Ponder this: Since earth is about 99% insects, how about a "hive" society, or perhaps a more insectlike appearence.

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Original post by Wavinator Well, the help I got from you guys on the last worldbuilding post was so invaluable that I thought I'd try again. The Ceticians are a playable alien race whose main ability is the control of time. They are very alien, which is probably going to freak people out (concept sketch, concept render).

I think you could find a better name. The first thing I thought of was Cetacea, the order that whales and dolphins belong to.

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Original post by Wavinator Here are there main concepts for this species: Communicate with pheromones Lovers of knowledge, books and culture

I think this is a big problem. Pheromone communication would be very ineffective. It wouldn't carry far, wouldn't transmit through surfaces. It would make electronic communication impossible. Pheromone libraries would be incredibly impractical. It would be inefficient. It would probably also make them very, very hard to understand and communicate with for species that speak.

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Original post by Wavinator Have a limited amount of regenerating energy that they can use to slow or accelerate time within a bubble

I don't follow here. What kind of energy is this? Where does it come from? I have a hard time believing something like that could evolve.

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Original post by Wavinator[/i ]Highly sought after for their ability to create exotic materials

"Highly sought after" makes it sound like they're being enslaved--is that the case?

How do they create exotic materials? What are the materials?

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Original post by Wavinator Sense cluster in the middle of the body can detach and float (using biological gravity machinery): This supports mating, personality transfer and exploration

If they're flying brains, why do they need the stalks? Can they re-attach to any body?

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Original post by Wavinator Immortal except for illness, accident or injury

That would lead to a huge population problem.

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Original post by Wavinator Asexual reproduction

Two things wrong with this:

1. You say above that the floating allows them to mate.
2. Sexual reproduction is essential for evolutionarily viable species.

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Original post by Wavinator Status in society is gained either by joining a Peacekeeper force which is dedicated to serving other cultures, or becoming a Time Sifter (archaeologist).

Why does this species need archaeologists?

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Original post by Wavinator They are probably a socialist democratic society that places a heavy emphasis on the group over the individual (like Japanese culture?).

This is problematic. Democracy probably wouldn't mix well with that type of culture.

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Original post by Wavinator Because they control time, they may have many inefficient methods: For instance, they might not think twice about taking a 3 or 4 century trip if they're skilled enough to place themselves in a bubble;

What's 3 or 4 centuries when you're immortal? Are you assuming they experience time at the same rate that we do?

Hey Wavinator, and everyone else. I had wondered where this game of yours had gone and HOLY CRAP MAN it looks like you've kept at it in my absence. =)

I'm short on time (school and part-time jobs will do that too you) but I wanted to chip in my two sense...sorry if someone's already covered this.

The ability to control/traverse/modify/alter time is MEGA powerful. If you really want to include this race in your game, which feels more and more like a Fable-depth type enviroment for Master of Orion, my one suggestion is to not make the race playable.

A race whose biology or tech can constantly slip back in time and drain the pools from which the predecessors of the predecessors of their enemies crawled from...? Not a good idea =) A cool idea, I'll grant you, and - if it's the focus of the entire game - rock in, my friend. But it seems to me a HUGE can of worms.

Now, maybe if you restrict time travel (because, if it's tech for example, it must take a TREMENDOUS amount of energy the further back in time you wish to travel)...so say it costs millions to go back in time a few minutes and actually change something...whereas it only costs a few hundred thousand to go back several years and see *exactly* what happened, beyond documentation and hearsay...that might work.

Hope this helps!

Forget pheremones. Make it a genetic sequence. Their language is "written" in genetics.

That'd be cooler, imo, and it keeps with the whole "memory is stored in their bodies" thing because their memory could jsut be piles of genetic-sequence information.

Information could even be copied from one to another this way, just by copying the DNA strands.

