Appearance

Biological drones were made to look like humans: they were designed to their creators’ image. They have a limited understanding to prevent people from getting worried about what would happen if they should revolt, which explains their blank stares, picturing their stupidity. Moreover they are generally very athletic. In order to further distinguish them from humans, they also bear a specific marking on their face; this marking can’t be removed, even through surgery.

Behaviour

Each Drone is grown from a batch of genetically engineered cells; these cells are modified with a specific purpose in mind – heightened strength, improved reflexes… However, due to the belief that the Drones could complain and possibly turn against their masters if they were too intelligent, much of the drones’ higher brain functions were disabled, which results – amongst other things – in a high happiness under most conditions; it would be an impossible task to find a drone who is capable of complaining.

History

Biological Drones were first engineered in a lab, the result of years of scientific advancement in biology and artificial intelligence. The Biological Drone encompasses many different species combined together to obtain a creature which is suitable for working in factories and carrying out jobs that other people simply refuse to even consider. However, fear of the so-called “Frankenstein syndrome” caused much debate around the issue; these ethics debates and legal issues were the cause of the final, “dumbed down” version.

Individual names

Biological drones, as engineered creatures, are generally considered as inferior by humans and their creators didn’t feel it was necessary to give them names per se. However each drone is individually identified by a code consisting of:

• a factory identifier corresponding to the factory it was produced in,
• a vat number corresponding to the specific vat of the factory it got out of,
• a batch number identifying the batch extracted from this vat they were part of,
• a serial number which corresponds to the unique identifier of the drone compared to his batch “brothers”.

In-game effects

To be blunt, Biological Drones are incredibly stupid. They are always happy, even when they are being completely abused as a workforce. Their lack of needs (with the exception of food, of course) make them very hard to corrupt; they are very sensitive to propaganda. The downside is that they are utterly useless as researchers, and that anyone’s propaganda will work on them. Due to their non-aggressive nature, using them as soldiers is pointless. Their sole purpose is to serve as factory workers, which they do extremely well. The drones’ population growth is completely controlled through laws; they do not prey on anyone, but an unchecked Biological Drones growth can have a devastating effect on other species’ populations in the long run.

One of the worst defects in Beta 5 was the “optimal factories” computation – it relied on nothing but arbitrary values and had one big flaw: it was supposed to prevent older players from being too powerful compared to newer players by having a decreasing derivative (yes, as in maths). This had a completely reverse consequence – people would just “whore” the planets and go away, having high population wouldn’t give you enough of an advantage in the long run.

Beta 6′s buildings will be managed in a completely different way. Instead of using arbitrary formulas, the new system will rely on a more realistic computation based on the size of the workforce available on a planet, the amount of jobs the buildings provide and what we call “secondary jobs” – construction, maintenance, police…

Each planet will have a population composed of various species – or at least that’s how it can be. As we already stated earlier, each species has specific characteristics. The first important characteristic (when it comes to employment, anyway) is the activity ratio: individuals belonging to a species may (or may not) be willing to work more than others, or have a longer “efficient” lifespan… This allows us to compute the size of the available workforce on a planet.

But then, species have different abilities – some are frail, some are extremely robust; some are clever, some are brainless brutes… The available workforce is considered to have three characteristics: an efficiency indicator for manual work (manufacturing, mining, construction, etc.), another one for intellectual work (research, medicine…) and one for soldiering (police force, defense…). These indicators are computed from the species-specific indicators and the ratio each species represents relative to the total size of the workforce. A random example would be that, if you have two populations of equal size and with the same activity ratio, one species being awful at intellectual work and the other being extremely good at it, the final workforce will be average at it. While not strictly realistic (as the guys who are good at something would probably have priority for jobs related to this ability), it should work.

Now that we know how the workforce is constituted and characterised, let’s move on to employment itself.

There are two main types of jobs on a planet: primary jobs, which are provided by buildings, and secondary jobs. The latter include construction, maintenance, research, security and a few unrelated jobs (your local Kebab shop, no doubt).

As long as there are fewer jobs than workers, the workers man all available positions completely. However, when the amount of free jobs is greater, the population starts working overtime. To compute this, we consider that people slowly take up additional 8-hour shifts, within a limit of 2.2 shifts (that’s 18 hours a day per worker on average).

