native life to destroy settlements
Or
3. Allow native lif to appear in settled areas

Then native life remains a problem

 

1v1 trex probably will always win against a modern soldier but that depends on the soldiers equipment..

And well, closest thing we have to siege worms is our whales in the oceans. Our blue whale is huge but that's basically it. But blue whales is like 60-90 feet about roughly the length of four m1a1s parked from front to back.

And has size measurements of the siege worm been released? For it to be able to tear cities apart, its probably 10x times bigger than a blue whale at minimum?

And it seems liek we recently discovered the world's biggest dinosaur at this date very recently..

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/the-sid...osaur--discovered-in-argentina-203028038.html

Paleontologists in Argentina say they recently discovered fossils belonging to the largest dinosaur on record. During its lifetime, the new species of titanosaur is believed to have stood 65-feet-tall, was more than 130-feet-long, and weighed 77 tons (155,000 pounds).

Which makes its length roughly the size of five m1a1s. But at same time it weights 77 tons supposedly. And a single m1a1 weights 60ish tons.

From what I'm seeing, it seems like animals can growth to surprising sizes while not weighting that much compared to our hardware due to bone and flesh weighting more lighter than metal.

Which means if we was to suddenly find ourselves under siege by dinosaurs of Earth, even rudimentary huge cannonballs fired from err renaissance era cannons of right size will be enough to crush their bones and end it's rampage. If we have one that's big enough that is if not well can build one xD

So basically this means the siege worm is pretty tough, astoundingly tough by our biological standards. If it can push battle tanks around like they're toys then their weight might be at minimum of 100 tons.

While compared to T-rex, the t-rex isn't that huge though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrannosaurus#mediaviewer/File:Largesttheropods.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentinosaurus#mediaviewer/File:Longest_dinosaurs1.png

Meat eaters tend to be smaller while plant eaters tend to be bigger.

But this suggests that the best way to bring an siege worm down pretty fast is to have something with great piercing power then have the penetrated shell explode inside the siege worm to cause big damage to it's organs.

And plus, it sorta similar to centipede due to it's segmented body or did i get centipedes wrong? There gotta be weak points in it's armor. The Linked segments?

To bring one down would make a huge improvement in how we make our body armor from studying it's corpse.

However, there is one advantage that Siege worm do have over us.. It apparently can move underground.. fast. And it can basically attack us with impunity by not exposing itself from afar but instead wait until it's just beneath our feet and then create an movable sarlacc pit. Nom nom.

But that means it hunts by tracking vibrations and sounds. Our battle tanks is pretty vulnerable from being attacked underneath.

Good countermeasure would be to attach an vibrator to a bomb and let the siege worm kill itself by nomming on bombs making vibrations.

hmmm

 

But take that the environment are more numerous "vs" something little more than upstart colony with limited supplied, manpower and biological difficulties.

I can think something more terrifying than a T-Rex. A pack of of T-Rex-ish animal.
If they are T-rex-ish animals, Can we call it Imperator?

 

As already noted, this is not hard to imagine if the alien's attack mode has nothing to do with technology (it's psychic) and its body isn't standard meat and bone (which is what our weapons are designed to inflict damage on).

 

Besides everything everybody else has said, I think it's important to point out that even if a squad of modern soldiers could take out a dinosaur pretty easily, not everyone is a soldier. That's true about the world today and about any space colony you feel like imagining. There would likely be a much higher number of civilian colonists than military. And without submachine guns, grenades, etc, a T Rex would pretty much slaughter any human.

The other thing is that the hostile native life wouldn't be much like a dinosaur invasion; it's native life, the dinosaurs are there before you are. You have to build your cities fighting the dinosaurs every step of the way. And even with modern (or future) technology, how are farmers supposed to defend themselves against dinosaurs? What happens if a Diplodocous tramples the crops? Leaving the cities would be extremely dangerous, raptors would attack travelers, huge reptiles in the ocean would capsize ships. Hunting dinosaurs for food would be difficult (not to mention that for the aliens, their meat would probably be inedible). Even small dinosaurs could eat kids on their way to school.

 

Hold on there for a moment please!

Do you know that the chickens of today descended from T-rex?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-448283/Proof-fearsome-T-Rex-evolved-chicken.html

KFC comes to mind. :3

 

Don't think T-Rex. Think Tse Tse Fly. Semi-intelligent swarm thereof. Nighty-night.

 

Eagle Pursuit isn't decrying the credibility of the alien lifeforms being a threat to the Humanity that lands on the planet. He's decrying the mystery of there being alien lifeforms on -a- planet so much more terrifying than our dinosaurs.

What is it that allowed evolution to bring lifeforms on Planet further and further along this terrifying path, with tougher skeletons, stronger muscles, bigger and bigger shapes, and monstrous appetites (or aggression drives), while on the similar planet Earth, everything frightening stopped at T-rex, and instead just gave the hominoid brain?

I was happily ignoring this until I saw the post. Now I'm upset my enjoyment level is seriously strained.

 

What I was trying to illustrate is that on earth the T-Rex isn't the most terrifying creature by far. For one it's a lone hunter (or possibly scavenger). Predatory pack animals + intelligence is what you should fear. And above all the small things that kill you before you notice them. We live in the 21st century and still we can't find a way to stop a common mosquito from spreading a deadly parasite to millions of people a year. "What is it that allowed evolution to bring lifeforms on Earth further and further along this terrifying path?"

 

I do admit that I fear the velociraptors more than I do about t-rex.

 

Huh. I guess you're right.

Enjoyment levels saved.