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Original post by serratemplar Hey Wavinator, and everyone else. I had wondered where this game of yours had gone and HOLY CRAP MAN it looks like you've kept at it in my absence. =) I'm short on time (school and part-time jobs will do that too you) but I wanted to chip in my two sense...sorry if someone's already covered this. The ability to control/traverse/modify/alter time is MEGA powerful. If you really want to include this race in your game, which feels more and more like a Fable-depth type enviroment for Master of Orion, my one suggestion is to not make the race playable. A race whose biology or tech can constantly slip back in time and drain the pools from which the predecessors of the predecessors of their enemies crawled from...? Not a good idea =) A cool idea, I'll grant you, and - if it's the focus of the entire game - rock in, my friend. But it seems to me a HUGE can of worms.

I think they can't actually go back in time, just slow or accelerate its passage.

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Original post by C-Junkie Forget pheremones. Make it a genetic sequence. Their language is "written" in genetics. That'd be cooler, imo, and it keeps with the whole "memory is stored in their bodies" thing because their memory could jsut be piles of genetic-sequence information. Information could even be copied from one to another this way, just by copying the DNA strands.

DNA is just data. You could represent it in any number of ways, such letters, like ATCGGCTA, or you could use flashing lights or sounds. I don't quite understand what you mean by "written in genetics." What is the mechanism of transmission?

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Original post by frankskye Ponder this: Since earth is about 99% insects, how about a "hive" society, or perhaps a more insectlike appearence.

Thank you for the suggestion. I've sort of got half and half of what you're talking about for some of the other races. There is a bipedal race with genetically engineered armor that gives them a very bug like appearance; and there's are a couple of hive minds, one a quadrapedal, somewhat insectoid (but mammalian) walking stump and another living spaceships formed from shards of an intelligent crystal planet.

Weird enough? [smile]

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Original post by Lysander I think you could find a better name. The first thing I thought of was Cetacea, the order that whales and dolphins belong to.

Hey, thanks for the great feedback. Story-wise the name Cetician actually is related to whales and comes from a mistake. Terrans first encountered the Ceticians near Kappa and Tau Ceti, about 29 and 11 light years from Earth (respectively). Because of the long time it took to break the language barrier, the name the news media bestowed upon them, "Ceticians" stuck.

Their true name is a complex mixture of pheremone compounds.

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Original post by Wavinator I think this is a big problem. Pheromone communication would be very ineffective.

Okay, I hear what you're saying but consider this: Effective by what measure? Surely there is no absolute measure other than physics.

Consider that until the greater part of the last two centuries the vast majority of human beings lived very slow, sedate and inefficient lives. We were mostly hunters and gathers, then became farmers. In geologic time our notions of effectiveness pale.

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It wouldn't carry far

Not sure I agree here. In fact, when you look at pollution studies its clear that factory outputs can carry downwind as much as 200 miles or more. No human voice can carry that far.

If anything, they'd be subject to the kind of electromagnetic smog we're experiencing as we ramp up our telecommunications infrastructure. There could even be a time in Cetician history when they might have had a global "voice," depending on the natural decay rate of the compounds, of course.

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wouldn't transmit through surfaces.

To an extent, yes, if the surface is non-porous. But this would simply have been a problem for primitive Ceticians to overcome. I imagine they would have used water to carry pheremone messages throughout structures. In fact, early city-states could have been connected by wind relay stations and rivers.

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It would make electronic communication impossible.

Why do you say that? The human voice is very poor for electronic communication, but we handled that first with a manually entered code that encoded messages (telegraph); then we switched to a membrane that did the same (phone).

I'm thinking that Ceticians would have actually developed a network of communication similar to the nerve cells in the human body, which are electrochemical. This would require a good understanding of ions and the ability to create some sort of ion pump, which nerve cells are, but they're naturals at chemistry by din of their makeup.

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Pheromone libraries would be incredibly impractical.

Actually, it would depend on how complex the language is at what materials they have that can absorb and hold pheremones, wouldn't it?

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It would probably also make them very, very hard to understand and communicate with for species that speak.

Now let me challenge you strongly here: What in your world view says that the universe MUST make species able to communicate? I'm keenly interested in your thoughts here because I strongly suspect that a generation of Star Trek/Star Wars/Farscape etc. have numbed us to the idea of what alien means. I suspect we now thing alien means "human with funny nose" or "slimy bug-like thing to shoot."

If that's the case, I'd like to offer a few alternatives to tweak people's very conservative view of what alien is.

