Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: NGTM-1R on June 23, 2015, 08:51:31 pm
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Back when I still FREDded, I fully intended to have the GTVA reading the Shivans' mail. It would have given the GTVA a desperately needed handle on the Shivan order of battle and maneuvering, but revealed almost nothing of their higher-order thinking.
The mystery is too important, I think, to solve, both from a writing perspective (it gives a writer options) and from a storytelling one.
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It's solvable in both respects without compromising any of the Shivans' effect. You just gotta stay fly.
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The art is all in the presentation, the selection of aspects and intimations, the sprezzatura.
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Yeah I've never been a fan of the "just don't explain anything" approach either. It sort of worked for Freespace 2, but that's because the series was cut short. If, say, Mass Effect 3 had done that...I know I would have been upset. With something like this, you only have one real option, which is to come up with an explanation that lives up to expectations.
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Or you can double down on the best parts of FreeSpace 2 and just keep pulling back layers of assumption and human conceit in a terrible excavation towards the Lacanian real, answering nothing, constantly asking more terrifyingly cosmic permutations of Are we ****ed(http://i.imgur.com/D6x181b.gif)
That'd be dope, I'd write that. It'd be like Ligotti meets Peter Watts.
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Or you can double down on the best parts of FreeSpace 2 and just keep pulling back layers of assumption and human conceit in a terrible excavation towards the Lacanian real, answering nothing, constantly asking more terrifyingly cosmic permutations of Are we ****ed(http://i.imgur.com/D6x181b.gif)
That'd be dope, I'd write that. It'd be like Ligotti meets Peter Watts.
That's pretty much where I intended to go. Hell, in the campaign where I actually intended to do Shivan POV missions, it was going to be a major theme; they're always so calm about everything, like they're in total control. The GTVA side is over talking about great victories and the Shivan side is "meh, they blew up a couple juggernauts, redeploy the fleet some and we'll sort this out". Everything you find out just leads you further towards the conclusion you're ****ed.
But it's never explicit why the Shivans want us dead. It's never entirely explicit they do want us dead, even.
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That's pretty much where I intended to go. Hell, in the campaign where I actually intended to do Shivan POV missions, it was going to be a major theme; they're always so calm about everything, like they're in total control. The GTVA side is over talking about great victories and the Shivan side is "meh, they blew up a couple juggernauts, redeploy the fleet some and we'll sort this out". Everything you find out just leads you further towards the conclusion you're ****ed.
But it's never explicit why the Shivans want us dead. It's never entirely explicit they do want us dead, even.
Sounds baller. If you aren't up to speed you should swing by the BP forum and ask the analysts to fill you in, I think you'd like a lot of the stuff they're finding (and I'd be very happy to have your reaction.)
While we are here on this favorite topic of mine here are my thoughts on the basic, seductive Shivan Answers:
Shivans are ancient von Neumann machines executing a program of scouring and supernova: as close as we have to canon, explains Capella and the Ancients. Simple. Allows some decent cosmic horror. But very familiar and leverages neither Bosch's crazy monologues nor the 'symptom of a larger problem' hint from :v:. Can tell a fine story if you present it well.
Shivans are gardeners on ethical or ecological grounds: ugh. Let's set aside the awful 'protecting subspace' variant and go for 'suppress hegemonic species'. Cosmic judgment or diversity protection seems supported by the FS1 outro. Reasonably elegant and believable. Doesn't do a great job with Bosch's motives - why would he think it was necessary to ally with the Shivans and ditch the Vasudans if they like nice people? Doesn't do much to explain Capella, though you could finagle it. Appealing creator/destroyer duality but the presence of clear objectives diminishes menace.
Shivan hostility is the result of a misunderstanding: even attributing individual consciousness to the Shivans softens their menace. I am very wary of any theory which posits common merkwelt or the basis for semiotic exchange. Does nothing in particular to use any of the clues V left for us, which attribute only direct violence and puzzling violence to the Shivans. Makes Bosch seem like a dork nerd.
Shivans are a space bug hive mind with queens and ****: get out
Shivans are a Nash equilibrium in a game between civilization strategies: hellll yeah now we're getting places. I mean this doesn't explain **** but it's not lazy and it doesn't lean on habits of anthropocentrism.
Shivans are an irreconciliably alien force whose role in the narrative is to corrode the deep assumptions of human primacy: yes but it's cheating to stop there
I dunno, what did I miss.
So would you be okay with me PMing you my ideas? I would love to talk to someone about it.
NGTM-1R: That actually sounds really cool.
Yeah hit me up, or both of us. Also I just ran the Installer on Blue Planet/Blue Planet 2 and it worked fine! Try it. Go to custom, select those two and the 2014 MVPs if you don't have them.
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I have an obvious bias towards treating as much of the canonical material as possible as meaningful and clue-rich. If you want to treat Bosch as a knob and get rid of 'symptom of a larger problem', that simplifies things a bit.
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Yeah I much prefer Bosch being right the whole time. For some reason it's just very compelling to think that we were on the wrong side for the entirety of FS2.
Okay, so the installer says that it installed all the mods it's supposed to, including AoA and a bunch of others. But I don't have them in my folder. I do have War in Heaven, as well as some other mods. The only thing I can think of is that a while back, I tried several times to install the SCP, but didn't know what I was doing. I currently have seven or so copies of everything. However, the first couple times, I remember that some of the mods failed to download. Later on they all worked, but if those early failures somehow made the launcher think they were installed when they weren't...
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Sure you picked the right target folder? You might need to figure out where the installer's log file lives and delete that.
You can always do a manual install, it's pretty easy. Make sure all the files here (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=68213.0) end up in /blueplanet/. If you've already got War in Heaven you're set there. Make sure they're in the same folder.
Make sure you have the 2014 MVPs in the same folder too, with its default filename.
I think learning about how real bugs work is much more useful to writing good Shivans than any science fictional bugs.
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Here are some things people value in decisionmaking and organization:
Efficient, top-down application of resources. Build a model of the problem. Figure out how to solve it. Don't waste time on trial and error.
Low latency.
Hierarchical networks of decision. Information flows up. Decisions flow down. Territories of choice are delineated cleanly.
Economy of labor. Economy of risk.
Seek safety when securing gains. Accept risk when avoiding losses.
Use past trends to evaluate future outcomes. When you're beaten, figure out what went wrong. Fix it.
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Sure you picked the right target folder? You might need to figure out where the installer's log file lives and delete that.
I think you want to delete this file to make the installer "forget everything".
c:\users\NAME\fsoinstaller.properties
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I think learning about how real bugs work is much more useful to writing good Shivans than any science fictional bugs.
I can't even tell if you're talking about insects or glitches
Also, I'm not entirely certain what your point is with the "how to run a business" thing. I mean...not to be rude.
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Here are some things people value in decisionmaking and organization:
Who is leaning on habits of anthropocentrism now? :p
Case in point:
Efficient, top-down application of resources. Build a model of the problem. Figure out how to solve it. Don't waste time on trial and error.
Alternatively, devote all your time to trial and error. Throw every single possible thing at the problem and see what works and what doesn't. For the things that work, explore variations. This approach to problem-solving can be found in neural network programming, genetic algorithms, and even emergent behavior in chaotic systems such as ants foraging for food. (Hey look, a colony with a queen!)
It's also why SpaceX has been so successful designing rockets: they went back to the drawing board on everything. This may be why some people contend that Elon Musk is actually an alien (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/576140759281238017).
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(http://i.imgur.com/iWKad22.jpg?fb)
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Here are some things people value in decisionmaking and organization:
Who is leaning on habits of anthropocentrism now? :p
Question is, are Shivans people? Is their cognitive model one that uses those structures?
What Batts wrote was a recognizably human method of decisionmaking. But what if Shivans are not using something similar?
Case in point:
Efficient, top-down application of resources. Build a model of the problem. Figure out how to solve it. Don't waste time on trial and error.
Alternatively, devote all your time to trial and error. Throw every single possible thing at the problem and see what works and what doesn't. For the things that work, explore variations. This approach to problem-solving can be found in neural network programming, genetic algorithms, and even emergent behavior in chaotic systems such as ants foraging for food. (Hey look, a colony with a queen!)
Well, hello there significant plot point of BP2.
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Alternatively, devote all your time to trial and error. Throw every single possible thing at the problem and see what works and what doesn't. For the things that work, explore variations. This approach to problem-solving can be found in neural network programming, genetic algorithms, and even emergent behavior in chaotic systems such as ants foraging for food. (Hey look, a colony with a queen!)
It's also why SpaceX has been so successful designing rockets: they went back to the drawing board on everything. This may be why some people contend that Elon Musk is actually an alien (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/576140759281238017).
Your first paragraph describes something almost diametrically opposed to your second, yet you're trying to use them as examples of the same approach to decisionmaking. That casts serious doubt on your understanding of the topic at hand, especially compared to some of the other people discussing it.
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That post is a list of things
people value
in decisionmaking and organization. These are anthropocentric assumptions that you should challenge in writing Shivans!
For the past two and a half years, across the span of Tenebra and several thousand words of fiction, the Blue Planet team has been laying out alternatives! We've been lucky to work with neural net designers, decision theorists, and evolutionary biologists to come up with some crazy **** about space economics, Steele tactics, subspace cognition, and how alien modes of thought might fight each other. It all started with messages hidden in UV maps (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Blue_Planet_intelligence_data#Shivan_behaviour_.28Narayana_textures.29) way back in 2010's BP2 release, then really blew up after Tenebra. If you like Shivans, play Tenebra! (or you could cheat and watch this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnRisy2o6OI))
The important thing when writing aliens is to challenge assumptions. Remember -
I think learning about how real bugs work is much more useful to writing good Shivans than any science fictional bugs.
An ant colony or a bee hive functions on an internal logic that's much weirder and more complicated than laypeople assume. Check it out. It'll amp up your writing.
This is one of my favorite machine learning stories (http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/), about an evolutionary algorithm designing computer chips.
s predicted, the principle of natural selection could successfully produce specialized circuits using a fraction of the resources a human would have required. And no one had the foggiest notion how it worked.
Dr. Thompson peered inside his perfect offspring to gain insight into its methods, but what he found inside was baffling. The plucky chip was utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops. Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest-- with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output-- yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type.
2 spooky
On SpaceX and rapid prototyping, if you're into grungy space engineering you should read Seveneves.
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Here are some things people value in decisionmaking and organization:
Efficient, top-down application of resources. Build a model of the problem. Figure out how to solve it. Don't waste time on trial and error.
Low latency.
Hierarchical networks of decision. Information flows up. Decisions flow down. Territories of choice are delineated cleanly.
Economy of labor. Economy of risk.
Seek safety when securing gains. Accept risk when avoiding losses.
Use past trends to evaluate future outcomes. When you're beaten, figure out what went wrong. Fix it.
What do Shivans value in decisionmaking and organization, based on what we see in FS1 and FS2? Do these values change between the games? Why might that be?
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Here are some things people value in decisionmaking and organization:
Who is leaning on habits of anthropocentrism now? :p
Question is, are Shivans people? Is their cognitive model one that uses those structures?
What Batts wrote was a recognizably human method of decisionmaking. But what if Shivans are not using something similar?
Yes, that was what I was driving at. I found it odd that Battuta left such an obvious assumption in his post, since I know he's done a great deal of thinking about Shivan thought processes. Though perhaps he was intentionally leaving a gap that he would come back to fill in later (such as this post (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=89984.msg1788767#msg1788767)).
Well, hello there significant plot point of BP2.
Is it? I confess it's been quite a while since I've played BP2, and I haven't yet played Tenebra.
Your first paragraph describes something almost diametrically opposed to your second, yet you're trying to use them as examples of the same approach to decisionmaking. That casts serious doubt on your understanding of the topic at hand, especially compared to some of the other people discussing it.