However, available positions are never completely filled when people are working extra shifts. In fact, the more jobs are available, the less efficient people are. While this can be profitable in the short term, “whoring” the planets won’t work, as the efficiency will decrease and, at some point, the loss will become greater than the gain (not to mention the hit on happiness, but that is something we’ll explain later). In addition, insufficiently manned buildings will cause more pollution than they normally do, since people are less careful with what they do when they’re overworked.

It is possible to modify the priority given to secondary jobs over primary jobs (or vice versa); if they have a low priority, secondary jobs will always be short on workforce, even if many workers are available. A high priority, on the contrary, will cause these jobs to be fully manned, even if more jobs are available from buildings. An intermediary setting will cause the workers to abandon secondary jobs in favour of primary jobs if many of them are available. While this allows empires to have a finer control on what their population is doing, it is a double-edged sword as the buildings will start degrading if the planet is short on maintenance workers. Changing this setting is not instantaneous either – people slowly convert from one type of job to another, so the larger the workforce, the longer the conversion takes.

Final point – a building’s efficiency is computed from the workforce’s abilities, and from the shifts that are actually being worked. Each building’s output depends on a combination of manual, intellectual and soldiering work.

Appearance

It is very hard to describe an Arc’kha’to as most of its appearance is determined by the host it currently uses. However, a host infested with an Arc’kha’to can be identified by the various protuberances and nodes that have pierced the host’s body.

Behaviour

The Arc’kha’to lay eggs in the corpses of other living beings, and the larvae which hatch then attach themselves to living hosts, hijacking their nervous system and taking complete control over their bodies. This very behaviour lead to the term “controllers”, which is commonly used by other species when referring to the Arc’kha’to.

Controllers are not picky about who they use as hosts and will be quite content to use any possible host, with a preference for relatively bulky hosts which provide them with higher chances of killing others, and therefore of laying the eggs of the next generation of controllers.

History

The oldest known ancestors of the Arc’kha’to were brainless parasites which survived merely by attaching themselves to their hosts. Over ages they started linking to the central nervous system of their hosts to better control their actions and thus obtain hosts which behaviour suited their needs. However the range of species controllers manage to parasite is vast; their high adaptability to newly discovered potential hosts make them even more deadly, as it will not take them too long to start controlling members of a species they didn’t know of.

While it is sufficient for rudimentary communication and very efficient when it comes to motor control, the neural link between an Arc’kha’to and its host is not deep enough to allow for advanced reasoning. In addition, their predatory habits tend to have them keep to themselves far from other members of their own species, as they constantly compete for preys. As such no real Arc’kha’to culture really emerged and no known internal history of the species has been passed along except through records in other species’ logs, such as spectacular breeding cycles resulting in heavy casualties. The Arc’kha’to themselves have long forgotten the name and location of their home world.

Individual names

Just like the name of their own species, Arc’kha’to individual names consist in short, guttural sequences of syllables. This is a consequence of their relatively weak connection to the host’s nervous system.

In-game effects

Due to their predatory and competitive habits, the Arc’kha’to tend to use up quite a bit of space – they don’t tolerate living too close to each other. Their natural growth rate is low and is very dependent on the availability of preys to eat and lay eggs in. Obviously, members of other species are not too fond of them, both because of their distasteful appearance and because of their tendency to kill you on the spot without warning.

Since they are not too bright because of the weak neural link to their host’s nervous system, they make poor researchers. This relative stupidity has an advantage, tho, as it makes them almost impossible to corrupt; propaganda is something way too clever to affect them.

Arc’kha’to are very efficient factory workers and absolutely brutal soldiers. Being quite undisciplined, they do not tolerate being overworked; furthermore, they don’t tolerate slavery at all – you don’t enslave Controllers, Controllers enslave you. High security doesn’t please them, as they feel threatened when feeding and/or breeding.

However the universe is huge and not encountering anyone else than other humans feels a bit… poor. Therefore we decided to include other species in Beta 6. So who are they?

First of all we decided to include species living in very specific environments, such as nebulae, hyperspace, etc. Having fleets going through these places would lead to encounters with these aliens.

Then we also chose to add species living on planets. These species would already live there or evolve from normal human beings. Each player would then have to manage a mixed population, where each species would have its own needs and tolerance to game related factors such as employment, happiness level, corruption level, etc.

So far the exact list of species to be included in Beta 6 is still open but we plan on having around 20. Therefore the list is open to suggestions (with original names and short descriptions).

Do you think having several species in the universe, be it in special environments or on planets can bring new dimensions to the game?

Don’t you think it might get too difficult to have to make several population groups happy on each planet of your empire?

Do you think we intend to have enough / too many / too few different species?