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Quote: Original post by Wavinator Have a limited amount of regenerating energy that they can use to slow or accelerate time within a bubble I don't follow here. What kind of energy is this? Where does it come from? I have a hard time believing something like that could evolve.

Yes, I would to. It didn't, the Ceticians were modified by a very technologically advanced species called the Fading Immortals. While the Ceticians did not have advanced technology beyond a pre-industrial level, they did have amazing minds and perception capabilities. The Fading Immortals used quantum mechanics to radically reengineer the Ceticians eons ago.

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"Highly sought after" makes it sound like they're being enslaved--is that the case?

They once were, but now because they've lived long enough to see empires crumble to dust, they're one of the wise elders of the cosmos.

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How do they create exotic materials? What are the materials?

Their sense cluster, now heavily modified, allows them to see possibilities in the quantum foam intuitively. Like a master billiards player that can anticipate trajectories of various balls on the table, Ceticians can "see" and hold configurations of matter and inject time-space distortions down at the quantum level. They're able to anticipate and use virtual particles as well as enforce shifts between particles and waves when it suits the structure they're trying to build. Not only does this allow them to preserve atomic configurations that should exist for only very short periods of time, they can rapidly speed up the half-life of undersirable compounds that are often toxic byproducts of such high energy manufacture.

(Eh, sorry, very geeky, but you asked for it! [grin])

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Original post by Wavinator If they're flying brains, why do they need the stalks? Can they re-attach to any body?

The flying brain part is another result of heavy modification, and they can't live without their own bodies for more than a few weeks. (This acts as a gameplay device as well as story point because it conveniently allows them to enter human sized spaces).

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That would lead to a huge population problem.

Yes, if the birthrate were incredibly high. Imagine if only a handful were born every few centuries.

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Quote: Original post by Wavinator Asexual reproduction Two things wrong with this: 1. You say above that the floating allows them to mate.

Eh, you're right, I'm using the wrong word. Here's how I saw this developing: Naturally, a Cetician fragments to give birth, a type of asexual reproduction common in creatures like flatworms. This would suggest an evolutionary environment where disease was relatively mild--a thin low pressure atmosphere might do it, as we find with plants and animals on earth that live in similar environments (high altitude, low heat). In competition, sexual reproduction would have lost out to asexual reproduction due to speed in a low-virulency environment.

After modification the process became one more like pollination, with floating clusters docking with different stalks and "downloading" changes. The cluster creates intense quantum level modifications to the material it is to pass, so it rises, does this safely away from its own body, then docks at a receptor stalk and deposits the changed genetic material before returning home. I'm assuming that while this process can be artificially duplicated, it did not yeild the results the Fading Immortals wanted.

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2. Sexual reproduction is essential for evolutionarily viable species.

I don't think this is proven, either in mathematical models or in considerations of entirely alien ecospheres. Asexual reproduction in the right environment is superior to sexual reproduction because all genetic material is passed on and you don't need to find a mate. But on our planet sex may have the upper hand in higher species due to its ability to pass on useful mutations which help to fight disease.

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Original post by Wavinator Why does this species need archaeologists?

You probably asked this question because they're immortal? If so the answer correlates with the fact that they were slaves for eons in a relatively confined space. In their freedom they are naturally curious about other species and how they live. Their galaxy is littered with the ruins of other cultures, other unique perspectives that went extinct while they were in captivity. So they find themselves naturally curious, and the fact that they're pokey about the process means that although they've been around a long time, they've by no means exhausted the trillions of potential dig sites throughout the galaxy.

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Original post by Wavinator This is problematic. Democracy probably wouldn't mix well with that type of culture.

Funny, I'd think the exact opposite only because as democracy grows it actually becomes inefficient and slow to reach a consensus. But these beings have a high tolerance for such a process.

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Quote: Original post by Wavinator Because they control time, they may have many inefficient methods: For instance, they might not think twice about taking a 3 or 4 century trip if they're skilled enough to place themselves in a bubble; What's 3 or 4 centuries when you're immortal?

Exactly. Or were you disagreeing with me here?

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Are you assuming they experience time at the same rate that we do?

For playability's sake, yes.