You must not be very familiar with SpaceX's design processes. They don't have a "process" as such, and they don't do systems integration. Instead, they test and test and test.
If you like Shivans, play Tenebra!
I keep reminding myself that I have to do that. :)
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Merlin is a very smart product of experience with turbopumps. The design process is faster and more field-iterative than is conventional for rockets, but it's closer to classically human problem-solving than to something like a neural net, because the bulk of the computation is performed in models rather than in praxis. They started with a lot of memory about past designs, and their design lineage is basically, well, a line — they don't mutate and radiate, they pick optimae and go for them. The system also has global memory (in the form of the humans running it), which many alternate algorithms neglect or actively avoid.
e: the key distinction Phoover is making is that SpaceX has a drawing board, whereas something like an ant hive or a market solves problems without any individual component even knowing there is a problem or that it's working for a solution.
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e: the key distinction Phoover is making is that SpaceX has a drawing board, whereas something like an ant hive or a market solves problems without any individual component even knowing there is a problem or that it's working for a solution.
Now that I will concede. The point I wanted to make about SpaceX is that they aren't afraid to try completely new approaches or jettison existing paradigms, and they disdain a lot of the stovepiping that you see in traditional manufacturing. They certainly aren't a neural network or an ant colony, but on the spectrum of organization, they are closer than their competitors. Only by trying radical approaches can you manufacture a $5000 part that used to cost $100,000.
Also, I think we've hijacked Kestrellius's thread.
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Yes, you absolutely have.
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If you aren't up to speed you should swing by the BP forum and ask the analysts to fill you in, I think you'd like a lot of the stuff they're finding (and I'd be very happy to have your reaction.)
With some regret, no. I still entertain ideas on the subject; I'm concerned they remain my own ideas, if that makes sense.
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It doesn't make much sense to me, but I can respect it.
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I'm going to be the odd one out and say that Shivan behavior has never struck me as random trial-and-error. There's a clear pattern of escalation: Bosch sends a cruiser and the Shivans send a stronger cruiser; the GTVA responds with corvettes and the Shivans escalate with a destroyer; the GTVA sorties several destroyers and the Shivans call in a juggernaut; the GTVA holds the line with its own juggernaut and the Shivans flood the system with a fleet of juggernauts. It's always a proportional response, never a "let's swarm the Colossus with strike craft and divine its weaknesses by their success or failure" type of thing.
I find, rather, that the Shivans behave reminiscent of an immune system. On a skirmish level, the Shivan response is largely reflexive and disorganized, comparable to coughing or sneezing. As damage accrues, the larger body takes notice and begins an inflammatory response, increasing asset flow to the affected area. If a pathogen is found, it is either immediately identified if previously encountered, or analyzed for its antigenic properties (numbers, tactics, technological level, and other strategic information) according to which a response is formulated. The supernova of Capella may have been no different than the draining of a pustule.
Which raises a question I find more horrifying than anything the Shivans can do themselves--if a species of genocidal, star-destroying aliens is just an immune system, what the hell is the full organism?
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I don't think Shivan behavior has ever seemed like random trial-and-error either.
OCAC Candidate
TIA Rapid Exemption Request - Compliance Conditioning Resource
Candidate 616A9814RARQW
NEMESIS NOW Integrated Outcomes Report
Introduction
If you're reading this you are part of the select Upsilon-plus group cleared for NEMESIS NOW. The intelligence community has spent a decade wailing over the explosive complexity of joint analysis on Shivan behavior during the Second Incursion. After ten years of listening to jumped-up experts on the effect of Sirius tax structures in Regulan election outcomes bleating about Vasudan psycholinguistic techniques and suggesting that Shivan behavior might be 'genuinely alien', our task force coalesced out of the collective resentment and irritation of people whose thoughts actually matter.
Wise figures in our leadership structure empowered NEMESIS NOW to traverse the entire alphabet of acronyms, callsigns, stacks, matrices, workflows, and footprints devoted to Shivan analysis. From this journey we return with several transparently exploitative gems of existential horror designed to scare you away and let us get back to work. This is one of them.
Looking Back
Most of you pretend to understand the differences in Shivan behavior between the Great War and the Second Incursion. The core fact you must grasp about the Second Incursion is that Shivan behavior was tactically diffuse, initially much like a set of agents with no global control, but later developed strategic direction. In the opening stages of the encounter, the Shivans reacted sluggishly, executing what we term an 'inflammatory response' to Bosch's incursion. As Allied presence in the nebula escalated, the Shivans began to emit a wide spectrum of behaviors, including a stereotyped recapitulation of Great War strategy that culminated in the GTD Phoenicia's bearbaiting operation and the famous 'High Noon' engagement in Capella. During this strategic epoch, Allied forces fought against a blind algorithm.
We cracked the Shivan behavioral code when we abandoned top-down, teleological analysis and trusted our models to identify patterns. When we extract a pattern from noise, we call it a signal. All Shivan behavior during these opening stages fits within one broad, chaotic signal.
As the Incursion proceeds, we begin to detect a second signal in the Shivan behavioral model. Here and there, strategic elements and tactical assets suddenly depart from the inflammatory response. Yet there is no clear phase transition, as we observed during the Great War after the destruction of the Lucifer. Instead, this signal operates within the inflammatory ladder, redirecting and manipulating elements already in play. For the sake of your limited imaginations we will risk anthropomorphizing and suggest its behavior is almost covert.
Something within the Shivan behavioral system began goal-directed behavior. The result was the detonation of the Capella star. What other outcomes can we attribute to this second signal, this specter in the demon apparatus? We can immediately extract one actionable piece of intelligence: if any of your colleagues or subordinates suggest the action of a 'Shivan queen' or 'hive mind', you can safely have them fired.
By altering the parameters of Shivan behavior across a range of possible (and some contrafactually impossible) states, we can bootstrap models of Shivan cognition. When these models predict Shivan behavior that resembles actual recorded encounters, we gain confidence in the underlying assumptions. In several scenarios, we used Great War behavioral patterns to operate Shivan forces during the Second Incursion. Allied casualties approached or equaled the ceiling value.
In some scenarios, the model of best fit incorporates a third force in play. We can observe this third force only by its interactions with the Shivan behavioral parameters. In many of these models, the Shivan 'second signal' is oriented partly or even wholly in response to the third player.
Beyond a three-player game, diminishing fit returns set in. In this respect our work probably resembles your sex life.
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Okay seriously, what are you guys talking about? You keep making all these apparently disconnected posts with grandiose explanations of things that don't seem to have anything to do with anything. I'm guessing it's about Shivan organization, and there was some big conversation about that at some point that I don't know about, and you're referring to that, but all this seems to just come out of nowhere.
And I hate being confused. :(
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You draw a line between the world of fighters and armor and briefings, and the world of dreams and portents, but this dreamscape, this forum thread, is a glimpse into a world just as real and deadly; a place of stratagems and treachery and power that seems as strange to you as a briefing would seem to an ape.
(In all seriousness: we're trying to use Shivan tactics to divine Shivan behavior, and thus figure out Shivan motives. It's a a conversation that's probably been going on since the game was released, but the "big conversation" you feel like you're missing is probably Blue Planet.)
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Okay seriously, what are you guys talking about? You keep making all these apparently disconnected posts with grandiose explanations of things that don't seem to have anything to do with anything. I'm guessing it's about Shivan organization, and there was some big conversation about that at some point that I don't know about, and you're referring to that, but all this seems to just come out of nowhere.
And I hate being confused. :(
Sorry, there is a large amount of institutional folklore here that you may not be privy to. In the first place, you have 17 years of speculation on the origin, motives, and abilities of the Shivans. In the second place, you have a particularly imaginative campaign (sc. Blue Planet) which has, as one of its primary purposes, an extremely deep investigation of the various mysteries of the FreeSpace universe, particularly the Shivans. In the third place, you have Battuta, who being a writer by trade, is in the habit of producing voluminous quantities of speculative text on just about any canonical or fanonical subject you can think of.
You may want to read the first few posts of this thread (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=80688.0). Despite its length, it is actually the Cliff's Notes version of the history of FreeSpace campaigns.
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We're talking about possible, uh, structures of Shivan cognition and thought that could explain how they act in FS1/FS2. We're asking: what kind of algorithm are they?
I mean 'algorithm' in a really simple sense. As a species or a civilization, how do they transform things they find into behavior? What's their map from 'this happened' to 'this is how we act?'
Let's talk a familiar algorithm: people!
We're each self-aware individuals. We can only directly experience our own life, so we don't want it to end. We have an array of instincts and a lot of learned behavior. We communicate by linking symbols to concepts, then arranging those symbols into language. We build social rules to teach each other to defer our own personal needs in favor of cooperation. When we encounter problems, we make a model of the problem in our heads, then we push the model around to see how we can apply our energy to solve it. This is called cognition. To build our models, we use both rules of thumb (called heuristics) and a volume of past experience, both direct (memory) and indirect (things we've been taught).
This is a really good system for us. We can pass information between each other with symbols. We can develop technology.
Most of us never really have to think about anything else. But there are other algorithms out there!
A rock, for instance, can accept energy and transform in response to the rules of physics and chemistry. It can 'remember' past experiences by changing its shape. But it can't do much else. It doesn't seek out energy and metabolize it. It can't assign symbols or build mental models of problems.
A simple worm can accept input and use rules of thumb, its instincts, to behave in a useful way. But it can't come up with new heuristics. To 'learn', it has to produce mutant offspring, some of whom may develop better instincts by chance. So the worm algorithm for problem-solving is evolutionary.
An ant colony has a set of genetic rules, called eusociality, which conspire to make each individual ant very interested in helping out its sisters. Each individual ant is quite stupid and limited. It has only basic rules, coded into its genes. But the interaction of many ants can produce collective behavior, like foragers calling for workers to plunder a dead beetle,or hundreds of workers linking together into a raft to cross a river. The ants even have very basic symbols: scent markers that can trigger behavior in other ants. So the ant algorithm is hive-based, and arguably a little cognitive, because it can take a problem and 'model' a solution out of collective behavior. But it's the hive doing the thinking, not the individual ant.
Another algorithm is the market. In a market, like the hive, individual actors have wants and resources. They spend resources to get what they want — trading things that are easy for them to find in order to get things that are scarce. Each one's acting locally, using only the information they have. But collectively, the market may figure things out that the individual actors don't know.
Another algorithm, seen a lot in machine learning these days, is the neural net. I wrote a bunch about neural nets but now I am deleting it because this post is too long already.
We're talking about what kind of algorithm the Shivans might be! Does an individual Shivan experience self-awareness? Does it possess 'qualia' (the internal experience of existing)? Do Shivans have the ability to create a model of a problem, solve it cognitively, and then move towards this optimal solution? Are Shivans aware that they exist, and that they're shooting spaceships? Do the Shivans care about local optimization the way we do — getting things done fast, with an economical use of resources and little risk of life?
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Alright, yeah. I guess...well, it's not exactly going over my head, but...
To put it bluntly, I'm accustomed to being by far the smartest person in the room, particularly when it comes to philosophy, or anything related to fiction. So I'm a bit taken aback when people are discussing such high-end concepts in such depth and with such efficiency. Although it's not as though these are things I never consider. I've spent quite a bit of time examining these concepts. Maybe I'll be able to contribute once I'm up to speed.
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A very important thing to consider in problem-solving is local vs. global.
When your algorithm is a local optimizer, it's really good at finding an immediate solution. A tiger might say 'I need meat! I will hunt.' But it can't sacrifice short-term gains in favor of long-term plans. It doesn't know how to say 'There are only ten cows left. I should should stop eating them, and switch to eating fish, so the cows can repopulate. That way my cubs will have more to eat.'
When your algorithm is a global optimizer, it can step back and look at the bigger picture. A tiger might say 'All the cows in Tigerworld are dying of plague. We should build a Tigership and fly to a new planet.' It can sacrifice short-term power for long-term good. But it risks being beaten in the short term by a local optimizer, another tiger who says 'if I eat ten cows, I will be strong and fast, and I can kill that Tigership jerk!"
If you think about the tension between these two, you can gain insight into a lot of problems in the world!
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Yeah I much prefer Bosch being right the whole time. For some reason it's just very compelling to think that we were on the wrong side for the entirety of FS2.
To be honest, I prefer the "Bosch was wrong, but the GTVA used him" answer. It fits with the whole "I could live with being a pawn if the game makes sense" feeling you have throughout FS2.
It's not particularly hard to believe that someone with an incomplete understanding of what the Shivans were could go off in completely the wrong direction. It would also explain why the GTVA kept helping Bosch with his plans. If you take the simpler "Bosch was right all along" approach you basically make them out to be idiots who simply didn't think things through.
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If you think about the tension between these two, you can gain insight into a lot of problems in the world!
Of course, it gets worse when you realise that much of the things that happen in the world are done by agents who do not behave rationally, but with other drivers in their minds and hearts. So it's not just "local vs global", and it gets even worse when you add up all the natural selection shenanigans that will find solutions that would be totally alien to this dichotomy you presented, as if they solved their problems in perpendicular, weird, astonishing ways.
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It's not particularly hard to believe that someone with an incomplete understanding of what the Shivans were could go off in completely the wrong direction. It would also explain why the GTVA kept helping Bosch with his plans. If you take the simpler "Bosch was right all along" approach you basically make them out to be idiots who simply didn't think things through.
Why?
Of course, it gets worse when you realise that much of the things that happen in the world are done by agents who do not behave rationally, but with other drivers in their minds and hearts. So it's not just "local vs global", and it gets even worse when you add up all the natural selection shenanigans that will find solutions that would be totally alien to this dichotomy you presented, as if they solved their problems in perpendicular, weird, astonishing ways.
I think what you're describing is the central consequence of the local vs. global problem!
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Of course, it gets worse when you realise that much of the things that happen in the world are done by agents who do not behave rationally, but with other drivers in their minds and hearts. So it's not just "local vs global", and it gets even worse when you add up all the natural selection shenanigans that will find solutions that would be totally alien to this dichotomy you presented, as if they solved their problems in perpendicular, weird, astonishing ways.
I think what you're describing is the central consequence of the local vs. global problem!
This is where introducing the concept of stability might be in order. Solutions for both local and global problems can be either stable or unstable. A solution is unstable if some slight deviation can force the system away from its current solution. A solution is stable if some slight deviation will end up pulling back to the point (or location of stability.) Obviously this is a simplification as solutions may be stable in one vector but not in another (i.e. saddlepoints), and of course, existing has many dimensions to it which means many different directions for it to change (culture, technology, government, etc.) Typically speaking, the more dimensions a system has, the less likely it will be stable because there are more possibilities for it to deviate.
We could say Shivans as a species are both a global solution and a stable solution to the long running game of existence; they're ancient and existed longer than anything else. (I wouldn't be surprised if certain Shivan ships are older than our own Sun!) Meanwhile, the GTVA is a local solution but perhaps also an unstable solution. Bosch's defection changes the GTVA. He creates a splinter group in the form of the NTF, and it is unlikely that the post-war GTVA is same as pre-war GTVA. By comparison, the Shivans have probably been doing what they've been doing for an inconceivable amount of time.
So we could perhaps extrapolate a few details about the Shivans vs Terrans/Vasudans.
Shivans as a species probably have fewer dimensions to them. This means we might not expect things such as culture or even a system of governance. Terrans and Vasudans have not shown any ability to remain in any one form for long. The entire history of the two species are constant wars, changing government types, and cultural development. To use the terminology, each era is a local solution. The Shivans probably do away with any notion of governments and culture because as a species they probably don't have that extra layer of complexity. Their solution to things such as culture is that they have none, and this contributes to their ability to have a stable global solution.
In interpreting Shivans, I like to think of them as a force of nature, as if they themselves were the universe. And not only is the universe immensely vast, but it naturally wants to kill us. For me, that is a pretty terrifying thought.
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Interestingly the BP Shivans seem to have an incredible amount of internal complexity and activity, it's just not globally directed or even consistent.
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The stability post is really good. And Phantom's observation ties into the presence of internal mechanisms designed to disrupt stable solutions in the name of totipotency and holocide.
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I'm saying that the very framing of the "problem" as being "local vs global" is already problematic in itself, for it pressuposes that all the agents are behaving in a rational, optimal, strategic manner, constantly trying to get into a Nash equilibrium state. But all evidence shows that at least, we humans, actually do not behave like this. In recent studies it was shown that only two groups of people actually behaved like that, economists and psychopaths - which makes a lot of sense if you think about it, and it would explain a lot of our intellectual fascination with psychopaths in the first place but that's a different topic.
Now we can double down in the mental process and declare that, in some weird, obscure manner, our psyches are actually tuned to work in a much deeper Nash-like rational equilibrium that hasn't just been understood and modeled yet, but once such models were done, we would actually see how perfectly rational and strategic all of us really are. And in that sense, terms like "solution" and so on would make sense again. But all of this is entirely teleological. There's no "solution" here to be had, because all we have in our genes and culture is mostly the past and our drives, not any purpose or reasoned demanded output for our existence.
If we are to look at mankind's "solution" to the shivan problem, we might even run to several philosophical problems before even correctly defining what exactly the "problem" is, but if we handwavely and generally define it as "surviving" the shivans, then I'd venture that a lot of adaptation would need to occur, for all our past, both culturally and genetically, are just not sufficient tools to deal with this kind of stuff. Natural selection was great, but it deals terribly with new original problems of their own that have the capacity to instagib the entire genepool / civilization. Our famed intelligence is little better than that, most of our thoughts are incredibly stupid and incoherent, science, as the other writer said some time ago, is a human achievement, not a "human trait". Will all the social and scientific processes that the GTVA produced be enough to deal with a deep-time deep-space challenge? My guess is 100% no. The only way it works in BP is because it is written with a non-desperation feel-good ending in mind, so it creates this idea that we are somewhat special (unlike all those other 99% of species that were wiped out, ala Mass Effect style), and it is this grace of specialness that saves our asses (we can sugarcoat it with "moral" decisions all we like, but still), where in reality there's no indication of this being the case at all.
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I'm saying that the very framing of the "problem" as being "local vs global" is already problematic in itself, for it pressuposes that all the agents are behaving in a rational, optimal, strategic manner, constantly trying to get into a Nash equilibrium state. But all evidence shows that at least, we humans, actually do not behave like this. In recent studies it was shown that only two groups of people actually behaved like that, economists and psychopaths - which makes a lot of sense if you think about it, and it would explain a lot of our intellectual fascination with psychopaths in the first place but that's a different topic.
Brah I think you're forgetting what field I was in. People clearly aren't econs.
People do gather info and make decisions based on rules and heuristics. The irrationality you're talking about is the product of rules and heuristics that evolved (in a local, satisficing, good-enough way) across time. Once you abandon the idea of teleological evolution, you can understand that human behavior is governed by a bunch of locally optimized heuristics that try to get together to solve much bigger, newer problems.
You're charging in here to argue points that are in fact already central to the discussion and agreed upon.
The only way it works in BP is because it is written with a non-desperation feel-good ending in mind, so it creates this idea that we are somewhat special (unlike all those other 99% of species that were wiped out, ala Mass Effect style), and it is this grace of specialness that saves our asses (we can sugarcoat it with "moral" decisions all we like, but still), where in reality there's no indication of this being the case at all.
Why would you assume this? All these years of BP making the precise opposite argument and you think it'll abruptly veer back the way it came? Interesting.
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The framing of 'local' vs 'global' in fact explains departures from 'rationality'. It's the definitions of 'rationality' and 'agent' that are misleading.
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Waha I also remembered one more class of people with reduce departure from 'rationality' in a number of experimental setups: the clinically depressed!
A number of heuristic biases, such as positivity bias, are actually adaptive in a range of common situations.
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GB, could you please remind yourself that an edit function exists and that you don't need to triple-post?
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Battuta phone posts
His think joy is too verbose
A vowel man weeps
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I think, Luis, that you're thinking too teleologically about the processes in question. For instance:
I'm saying that the very framing of the "problem" as being "local vs global" is already problematic in itself, for it pressuposes that all the agents are behaving in a rational, optimal, strategic manner, constantly trying to get into a Nash equilibrium state. But all evidence shows that at least, we humans, actually do not behave like this. In recent studies it was shown that only two groups of people actually behaved like that, economists and psychopaths - which makes a lot of sense if you think about it, and it would explain a lot of our intellectual fascination with psychopaths in the first place but that's a different topic.
Agents in competitive games converge to Nash equilibria because that's the stable strategic environment for the game, not because they aim to reach a Nash equilibrium and rationally try to bring it about. They don't need to know anything about game theory or strategy at all, or even have the ability to think.
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Now we can double down in the mental process and declare that, in some weird, obscure manner, our psyches are actually tuned to work in a much deeper Nash-like rational equilibrium that hasn't just been understood and modeled yet, but once such models were done, we would actually see how perfectly rational and strategic all of us really are. And in that sense, terms like "solution" and so on would make sense again. But all of this is entirely teleological. There's no "solution" here to be had, because all we have in our genes and culture is mostly the past and our drives, not any purpose or reasoned demanded output for our existence.
If we are to look at mankind's "solution" to the shivan problem, we might even run to several philosophical problems before even correctly defining what exactly the "problem" is, but if we handwavely and generally define it as "surviving" the shivans, then I'd venture that a lot of adaptation would need to occur, for all our past, both culturally and genetically, are just not sufficient tools to deal with this kind of stuff. Natural selection was great, but it deals terribly with new original problems of their own that have the capacity to instagib the entire genepool / civilization. Our famed intelligence is little better than that, most of our thoughts are incredibly stupid and incoherent, science, as the other writer said some time ago, is a human achievement, not a "human trait". Will all the social and scientific processes that the GTVA produced be enough to deal with a deep-time deep-space challenge? My guess is 100% no. The only way it works in BP is because it is written with a non-desperation feel-good ending in mind, so it creates this idea that we are somewhat special (unlike all those other 99% of species that were wiped out, ala Mass Effect style), and it is this grace of specialness that saves our asses (we can sugarcoat it with "moral" decisions all we like, but still), where in reality there's no indication of this being the case at all.
This is a very good critique. I'll respond to this first since it'll make more sense. First, let's get some definition stuff out of the way. A "game" is the abstract interaction between the actors and a set of states or "win" conditions. Solutions are states in which the system is in equilibrium, so for the most part, we can say they're the same thing. I will actually refrain from using the term equilibrium except in the specific case of a Nash equilibrium. Actors are the distinct entities that are making decisions within the game. All of this stuff is conceptually from the field of game theory although notions such as stability or solutions are concepts applicable in the broader fields of mathematics as well.
Defining the "problem" or "game" is certainly an important part of the question. What I think has been intrinsically proposed is that the problem is the one of existence. The "win" state is very simple; the actor in question has to continue to exist. To "lose" is simply to cease having a form. Note, in this game, everyone can win or lose; there does not need to be a loser for there to be a winner. In this case, both Terrans and Shivans have won the game. But here's where the difference is important. Terrans won by employing an unstable solution whereas Shivans seem to have won by employing a stable solution. The Terran solution, the post-FS2 GTVA, is probably an unstable solution because the GTVA X number of years later will be a different GTVA (especially if we assume things like BP). The FS2 Shivans (and this is based on how I have interpreted the Shivans) have not changed in billions of years (perhaps even more). They fly around supernovaing stars and killing anything that gets in their way. They (and this is my interpretation) have not evolved their technologies or doctrine. And by this static set of choices/behaviors, they have managed to continued existing.