First off, I just wanna say WOW. This just totally blows me away, and I always thought I was good at coming up with ideas heh.

1. If each child is an exact replica of the parent, is the whole species genetically identical, with only memory-imprints differentiating them? How would other species tell them apart? (I assume they each emit different pheromone "identifcation scents" so they can tell each other apart.) Maybe they could selectively genetically modify their offspring or something? This process could change the color of some individuals...they wouldn't be able to see it, but humans would. A pink alien would be a bit less threatening. :P

2. What is their notion of family? How many offspring does one typically have in oh, say, 1000 years? You mentioned offspring being imprinted with memories from elders...how do they decide which elders it gets imprinted by? There's probably a big batch of social customs dealing with this. I'd imagine there'd be a relatively small amount of elders/memories involved, at least at the "newborn" stage, to avoid overloading the offspring's mind and making it go crazy. (Is it possible for them to go crazy? How does their society deal with this, if so?) I'd imagine that being imprinted with memories would make the kids more mature than most adult humans, but discipline problems would probably still arise. How is discipline carried out, both in relation to one's offspring, and with their version of criminals? (Can you imagine what'd happen if the elders all got together to decide how to punish a criminal, and it took them 500 years to figure out what to do, by which time he'd committed yet more crimes? They have to be able to make quick decisions *sometimes*.)

3. Back to the family thing. Does each one live alone, or do they have big communal "forest" type homes? Do they have permanent attatchment arrangements similar to marriage (except without the sex), or does their long life/ability to predict the future make this unfeasable? With such long lives, I'd imagine their relationships with each other would get very deep, whether they're best friends or worst enemies. I don't see them doing big flashy emotional stuff, but when you've known someone for 10,000 years, every word can have a thousand meanings.

4. If they can't see, how do they sense their environment? If one was on Earth, could it tell it was fall by the chemicals in the tree leaves? Another useful ability would be if they could detect impurities in water, metals, etc. that could be harmful to other life forms or operation of machinery and such. Rulers could hire them to tell if there was poison in their food, heh. Also note that without sight, there'd be no difference between day and night to them, in terms of "seeing where they're going". Bad weather could severely disrupt their communications/sense of where things are, though.

5. Random thought: pheromone communication would make it likely that there'd be lots of random comments floating around, and it'd be easy to "overhear" stuff you weren't intended to. How do they deal with this? Do they have "pheromone channels" that prevent speech from floating around randomly, or do they refuse to tell secrets/gossip, or are secrets and gossip totally alien to them to begin with? If so, this could be as big a barrier to them understanding humans as the speech-to-pheromone translation. Also, they'd probably have a heavy aversion to lying, since memory of the lie could be handed down for generations. They might not even be able to understand lying, which could make them easy prey for humans in some situations. Maybe we're more alien to them than they are to us...

Sorry for the long post, but I really love having meaty ideas to play with. :)

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Original post by serratemplar Hey Wavinator, and everyone else. I had wondered where this game of yours had gone and HOLY CRAP MAN it looks like you've kept at it in my absence. =)

Hey serratemplar, thanks for the input! Yup, it is progressing. Sometimes its like watching grass grow, though. [smile]

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The ability to control/traverse/modify/alter time is MEGA powerful.

Yes, you're right. But the Ceticians can only really move forward in time (although a Prince of Persia rewind time thingy would be cool, it doesn't fit with the fiction and would be way too unbalancing). A Cetician player would really be more like a mage found in most medieval cRPGs in that they would be able to stun, slow, or speed up other beings. They would be able to do things like rapidly deteriorate a lock or slow-mo an explosion, for instance, by casting timeflow bubbles.

We've actually seen gameplay like this in games like Max Payne, Matrix and Project Eden (which has a nice time slow bubble or ray weapon). It IS powerful, but when you consider that A) the race will likely be undesirable to play and B) there'll be some consequence to violent acts, especially for them, I think the ability might create interesting gameplay and sort of improve their attraction as a playable race.

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...which feels more and more like a Fable-depth type enviroment for Master of Orion...

[smile] Thanks for the Fable comment-- btw, this idea actually grew out of wanting to see Privateer mixed with Master of Orion a long time ago.