I'm saying that the very framing of the "problem" as being "local vs global" is already problematic in itself, for it pressuposes that all the agents are behaving in a rational, optimal, strategic manner, constantly trying to get into a Nash equilibrium state. But all evidence shows that at least, we humans, actually do not behave like this. In recent studies it was shown that only two groups of people actually behaved like that, economists and psychopaths - which makes a lot of sense if you think about it, and it would explain a lot of our intellectual fascination with psychopaths in the first place but that's a different topic.
Those assumptions aren't necessarily prerequisite to the idea of local/global solutions or equilibrium.
What needs to be noted is that the framing of the question or actors is essential to the interpretation. In economics, Nash equilibria tend be solutions where neither actor (usually a person or a firm entity) will want to deviate from their current behavior. But this doesn't give us enough information to analyze the overall system if we deviate slightly (say someone makes a mistake or an irrational actor comes in and makes a random decision). If we refer back to the idea of stability, an unstable solution is one where some random action (perhaps from irrationality) can result in the players moving away from the Nash equilibrium. If we were assuming an unstable solution, then your critique of irrationality is entirely valid.
However, solutions can also be stable. In a stable solution, some deviation will be corrected for by whatever forces exist in the system over time. Most economists usually concern themselves with only stable solutions because unstable solutions are subject to the critique that mistakes/irrationality does exist.
Two bits of empirical counterpoints: 1) Economists do have models where actors may be assumed to be irrational (i.e. making random choices, making choices on an entirely algorithmic pattern, or even purposefully picking choices that are harmful to them). 2) You can abstract away from the idea of perfect rational people. An actor can be anything so long it is involved in the defined game. Refer to Battuta's post on rocks (and why they are also engaging in the game of existing.)
Now it's fair to also allow a bit of leeway for when we say something is in a solution. If something hovers very closely to a solution, then usually we can say it's a solution. Imagine if the post FS2 GTVA does not change at all. People's genetics remain the same, they have the same system of governance, and so on, with the exception that every few years people start wearing different hats. We can probably say this GTVA is a solution for the problem of existing.
So the idea of solutions is a fine framework for analyzing the Shivans. But as you've pointed out, it is also very important to identify what we mean by solutions. Here, we have a mostly clear game and solutions that address it appropriately.
If we start critiquing the idea of what it means to be an actor though or what it means to maintain identity as the same actor, we'll get into really funky discussions about what it means to exist. If the Shivans vaporized all of humanity and we became dust, does that mean we have also "won" the game of existing by picking the strategy of being space dust?
Edit: I love this forum. I can't think of anywhere else I get to discuss game theory, philosophy, and fictional space aliens from a video game.
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I think for me the vital insight about winning the existence game is this: a very strong tactic is to gain the ability to reshape existence to suit your tactics and deny those of others.
A simple case is farming. We can use land and crops to create food surplus. Later we may develop fertilizer and artificial climates and specially bred crops. By this means we reshape the ordinary terrain of food scarcity in our favor.
As we get better at this, we begin making models that predict the tactics of others. We predict how they will act and we counter play. This is Steele in BP. He uses understanding of his opponents to precisely disrupt their tactics. In the farming analogy, we might choose crops that flourish in the presence of pests our opponents are vulnerable to.
This tactic is so good that I would expect galactic civilizations to build hegemonies from it. 'We have a model of everything you may do and we have already solved the counter plays.'
Yet we see none of this in the Shivans. They do not show any interest in building models of us. They don't target their force at gaps in our capabilities.
I agree with you, wholeheartedly and with great delight, that the Shivans represent an optimum in the existence game. But I don't think that points to stasis. I think it points to tactics that prey on the tactics I described above.
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I'm saying that the very framing of the "problem" as being "local vs global" is already problematic in itself, for it pressuposes that all the agents are behaving in a rational, optimal, strategic manner, constantly trying to get into a Nash equilibrium state. But all evidence shows that at least, we humans, actually do not behave like this. In recent studies it was shown that only two groups of people actually behaved like that, economists and psychopaths - which makes a lot of sense if you think about it, and it would explain a lot of our intellectual fascination with psychopaths in the first place but that's a different topic.
Brah I think you're forgetting what field I was in. People clearly aren't econs.
People do gather info and make decisions based on rules and heuristics. The irrationality you're talking about is the product of rules and heuristics that evolved (in a local, satisficing, good-enough way) across time. Once you abandon the idea of teleological evolution, you can understand that human behavior is governed by a bunch of locally optimized heuristics that try to get together to solve much bigger, newer problems.
You're charging in here to argue points that are in fact already central to the discussion and agreed upon.
My problem with this answer of yours is that I had foreseen it and already pre-answered to it right above it:
....But all of this is entirely teleological. There's no "solution" here to be had, because all we have in our genes and culture is mostly the past and our drives, not any purpose or reasoned demanded output for our existence.
Why would you assume this? All these years of BP making the precise opposite argument and you think it'll abruptly veer back the way it came? Interesting.
You're a damned good writer, and so I fear assuming anything with you, but my feeble mind cannot but assume that this is the unavoidable weakness of the plot, that no matter how you dice it, it will either come from a "specialness" of terrudankind or sheer luck. You might hide it so well that it will be invisible but for those who are going to nitpick everything till they find the crack, but it's like a perpetual machine for me: no matter how clever you made your maths, there's a crack somewhere down there that just doesn't cut it.
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So laying out the strategies:
UEF - be peaceful and exist on what's given in the environment
GTVA - eat the peaceful by manipulating the environment
Shivans - be the environment?
The Shivans are such a massive entity that their mere existence shapes how everyone else reacts.
On a past note about local/global strategies: if the Shivan strategy truly is the optimal global strategy for existence, then does that imply the most effective strategy at winning the existence game is to exist on an unprecedentedly large scale? It almost feels like we're saying to be the biggest winner, you have to be the biggest winner.
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Sorry for the doublepost, but doing renders and commenting here is stretching my PC resources thin :).
I want to answer to Snarks (and partially to Phantom Hoover), because I see I was defining terms incorrectly, thus following terribly the reasonings.
Sure, I totally see the point in analysing these things in game theory in that manner, and alas, it's somewhat of a sketch of what the GTVA mega-computers were actually doing in making those social predictions that urged them to go to war in Sol. I surged in the thread because I kinda didn't like Battuta's simplistic vision of future prediction by free agents as "local" vs "global", when all I can see is just a difference of scale in analysing future possibility states (the tiger hunting does have lots of problems to solve in order to get its meal, the cowboy has his own shares of other problems to solve as well), with apparent qualified differences being just the emergent result of more neurons working at the problems at hand.
What I sense about the "difference" between those two above mentioned is that they come from two separate parts of our brain, one we just call our primal drives or needs, the other we traditionally call "intelligence", and we as human beings feel the inner tension between the two, so why not call them apart? But again, it's like chess. Once it was thought that "long term thought" was so different than "local thought" that AIs beating super-GMs was a sheer impossibility. This was proven false, all that was required was more neurons thrown at the problems (discussions about Kasparov's brain neuron nets being hugely more efficient at playing chess than Deep Blue's rooms of chips notwithstanding).
I agree with you, wholeheartedly and with great delight, that the Shivans represent an optimum in the existence game. But I don't think that points to stasis. I think it points to tactics that prey on the tactics I described above.
Tactics of beating tactics of beating tactics. There could be countless levels of this in the shivan design. Purely the result of extreme intelligence (if we define it as capability to predict future states). Now I know, it could be just random chance, or natural selection of some billions of years ago, that these agents just happened to come across these tactics, but since we also know the computing power of a single shivan corpse, I'm betting that intelligence was the main driver here.
On a past note about local/global strategies: if the Shivan strategy truly is the optimal global strategy for existence, then does that imply the most effective strategy at winning the existence game is to exist on an unprecedentedly large scale? It almost feels like we're saying to be the biggest winner, you have to be the biggest winner.
Size does give the shivans an advantage. I wonder how they behaved when they were smaller in scope, their strategies were obviously completely different.
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Man it's not foreseeing if you're just saying what we've all been arguing! The heuristics we use to navigate the world arose from an ateleological existence game, and it's hard to get those blindly evolved local heuristics to work for our new, 'rational', teleological mode of global reasoning. You're trying to argue against something by restating it. All we can do is keep saying 'yes, exactly!'
So laying out the strategies:
UEF - be peaceful and exist on what's given in the environment
GTVA - eat the peaceful by manipulating the environment
Shivans - be the environment?
The Shivans are such a massive entity that their mere existence shapes how everyone else reacts.
On a past note about local/global strategies: if the Shivan strategy truly is the optimal global strategy for existence, then does that imply the most effective strategy at winning the existence game is to exist on an unprecedentedly large scale? It almost feels like we're saying to be the biggest winner, you have to be the biggest winner.
I think of the Shivans as an environment, yeah! But not just a system of systems interacting, like weather or tectonics. Something much more dangerous.
To borrow more of your language, I think of the Shivans as a function. A transform. It accepts input and produces, eventually, a response. What input?
Exactly the kind of stable existence game equilibrium tactics you talked about earlier. And the output is the devastation of that tactic. The Shivans are whatever network occupies the space between.
Imagine a point in the game space so unstable that when it encounters a stable equilibrium it immediately diverges wildly - and does so in a way that eventually selects for a counterstrategy.
It's not the kind of super smart chess mind I was talking about earlier. Rather, it's a function intrinsically hostile to that mind, one that eats the enemy's local victories and transforms them into global defeats. It can fight anything because it has no internal structure to predict and destroy: only engines for transforming input into radically divergent behaviors that eventually produce a winning tactic.
Note that this crazy anti-chessmaster function may of course produce chessmasters from its sea of possibilities. They'll be effective at optimizing force locally, but may create fragility by over optimizing and becoming predictable. In BP these are called anima. They recruit elements from the totipotent base state to satisfy their local objectives, and they last until something takes them out.
And yes - you have to be huge to do this. Ridiculously so. It's such a locally wasteful tactic that you have to be able to absorb galaxies and millennia of losses in the name of ultimate victory.
The Shivans have given up on the Princess Bride problem that haunts chessmasters: if you do this, I do that! But you know I know, so you'll do THAT, so I must do THIS, but you know I know you know...
They've stepped back and said, ok, how do we take the limit of this problem and become the victor at infinity? How do we become a function that transforms strategies into counterstrategies?
In a sense the Shivans are very lazy. They ask you to work very hard to figure them out, or to throw all your strength at them, or whatever, man, it's all cool with us. They outsource the job of figuring out your weaknesses to you! They're just exceptionally good, in the long run, at listening. They'll grow the organs they need to kill you once you've made it clear what those should be.
There's a reason BP said the Shivans were calculated, not made. Though that means a few things.
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That sounds incredibly smart, and I notice the calculated bit. Has been a while since I last dwelled my thoughts into this so I missed a couple things from canon here, but I do wonder. I wonder at how magical it just seems to be. I wonder how it is possible to have all these diagnosing abilities without any hint of intelligence. Kinda reminds me the weakest point from The Dark Knight IMHO, the one where the Joker just laughs at the schemes of everyone else, while he just goes and "chases dogs", he has no clue what the hell he's doing and so on. And yet, he pulled several batmans in the movie and predicted almost everything about those people's schemes.
I do understand the point of using intelligence locally as a tool, and I am indeed fascinated by this idea of intelligence being used by a simpler function to do its bidding ( a phrase I never got to use in my Aken's Diary BP fanfic ran like this: a panicked crew member of the Iceni anima started shouting to his crewmates "Don't you see? They turned us into mere middleware!!"), and the designed point is indeed important. It also smells like a poignant statement over the human mind itself, as if saying, "You think you're in control of your body, don't you? Well, let me write you a scenario that might hint otherwise!".
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Welp, I'm still feeling out of my depth here, but I did a bit of reading on game theory and I get the jist of it.
Also, I just had an idea. Suppose someone created a computer to run simulations of various scenarios. Specifically, let's say the GTVA created one to predict the actions or motivations of the Shivans.
And then, suppose everything. Every possible situation, run through the computer. Victories, defeats, both, neither. But the computer is programmed to prioritize success, so when running a scenario, the computer doesn't progress to the next event until an acceptable outcome has been achieved and documented. Then, if that scenario arises, it is dealt with precisely in the manner laid out by the optimal run.
Do you see where I'm going with this?
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That looks like a simple chess AI player. It's a weeed more complex than that. See "local" achievements vs "global" achievements - the difference between short-term outcome and very very very long term outcome, the difference between a toddler playing chess and Kasparov.
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Oh. Yeah, my point was something completely different.
Alpha 1's superpower isn't immense flying skill, it's the ability to retry his or her missions an infinite number of times until an optimal outcome is achieved. What I'm proposing is that this, rather than simply being an out-of-universe phenomenon, is the result of Alpha 1 being connected to a computer simulation device in some way. Maybe Alpha 1 doesn't even exist, and it's the computer flying the fighter once it runs the ideal simulation.
Furthermore, this concept allows all campaigns to coexist, despite the fact that even if you take alternate-universe shenanigans into account, it's hard to justify the Shivans having entirely different origins and motives. However, if most modded campaigns are simply speculative simulation scenarios...
Since the Shivans are pretty much an unknown variable -- the GTVA has no idea what they want -- it would make a certain degree of sense to just go through every single motivation they could think of and prepare for anything.
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It's not particularly hard to believe that someone with an incomplete understanding of what the Shivans were could go off in completely the wrong direction. It would also explain why the GTVA kept helping Bosch with his plans. If you take the simpler "Bosch was right all along" approach you basically make them out to be idiots who simply didn't think things through.
Why?
If you take the Bosch was right all along point of view you make a set of assumptions about the GTVA which I'm not particularly fond of.
1) You assume that humans definitely can understand Shivans well enough to be able to communicate with them. You further assume that an alliance with them is possible.
2) You assume that despite the number of people studying them only one middle ranking officer (Bosch probably wasn't an admiral at the time) understood what was going on.
3) Bosch must either decide to keep what he has figured out to himself for some unknown reason he doesn't bother to explain, even when monlogueing or he does tell the GTA and they ignore him because he's a poopyhead.
4) The GTVA bury the information Bosch used for no good reason. Yeah, I know military intelligence can be stupid but we are dealing with a genocidal species here. You would have thought someone would want the research to continue.
5) The GTVA aid Bosch several times because of his work on a secret project. This is despite having such a vague knowledge of what the secret project is that for all they knew it could have been a super recipe for chilli. One so good that the Shivans would just have to know how to make it.
5b) Or the GTVA knew that it was a communication device and they let Bosch continue to develop it because leaving it to a rogue admiral who has already caused one war is better than asking the janitor for the keys to that room you've labelled "Shivan stuff we can't be bothered to look at - TOP SECRET" so that you can restart the research you should have been doing for the last 20 odd years anyway.
6) Having continually ****ed up when they finally find the Iceni the GTVA spend the minimum resources they possibly can in order to retrieve the information on board. Cause there's no real issue if the Shivans blow it up and we never figure out what message Bosch sent.
Basic conclusion - The GTVA are a bunch of idiots.
On the other hand, if we assume that a select few within the GTVA know a bit more about the Shivans than Bosch things start getting interesting.
Suppose that the truth about the Shivans is as horrible as we've been talking about on this thread. There's no way you'd want something like that to become public knowledge. Further suppose that for some reason the best strategy for the GTVA is to communicate something with the Shivans (It really doesn't matter what).
The GTVA have a problem now. They can't just open the portal and knowingly start off a war without explaining why they did it. And looking like they blundered into the war looks bad on them.
Enter Bosch. Bosch had some crazy, incorrect views about the Shivans. The GTVA realise they can use him as a cat's paw to achieve their goals. It wouldn't be hard to make sure that the scientists who end up working for him are their people and since Bosch probably can't read quantum pulses they can be sure that it will be their message that gets sent.
With this scenario most of the seemingly idiotic decisions the GTVA made suddenly make sense. Bosch gains an incomplete picture of Shivan motivations precisely because he isn't a scientist studying Shivans. He's ignored because he is wrong. The information on Shivans is buried not out of stupidity but because it needs to studied in much greater secrecy. And the GTVA aid Bosch cause they want him to succeed, not because they think allowing a rogue officer to develop WMDs is a good idea.
In the end, we don't even need Shivan motivations to be understood or even understandable, we only need the GTVA to believe that the message they were sending would do something useful. Whether it was an offer of an alliance, surrender, peace treaty or even an Independence Day style computer virus is rather unimportant. All that matters is that the GTVA thought it would be worth it.
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I don't think any of your assumptions are necessary but reading the rest I think it's just because we have different interpretations of 'Bosh was right' on the way to similar objectives.
This convo is spoken to a lot in the COLDMORN leaks.
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The Bosch monologues are too lovingly written and too central to be thrown out as pure delusion, though
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Not pure delusion. The work of someone very intelligent working with incomplete data.
Large parts of what he says is correct. The rest is based on sound data but interpreted incorrectly.
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The Bosch monologues are too lovingly written and too central to be thrown out as pure delusion, though
To parrot you: why?
There's an element of hubris to Bosch's assumption he just needs to use the language of the xenocidal monsters and everything is hunky-dory. Whether that's just garden-variety arrogance or classical hubris in the sense of challenging or claiming to comprehend the divine, it's definitely there.
People describe FS2's themes of arrogance. I've argued a long time that Terran Command, however, did the best it could; you've even largely agreed with that argument. Bosch, on the other hand, should be treated better? Hell the entire story of FS2's about a shaggy dog as far as the player's concerned. There's no reason to assume Bosch's story isn't meant to end the same way.
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I was about to quote your frequent arguments that command isn't stupid.
It seems rather unfair to assume that the GTVA government must be. And I really can't see how Bosch's monologues can be correct unless they are.
I hadn't been thinking along the lines of hubris but it is a great point. Bosch is obviously arrogant enough to believe that he alone can understand the Shivans. It fits perfectly with the tone of FS2 if he is as mistaken as the GTVA claims that the destruction of the Ravana and then Sathanas proves their superiority over the Shivans.
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There's a frustrating through-line here of treating 'the Bosch monologues can be mined for meaning' as identical to 'Bosch is right about everything' or 'Bosch will solve Shivans with diplomacy.'
To me the challenge is using the content of the monologues to make things more interesting and menacing.
Treating something as important is not the same as treating it as simple fact. Bosch's insights, like the Ancients, are attached to a structure and a belief system.
One of the core principles of BP writing has always been finding ways to use as much of the canonical information as possible to create interesting stories. The NEMESIS NOW brief about the Rephaim engagement, for example, even managed to mine a continuity error about the Thutmose and Sopedu to build on the Nagari story.
I can see a lot of ways to write a very good story about Bosch being wholly insane or just deeply misguided and manipulated. But I would hold those stories to a standard - they'd need to be as good as those I can tell with Bosch in possession of fragmentary insight.
I was about to quote your frequent arguments that command isn't stupid.
It seems rather unfair to assume that the GTVA government must be. And I really can't see how Bosch's monologues can be correct unless they are.
I hadn't been thinking along the lines of hubris but it is a great point. Bosch is obviously arrogant enough to believe that he alone can understand the Shivans. It fits perfectly with the tone of FS2 if he is as mistaken as the GTVA claims that the destruction of the Ravana and then Sathanas proves their superiority over the Shivans.
Your question has been answered at great length in the assorted BP materials! I think you'd like the way it handles making GTVI smart at the same time it grants Bosch an ambiguous status somewhere between visionary and tragic pawn.
In general I think you guys are too quick to take corners and pass over the more complicated, ambiguous stories in the middle.
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I'm being too hardline too, though. There are good stories to be told under a wide range of interpretations. I think we've found one that makes GTVI very smart, Bosch a tragic messiah, Bosch a foolish pawn, and GTVI an insanely overmatched organ of desperation.
I am less interested in arguing that stories are bad than in pushing solutions I think can turn out well.
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I will Boschpost more when I'm not drunk.
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Actually, I'm not taking a corner. You're saying that you tried to mine the game for as much as you can, guess what, I've been doing the same thing for years too. Both on my own and as part of the MindGames team.
I'm quite happy to accept various stories which have Bosch as being correct. But they do need to explain the inconsistencies in the GTVA's behaviour. If Blue Planet does that, great. But it's not the only possible interpretation and I think you forgot that when you tried to claim that we can't throw out the monologues. Both NGTM-1R and I pointed out that what I had posted in no way devalued the monologues as being unimportant.
What I dislike is people taking the simplistic "Bosch was right and command were wrong" approach. Command are not idiots. You might not be doing that but I'll point out that my first post on this thread wasn't a reply to you anyway.
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I don't think we disagree on any fundamental point.
I've always been a big advocate for narrative heterodoxy. If you've got a cool interpretation that makes a good story, tell it!
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It's perfectly possible that Bosch and the GTVA are right. Even Command's information is incomplete--the method to Bosch's madness may have become frighteningly apparent only once the GTVA began to pour over the defeated NTF's records.
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Yes. And it's also possible that GTVI elements groomed and abetted Bosch in pursuing an agenda they couldn't achieve on their own. Or they they engineered the NTF rebellion as an intentional recapitulation of the T/V war in order to trigger a Shivan response. Or that both sides were manipulating each other while holding partial information, the GTVI in need of ETAK but Bosch in possession of some messianic vision.Or that Bosch was able to draw the Shivans' attention in a not-immediately-violent sense, but without fully understanding what he'd set in motion. There are lots of ways to play the story without flipping a switch between 'Bosch right' and 'GTVA right.'
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Or they they engineered the NTF rebellion as an intentional recapitulation of the T/V war in order to trigger a Shivan response.
Ooh...now that one you could get some mileage out of. (Or maybe you guys already did in BP; I'm woefully behind!)
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I've not seen that really explored in BP to date.
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Here are some things people value in decisionmaking and organization:
Who is leaning on habits of anthropocentrism now? :p
Case in point:
Efficient, top-down application of resources. Build a model of the problem. Figure out how to solve it. Don't waste time on trial and error.
Alternatively, devote all your time to trial and error. Throw every single possible thing at the problem and see what works and what doesn't. For the things that work, explore variations. This approach to problem-solving can be found in neural network programming, genetic algorithms, and even emergent behavior in chaotic systems such as ants foraging for food. (Hey look, a colony with a queen!)
It's also why SpaceX has been so successful designing rockets: they went back to the drawing board on everything. This may be why some people contend that Elon Musk is actually an alien (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/576140759281238017).
What is the greatest algorithm of all time? Evolution.
From a bunch of RNA molecules, it produced highly efficient computation structures (brains) that can self-direct evolution itself and will be capable of manipulating space-time.
And the intellectual-ness of this entire thread is why I <3 the HLP community.
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Evolution is not so much good as it is least bad. It's a really ****ty way to solve problems in a number of respects.
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The NEMESIS NOW brief about the Rephaim engagement, for example, even managed to mine a continuity error about the Thutmose and Sopedu to build on the Nagari story.
:lol: Wow, this is Star Wars-level of fanon extrapolation!
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So am I basically just making myself look like an idiot here?
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No, you caused and contributed to a great thread!
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Okay, good.
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Evolution is not so much good as it is least bad. It's a really ****ty way to solve problems in a number of respects.
Evolution is a great algorithm if time is no issue, and you don't want to put any work in yourself. I mean, sure, you could invest huge amounts of capital and manpower into city planning.. or you could let amoebae that have been slowly working out similar algorithms for millions of years do it for you. (http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/07/mapping-tokyos-train-system-slime-mold/2679/)
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Back to the begining of the topic here-I always had a somewhat romantic and simplistic view of FS2 events. Never a fan of the hive mind theory. Not a huge fan of duality either. It's kinda hard to write about this knowing events from BP so forgive me for borrowing or ignoring certain concepts or facts. Also, I won't bother trying to think or reason any other way than we, humans do, because that'd just look like a today's kid trying to play tetris by touching the screen. So it's a much more grounded theory than ones before here, and BP.
So, explaining Shivan behaviour starts from:
1. Motivation. Whether they're the universe itself or simple, individual beings like ourselves, something must have triggered their appearances. To explain that, one has too observe both incursions. What is the common denominator GT(V)A behaviour in both instances? War ? Hardly, since Bosch believes in the threat of second incursion even before it happens. Did he call them the second time? Seems a cheap way to explain it. For them to behave that way, or any other way, we must have interfered with their interests. Whichever it is, even the young, self-destructive soceties of Terrans and Vasudans realised that Shivans are here to stay. So from a Shivan big picture standpoint, time between the two incursions seems irrelevant. It also doesn't matter how small of a blip on their radar our interference is. Our insignificance would be no reason for them to stay away and that's something we can easily identify in our own behaviour/society. So since their first showing until Capella and beyond, all three parties are of the same thought-GT(V)A existence is in great jeopardy.
The previous passage surely dissapointed those who are of the idea of a greater sense in Shivans, but isn't that the exact anthropocentric argument we're trying to avoid? That we, with our actions and deeds are so important, that the ever present, all dimensional, time bending(for a lack of better term), universe policing "specie" has decided to step in? I choose the other way, that IT is still a lot bigger than all of us, and that we are simply crossing paths with those who wield a bigger axe at the moment.
2. Execution. I'd split this one into two, individual and group.
As individuals, Shivans do show some similarities. They are fighting for a greater cause and are part of a greater scheme. They don't want to die. They don't have unlimited resources but do have a lot. They have logistical issues of movement through space. They fear their rivals and attempt to defeat them and get rid of them. Here's an interesting one: despite possible advantages, they don't want to hang around and learn too much and cooperate with others, they'd much rather wipe them out and use what they can. Now many might say otherwise but I really don't see us, or Terrans, judging by their actions, as tolerant beings ready and brave enough for cooperation on an even footing level. As masters, yes, probably. As slaves, possibly. Otherwise, no. Shivans take it a step further and don't even try the diplomacy route. Which brings us to the main difference. Unlike humans, they are able to execute their plans for the greater good with great efficiency and reckless abandon. They don't question, second guess or fear. Those traits are at the core of their advanced state, which enabled them to live for so long and be so successful and strong. There's no point in fearing if you're smart enough to blindly follow a good plan, given to you by a higher power on a bigger scale(such as going into a war) and thought out by yourself in moment to moment living (such as dogfighting). Those traits are what enable Shivans not to mourn their fallen comrades. Sadness in that regard is a product of, ultimately, deep personal reasons. It is also very unproductive especially in terms of fighting a war. They don't retaliate when angry, because getting angry is for the stupid. They don't operate on petty feelings humans take a lot of pride in. We can call them machine-like, they would call us stupid. We are unnecessary, stupid and disruptive and they have no problem in killing us all. We're like ants in someone's field wondering why someone is taking that big shovel to our home.
As a group, apart from points already made, Shivans face similar problems to GTVA but are much better equipped to deal with them. Many question their tactics and quickly dismiss traditional explanations, and start going beyond and over these simplistic views. I guess going from 1 to 100 Juggernauts will do that to a person. While frying most of them in a supernova just like that. It's a big challenge to conventional war theories. First of all, it shows Shivans as mystical and impossible to understand, which is agreed upon by all at this point. Second, it clearly says they could annihilate us with ease so why don't they? That's when a strong parallel with our wolrd comes in. How many superpowers today could destroy beyond recognition those who defy them? And why don't they ? The numbers add up. Just take a look at sheer numbers of US Navy for example. Makes the second incursion look like a fair fight. :D But there are bigger issues at play, and here we again get to that dreaded topic of anthropocentrism. We are a miniature thorn in a giant's eye. It's not worth sending a quarter of the fleet accross half the galaxy, possibly guarding some of the more important systems in the galaxy, to completely exterminate us. We are either very local(read:small, unimportant) or too big to dispense that easily. Another possible explanation is we're intriguing. There's something potentially useful about us. We're not obeyant but are very intriguing. How does Bosch play into that intrigue of ours? He certainly isn't happy to let his grandkids sit around, living their life with a dark red axe hanging over their head. He wants to reason with the beast, carve a space for us in the universe. Certainly a trait of a great ruler, one who even under some other empire's rule manages to make life manageable to his people. Not everyone can be a Zhukov or Churchill. It's the easy, obvious, and correct explanation for Bosch. Whether he's being used by GTVA is beside the point almost. Personally I'd say GTVA are sitting on two chairs, letting Bosch "slip through" while simultanously trying their luck in a straight fight. He probably knows it as well, and is partly happy, partly annoyed at them for not making it an official top priority.
Capella is one that I struggle to explain. "Here's what we can do" ? A line in the sand? A tactical blowout of an important GTVA system? A future nebula, where they often operate? It's too late and already waaay too long of a post so I'll leave that for another time, cheers. :)
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I guess I'm not seeing where your narrative differs much from what's been discussed up thread. Do you have specific explanations for the motives and means of the Shivans, or for the changes in their behavior between the games?
I suppose I'm saying: well written post, but what's the takeaway?
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Okay so here's something that occurred to me. It's kind of silly, but I think it has a bit of potential.
What if the Shivans perceive time backwards? Or, alternatively, Terrans and Vasudans perceive time backwards?
As I said, it's silly, but it would basically mean that from their perspective, they coalesced a nebula into a star system for these curious little lifeforms to live in, and brought hundreds of thousands of Terrans and Vasudans into existence. Then, the Terrans and Vasudans were kind enough to create a Lucifer-class supercreator for them, which they then used to terraform the barren Vasuda Prime into a habitable planet.
From a more serious standpoint, I think some things could be done with this and the concept of the Big Crunch. Now I don't actually know anything about this field, but as far as I know the Big Crunch is essentially the concept of the Big Bang in reverse: the universe collapses under its own weight, and comes together into a single point.
So, since space and time are related to the point of basically being the same thing, what if the universe's expansion reversing would also cause time to run in reverse? That is, time is just a set "run" from the Big Bang to the point at which the universe is largest, and it can be perceived as either going from the Big Bang forward, or from the end back to the Big Crunch.
The Shivans, then, are from the sort-of-alternate-universe the lies beyond the reversal of the expansion. They evolved, or were created, or whatever, in an environment where time runs backwards, so for them death is birth, and destruction is creation.
It would also mean that the Shivans are basically by far the most friendly species in the Freespace universe. I mean, all they do is create stuff.
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what if the universe's expansion reversing would also cause time to run in reverse?
The short answer is no.
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I guess I'm not seeing where your narrative differs much from what's been discussed up thread. Do you have specific explanations for the motives and means of the Shivans, or for the changes in their behavior between the games?
I suppose I'm saying: well written post, but what's the takeaway?
Sorry, I really didn't see it that way. What I mean is, lately, and on this thread, most of the explanations of their behaviour, or, what they are really, seem to go toward alternative options, exploring them as the Universe's destroyers, one extreme side of a duality, or a big part of universe itself. I just wanted to put in a strong word for the classic theory, albeit with some gaps to be filled.
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Yeah, that makes sense to me! I'm just trying to be sure I understand 'classic theory' - you think of the Shivans as an advanced alien race with individual thought, a culture of ruthless efficiency, and an aggressive mindset?
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For intents and purposes of this topic, and especially considering the other theory,yes, you could say that. But I must add that individual thought here is an interesting concept since the aforementioned efficiency and intelligence combined with understood and agreed upon goals of the whole race leave little space for creativity(and being wrong on a small AND big scale). So from that comes the illusion of a collective mind.
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Ironically it could just be that Shivans, given they're obviously highly modified, all think the same because there's really nothing different about them. A dozen computers off the same production line will give you identical answers to a question. The existence of different consciousness is not required to produce uniformity; uniformity is required to produce uniformity, one way or another.
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The problem is diverging input. In a system of that type you need some kind of feedback loop to prevent separation.
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Diverging input only works if the input is judged to require a novel response rather than an existing one. As long as the answer is in the playbook already, nothing changes.
The fundamental similarity in behavior of Shivan weapons, equipment, and spacecraft to their opponents means this may be the case. The only thing deployed against them in both games to which they have nothing that could provide an immediate frame of reference is the TAG system, and even that seems well within their ability to have theorized before encountering it.
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Divergence doesn't require novelty. Just experiencing stimuli in different orders or with dissimilar separations will start to push systems out of lockstep.
A big lookup table is a really inefficient way to handle cognition - you're giving up a lot of capabilities for functionally no gain. The ability to hold internal states like 'I am in a nebula' or 'although the stimulus is absent, I induce it will recur in the same pattern' is key to being useful, and once you have state memory, you've stepped outside a simple behavioral map. (This is the same problem that took out behaviorism in real life!)
I also don't think it does much interesting fictional work to explain elements of the canon, which is probably the biggest arbiter of ~theory~ for me. But if you've got a good angle on it, fire away!
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So...I'm the only one who thinks the Shivans seem really fragmented, not uniform at all? The Great War Shivans don't act anything like the Second Incursion ones. The Second Incursion ones seem more confused than anything.
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Back to the begining of the topic here [...]
I like one point this post makes: the answer to "if the Shivans can destroy us all so easily, why don't they?" is "why would they?". To make a dumb analogy, there are bugs in my apartment, and I could theoretically get rid of all of them, but I'm too lazy to do that. First, I live in a very wooded part of the city and like to keep my windows and balcony open, so new ones come in all the time, and second, this one species of spider just gets on the ceiling and remains there doing their thing 24/7 and avoiding me completely. So sometimes when I see them there standing perfectly still and harmless on the ceiling, I'm like "meh, **** it, this is not worth climbing on the couch for". Of course some kinds of bugs are very annoying and unsanitary so I'll go to considerable but still not ultimate lengths to get rid of them.
So FS1 Shivans could have simply been in passing and were like oh well let's clean this mess up while we're here! and when they failed (admit it, it happens to you too) they were like oh **** it, it wasn't that important anyway. Of course a couple of decades later the same kind of bug got out from behind the closet, climbed up onto the dinner table and started crawling through the food, so they got pissed and shut the blinds.
You still run into a large number of problems when you assume that Shivans are intelligent and conscious, both in gameplay and in story. For example, if they are intelligent and "acting rationally", why did they R&D take an 8000 year break between the Ancient-Shivan war and the first incursion? How can their ships be only a lot, and not incomprehensibly better then the Terran and Vasudan ones? The answer to that of course is "shut up, it's one of the most common tropes of the genre", but you are obviously not obliged to take it, as BP doesn't, coming up instead with a lot better fitting story. On the flip side, I think that the large part in how well it fits is due to the loss of predictive power. If you assume classically intelligent Shivans, then it's easy to say that no, no self-respecting advanced alien civilization would ever incorporate a Shaitan into it's fleet, but with BP's Shivans it's "well sure, Shaitan isn't locally maximal, but totipotently speaking, who knows!"
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So...I'm the only one who thinks the Shivans seem really fragmented, not uniform at all? The Great War Shivans don't act anything like the Second Incursion ones. The Second Incursion ones seem more confused than anything.
No, there've been a lot of posts in this thread pushing heterogeny and unpredictability as central to Shivan tactics. The immune response/escalation heuristic analogy is another angle. Or the BP totipotence/anima system, which combines local outbreaks of highly intelligent goal-directed action with a superordinate reactive architecture.
This thread is about lots of different theories, not about finding one to rule them all. You could even make an argument that that FS1 and FS2 Shivans don't behave dissimilarly, I guess.
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Wat if the Shivans are a GTI conspiracy to take over the Gee-Tee-Vee-Aye? (Which they tried after the Great War)
What if the Lucifer was an Illuminati plot? What if its indestructibility was a fabrication?
After all, antimatter bombs do melt steel beams.
EDIT: I should make a campaign about this...
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What if we loaded our most pretentious philosophers into a decommissioned Orion and sent them to colonize Bernard's Star?
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What if we loaded our most pretentious philosophers into a decommissioned Orion and sent them to colonize Bernard's Star?
Probably'd find Bernard's Star getting supernova'd in short order.
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What if we loaded our most pretentious philosophers into a decommissioned Orion and sent them to colonize Bernard's Star?
Probably'd find Bernard's Star getting supernova'd in short order.
Hogwash. Your response oversimplifies the totipotential superordinate reactive architecture inherent to the uniformity needed to produce uniformity.
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Here's a thought: define "Shivan." The idea of a uniform alien species is itself anthropocentric; ants with differing roles within a colony possess radically different morphology. Anthropocentric too is the idea that an alien species crews ships the way that humans do. How do we know that the only type of Shivan is that with three legs and a shoulder-mounted anti-infantry beam cannon? Why do we assume that the ships are merely ships, and not a different type of Shivan? Would Lilith-strain necessarily have the same thought process as a Ravana-strain, even within some sort of collective mind?
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Yeah, I'd personally like to think there's no common body plan or phenotype.
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Here's a thought: define "Shivan." The idea of a uniform alien species is itself anthropocentric; ants with differing roles within a colony possess radically different morphology.
Not exactly. Ant colonies with specialized morphology for soldiers/workers are usually considered to represent a less optimized overall form then those with a single worker caste that does everything and in all but a few niches they will be out-competed. The evolutionary trend as mapped by the fossil record and observed science on the subject has been towards a single jack-of-all-trades form. If you're going to cite the science, be careful you're citing it correctly.
How do we know that the only type of Shivan is that with three legs and a shoulder-mounted anti-infantry beam cannon?
Because CBAnis and other sources have illustrated this point and told us. We have been shown that form is the pilot for their fighters, their response to boarding parties, and told it is the only one ever recovered from captured craft. There is no evidence for any other kind of Shivan. Further it's made clear this form is heavily augmented; standardization as a result of standardized augmentation parts in addition to any biological standardization that may exist.
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We aren't ever shown a fighter pilot in Freespace that I know of.
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Always thought it was strange that whatever the GTVA threw into the field, the Shivans had something equivalent but 'more'. The Lucifer fleet may or may not have been around since the time of the Ancients, and so was probably designed to fight them, which would explain some of the differences, but it's almost as if the Shivans were psycho-reactive to whatever they fought, they became their enemies worst nightmare as a kind of defence mechanism.
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Here's a thought: define "Shivan." The idea of a uniform alien species is itself anthropocentric; ants with differing roles within a colony possess radically different morphology.
If you're going to cite the science, be careful you're citing it correctly.
I'm not citing anything, merely presenting evidence that a species need not be unified in form.
Because CBAnis and other sources have illustrated this point and told us. We have been shown that form is the pilot for their fighters, their response to boarding parties, and told it is the only one ever recovered from captured craft. There is no evidence for any other kind of Shivan. Further it's made clear this form is heavily augmented; standardization as a result of standardized augmentation parts in addition to any biological standardization that may exist.
CBAnis are notoriously inconsistent. See, for example, nonexistent jump nodes.
We only see a live Shivan once--in the cutscene boarding of the SC Taranis. Everything else is archive footage and techroom data, presumably taken from the SC Taranis capture, which is the only capture of a Shivan vessel that isn't classified... and they could hardly do autopsies on those bodies, since the Lucifer blew everything to hell. And if there are significant morphological discrepancies, especially living ships, you can bet your ass it's classified well beyond a fighter pilot's level of clearance.
All-purpose serves no purpose in war. It's the reason there's a distinction between fighters, bombers, cruisers, corvettes, destroyers, and so on and so forth; different roles leads to different optimizations. I doubt that Shivan navigators have the same augments or thought processes as Shivan soldiers. Form is hardly a stretch.
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Always thought it was strange that whatever the GTVA threw into the field, the Shivans had something equivalent but 'more'. The Lucifer fleet may or may not have been around since the time of the Ancients, and so was probably designed to fight them, which would explain some of the differences, but it's almost as if the Shivans were psycho-reactive to whatever they fought, they became their enemies worst nightmare as a kind of defence mechanism.
This gave me an idea.
The idea is that this strategy of only being slightly "one-up" against their foes at any given time is actually optimal in longer time periods, for it is able to hide their true power from the species they target. This information gap shallowly seems to work at the subspecies' advantage (for they are then able to get some shots), but in the long term it is highly poisonous. The reason being that if you know beforehand just how terribly beyond any manageable scale the shivans' power is, the subspecies would tend to create guerrilla tactics in space, they would try to get the longer view and create strategies that could, in the long run, prevail against the shivan hegemony. Most would obviously fail (like the alternative GTA outcome in AoA), but there could potentially be some smarter clusters of survivors that could endure the struggle.
However, given you haven't this knowledge, your military economic drive will be focused through decades on classical, typical, weapon / ship improvements, your resources are entirely driven to create "superweapons" (Colossus) within a larger proud fleet of ships. All of this investment can then easily be wiped out with a small fleet of Sathanas, for instance, without any big worries. A tad reminiscent of the reaper logic in Mass Effect of having the species develop through technological paths that the reapers themselves can control. If the GTVA had known the true scope of the shivan threat, they would (if having avoided psychological collapse) have invested all their resources in coming up with entirely different survival strategies, a lot more fragmented in their own landscape of ideas (a lot of more brainstorming) and perhaps even giving way to desperate measures and contigencies that simply didn't exist around the second shivan incursion.
Of note is how different both in terms of psyche and strategies the new GTVA in AoA / WiH is, given what they now know about the Shivans. The Capella incident was, in many respects, an information leak from the shivans to the GTVA about their nature, the information gap advantage being lost to the GTVA. Of course, odds are still a million to one against the GTVA, but one step at a time!
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And if there are significant morphological discrepancies, especially living ships, you can bet your ass it's classified well beyond a fighter pilot's level of clearance.
Why? That literally does not make sense. It doesn't change anything from the pilot's perspective; they functionally behave the same as non-Shivan ships in game and it's not as though the GTVA or its predecessors appeared to have big problems with ending life. However the knowledge the ships themselves are alive would allow more efficient tactics to be employed to attack them, as living things are generally easier to attack for degrading their capabilities than machines.
It's also, relatively speaking, unlikely from a simple standpoint of how they would get that way. The Shivan ships we have observed show no real evidence they are able to control their own functions in any way (given we know the Shivans can survive vacuum exposure, for example, Hallfight should have taken place in one if the ship itself had the ability to detect someone cutting through its hull and entering and the ability to vent; no vacuum happened though). Evolution, as noted above, is a relatively poor system for producing optimized solutions for a single task, not least because evolution tends to select for day-to-day survival optimization over extreme situations. Pain, for example, can be crippling when something is seriously injured and prevent it from saving itself, but as a matter of day-to-day avoidance of minor injury and its ability to degrade function or expose to more serious issues like infection, it's invaluable. That's the kind of tradeoff natural evolution makes. Yet if the Shivan ships are themselves alive, they are optimized for extreme situations to the point they perform identically to Terran or Vasudan purely mechanical and electronic ones equally optimized consciously.
That's not an argument for the ships being Shivans themselves so much as an argument the ships were manufactured that way by the Shivans. If they're alive themselves, it's incidental.
Hell I was arguing, before even Mass Effect hit, with a Shivan theory that the Lucifer and Sathanas fleets do not represent the same species in reality; what we think of as Shivans represent civilizations following a previously laid-out technological path. The differences we see, like the Scorpion and the Lucifer or the Aeshma and the Astaroth, represent gaps in the tech base or novel additions to it by the people who picked it up.
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Possibilities are endless anyway, you could go as far as you want. Like suggesting that an alien form may be impossible to detect, at least in the usual sense. Two legs, three legs, insects, weird animals,big eyes on a slim grey body, those are all not very imaginative concepts of aliens. But like in all physics, you have to make certain assumptions for something to even begin to make sense. Especially with the data provided by canon sources, I therefore consider Shivans similar to life forms we know.
As for a (lack of a) gap in Shivan technology from Ancient wars to present day, you could pose similar questions on Earth. How far will we go in 2015 if we were in space when jet engined planes were not considered norm? How fast will we go in 2015 if we are supersonic in 1976? War technology is expensive and a waste in some senses. Also, without major, game-changing breakthroughs, such as invention of the wheel, electricity, or harvesting power from stars there is only so much you can advance. And if you think you're alone and very powerful ?
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We have been shown that form is the pilot for their fighters, their response to boarding parties, and told it is the only one ever recovered from captured craft. There is no evidence for any other kind of Shivan. Further it's made clear this form is heavily augmented; standardization as a result of standardized augmentation parts in addition to any biological standardization that may exist.
The Joint Strike Shivan
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We only see a live Shivan once--in the cutscene boarding of the SC Taranis. Everything else is archive footage and techroom data, presumably taken from the SC Taranis capture, which is the only capture of a Shivan vessel that isn't classified... and they could hardly do autopsies on those bodies, since the Lucifer blew everything to hell. And if there are significant morphological discrepancies, especially living ships, you can bet your ass it's classified well beyond a fighter pilot's level of clearance.
Actually, that's not the SC Taranis
Captured Shivan Freighter / Antares System
Given that the Taranis was almost certainly also boarded, that means that the crews on both freighters and cruisers are the same (Not to mention the kind that jumps on ships and stomps them to death).
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We still don't know for sure how Shivan ships operate and, taking Derelict's idea of a living ship, it wouldn't surprise me if Shivan ships were somewhat like the Protoss Immortals in StarCraft or other "consciousness" inside a machine to actually control individual ships. The boarding parties encountered could be engineered specifically to protect where the ship's consciousness is housed. I remember there was speculation in the tech room descriptions about Shivans being an engineered race.
Also, to go back to a very early part of the thread, I applaud :v:'s storytelling chops in FS2 considering we're still speculating about the Shivans' motivations 15+ years after the game came out. As someone who's done a fair bit of writing, I can say that the power of implication is in many ways preferable to explanation. It has been implied that Shivans are engineered. It's been implied that they are some cosmic force used to cull dominant species. It's been implied that they are simply trying to find a way home. These last two implications may be at odds, or possibly are not:
If the Shivans are indeed an engineered race, they could be extragalactic or extra-dimensional and have been placed into our galaxy/dimension by their creator as an experiment or as punishment for failing to perform their role as expected and they are trying to find a way to return to their creators and, as an engineered species, they are still carrying out their original task in the process.
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A ship doesn't need a consciousness to be very smart. And when you're dealing with advanced systems, 'alive' starts to blur with 'functioning normally.'
Which isn't disagreement with you - just picking at how we define and separate concepts.
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I agree that the line between "alive" and "extremely sophisticated system" can get blurry. Since we are in the realm of speculation at this point so it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility to have Shivan ships controlled by actual Shivan consciousness considering they appear to live purely in space.
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But why is consciousness necessary? We have a number of systems in the 21st century world, today, that do a superb job at their tasks without any sort of awareness. What if consciousness is a narrow, expedient solution to a specific problem — not a generally useful panacea for thought?
*huge can of worms explodes everywhere and becomes an intractable philosophical debate*
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It could even be argued that human 'awareness' as we define it is little more than a side-effect of developing a predictive intelligence. In other words, not only does there have to be a 'then' and 'now', there also has to be a 'me' and 'you', subjectivity is perhaps required in order to make predictions on the results of 'your' actions.
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Why? That literally does not make sense. It doesn't change anything from the pilot's perspective; they functionally behave the same as non-Shivan ships in game and it's not as though the GTVA or its predecessors appeared to have big problems with ending life. However the knowledge the ships themselves are alive would allow more efficient tactics to be employed to attack them, as living things are generally easier to attack for degrading their capabilities than machines.
I would think that knowing your species was brought to the brink of extinction by a three-kilometer-long biomechanical space lobster would be terrible for morale. (As an aside, I'm not the only one who thinks the Lucy looks like a lobster, right?)
It's also, relatively speaking, unlikely from a simple standpoint of how they would get that way. The Shivan ships we have observed show no real evidence they are able to control their own functions in any way (given we know the Shivans can survive vacuum exposure, for example, Hallfight should have taken place in one if the ship itself had the ability to detect someone cutting through its hull and entering and the ability to vent; no vacuum happened though).
Can you directly vent your liver when you've had too much to drink?
Evolution, as noted above, is a relatively poor system for producing optimized solutions for a single task, not least because evolution tends to select for day-to-day survival optimization over extreme situations. Pain, for example, can be crippling when something is seriously injured and prevent it from saving itself, but as a matter of day-to-day avoidance of minor injury and its ability to degrade function or expose to more serious issues like infection, it's invaluable. That's the kind of tradeoff natural evolution makes.
The Shivans almost certainly mastered their own genome long ago. There's no reason to believe they haven't augmented themselves biologically as well as mechanically, and that their growth as a species hasn't transcended our definition a long time ago.
Yet if the Shivan ships are themselves alive, they are optimized for extreme situations to the point they perform identically to Terran or Vasudan purely mechanical and electronic ones equally optimized consciously.
Recall that the Shivans stomped all over the Terrans and Vasudans on first encounter. The GTVA is emulating the Shivans with mechanical and electronic craft, not vice versa.
That's not an argument for the ships being Shivans themselves so much as an argument the ships were manufactured that way by the Shivans. If they're alive themselves, it's incidental.
True. But if the Shivans have a collective consciousness of some sort, and their craft share in that collective consciousness, are said craft not themselves Shivans?
The whole point here is that you can't necessarily apply the same labels of "crew" and "ships" and "species" to the Shivans, a radically alien race with radically alien psychology and culture, that you do the familiar Terrans and Zods.
Hell I was arguing, before even Mass Effect hit, with a Shivan theory that the Lucifer and Sathanas fleets do not represent the same species in reality; what we think of as Shivans represent civilizations following a previously laid-out technological path. The differences we see, like the Scorpion and the Lucifer or the Aeshma and the Astaroth, represent gaps in the tech base or novel additions to it by the people who picked it up.
Absolutely, but not necessarily different species. The F-14 and MiG-25 aren't indicators of any taxonomic difference between Americans and Russians, after all.
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But why is consciousness necessary? We have a number of systems in the 21st century world, today, that do a superb job at their tasks without any sort of awareness. What if consciousness is a narrow, expedient solution to a specific problem — not a generally useful panacea for thought?
*huge can of worms explodes everywhere and becomes an intractable philosophical debate*
I don't think in a ship system context alone it is useful. We have no idea if Shivans, as seen in Hall Fight and in the tech room actually pilot their ships. There is some evidence of that by way of Enter the Dragon (and its follow up I can't remember the name of off the top of my head). If we consider the Shivans to be some sort of nomadic species, or at the very least trying to find a way home as Petrarch describes in the FS2 ending, then they could have begun interfacing themselves more directly with their ships' systems and over time created some sort of hybrid system between their consciousness and the ship.
If we continue the speculation that they are indeed a hive/collective then directly interfacing with their ships, or having some part of the Shivan consciousness inside of a ship's systems could provide faster and more accurate tactical data than a traditional method of interfacing and controlling a ship.
On the other hand, we don't even know if Shivans have a "consciousness" at all and they could instead be something akin to the galaxy's antibodies, destined to single mindedly destroy species that have the capability of wiping out other species. I don't see this last bit as particularly plausible given their behavior in FS2 though.
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I don't think any of the FS2 behavior requires either consciousness or a hive mind/live-networked intelligence. You can totally explain it with those models, if you want! But I see a lot of explanatory and storytelling power in the idea that Bosch and the GTVA are both interacting with a swarm intelligence, a set of response heuristics, or a similar kind of decentralized model.
You can opt for a choice like that and still invest the Shivans with enormous intelligence and weird/specific local character. I also think it's a space largely untapped by science fiction, which makes it cooler in my book.
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Hell, this thread is part of why I respect the game's fiction as much as I do. You certainly don't need any of these explanations and they are only faintly theorized in the actual games, which is the Shivans' beauty as an antagonist (or not). Since their behavior and culture are only ever speculated about, we can create and explore aspects of science fiction relatively untouched.
I particularly find the idea of them simply being extremely complex algorithms and heuristics intriguing. Perhaps ETAK discovered this and allowed him to begin altering the heuristic to ally with them...
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Hm...well, we could go with the theory that the Shivans were created by a race of capricious gods to fight against the Terrans and Vasudans for their own enjoyment.
You bastard.
Also, I continue to be slightly caught off guard by how intelligent you all seem to be.
However...well, yes. It's entirely possible that the Shivans are simply some species that hail from a vastly different environment, and as such just have a very different way of solving problems, and very different goals. (I'm very glad to see people understanding that self-preservation is part of human programming, rather than some intrinsic quality. It bothers me when SF gives AIs that become self-aware self-preservation protocols regardless of whether they were actually programmed to have them. It's debatable just what becoming self-aware would do, but it wouldn't make them stop following their programming. We follow ours, after all.)
(This is something I think about a lot. Simply the sort of anthropocentric provincialism exhibited by most people. Assuming that everything in the universe thinks like they do (and, furthermore, that their morals and values happen to be the correct ones, and anyone who disagrees is being intolerant, but that's a whole different discussion). And it shows up everywhere, and it drives me crazy.)
Anyway, so there's that.
HOWEVER.
Narratively, I think the Shivans need a reveal. There needs to be some central secret that has a profound impact on the player. Mass Effect failed at this, because the explanation for the Reapers was ultimately pretty much just "they're some things made by some people to do some stuff". There was nothing perspective-altering about that; the explanation was very mundane.
Conversely, just to plug myself a bit here, my planned "rewrite" of the second two games involves a very different explanation that IMO works quite a bit better. Essentially, they're the parents of organic life. We learned in ME2 that the Reapers create more of themselves out of organics. The reveal here is essentially that that's the only reason organics exist in the first place -- the turian race, for example, is basically an infant Reaper. Every fifty thousand years, the Reapers come and bring their children to maturity by assimilating them into Reaper form, then seed the galaxy with the next generation. It's the idea of reversal -- we didn't create the robots, they created us. You get a new piece of information, and everything looks different -- we're children, and we think that the big evil parents are coming to destroy us, but they really want what's best.
Anyway I've gotten off topic. Point is, the heuristics stuff is fascinating, but it's not enough on its own. There needs to be some sort of perspective-altering impact.
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I think there can be, but there doesn't need to be. You can get a lot of work done with tone and intimation.
Ever seen True Detective? Nothing supernatural happens in that show. Nothing ever stumbles out from behind the curtain and wiggles its tentacles at the camera. But it's uncanny and eerie and affecting as hell.
You could probably write a campaign of Shivans acting weird and people fighting them and the occasional spine-chilling monologue and have a great, substantive addition to the FreeSpace pseudocanon. Like Vassago's Dirge!
(play Blue Planet tho)
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I particularly find the idea of them simply being extremely complex algorithms and heuristics intriguing. Perhaps ETAK discovered this and allowed him to begin altering the heuristic to ally with them...
I would interpret ETAK as something that would theoretically give absolute control over the Shivans. Since the Shivans have never shown any interest in diplomacy, I could certainly see Bosch and some leading theorists believing that the Shivans are rogue machines. Now this would be what Bosch and possibly the GTVA thinks the Shivans are. The ETAK experiment then failed to control the Shivans, and the Shivans boarding and taking Bosch would then be the higher intelligence response from the Shivans. This would fit the theme of the GTVA's hubris, thinking that they understand the Shivan and can control them while maintaining the enigmatic nature of the Shivans.
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You can snug that in nicely with Volition's apparent intent to write the Shivans as ancient von Neumann/terraformers still executing the descendant intent of their original programming.
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Narratively, I think the Shivans need a reveal. There needs to be some central secret that has a profound impact on the player. Mass Effect failed at this, because the explanation for the Reapers was ultimately pretty much just "they're some things made by some people to do some stuff". There was nothing perspective-altering about that; the explanation was very mundane.
I was gonna say something but Battuta chimed in first - yes, there is no need for a reveal, but I do believe you have to give something. That something might just be a trick, a hint at an answer, at a process that will give you answers, a signal that gives you hope that indeed you are about to understand the gist of it, and then when you are truly happy to finally being about to have the answers on your lap, a curveball goes on your way and you are left with a mystery again. This is a description of FS2 mostly, where hints of a process or an answer were being constantly given (The ETAK promising a communication with Shivans, the Sathanas defeat, promising a visit towards their hintersystems and thus to their secrets). In FS1 this also happened (The shivan ship boarding, prominently).
But what I think that drove people nuts and still drives people to think about them and what they really are and so on and so forth is how mysterious they were left as. Any answers someone could come up with will *always* be less than the unimaginable that exists before you know what they are about. Once you know, the mystery is gone, the interest is gone. "Ah, the Shivans are X. Ok then".
It seems like a cheat but it is NOT. For the precise idea here is exactly the Gap. The unsurmountable Gap between the Real and your ideas about it. This is a core feature of Cthuluh, they were beyond reason, they had irrational (impossible) geometries. They were unintelligible. And it is this gap that is the source of the Terror. Close this Gap with some Mass Effect shenanigan, and suddenly the Reapers become laughable.
Anyway I've gotten off topic. Point is, the heuristics stuff is fascinating, but it's not enough on its own. There needs to be some sort of perspective-altering impact.
Sure, you need *something*. But you also need the idea that you *cannot* grasp more, that there is some kind of limit, from which only madness ensues. That tension is the fascinating originality of these kinds of stories.
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I think part of why this community is still going strong and has made some incredible stories and theories is precisely because :v: only ever hinted at the Shivans' nature. @Luis, I thoroughly enjoyed your reading of FreeSpace as a retelling of Exodus and thanks to :v: never coming out and saying that any fan theory was wrong, like Bioware did with the Indoctrination Theory when the ending was still being discussed to death.
In my experience (with much of it coming from our community) the audience will usually come up with far more intricate and creative explanations given enough time (Luis's Exodus theory, Blue Planet, etc.) than what the developers could explain (again see Mass Effect). The key though is hinting at more going on than is initially presented. FromSoftware (Souls series) is excellent at this and they give slightly less directly to players than :v: did with FreeSpace.
The retail campaigns do drop quite a few hints by themselves that people have run with, or even running with the Shivan name alone. What :v: has left us with is the ability to let our imaginations and discussions prosper through their tiny hints. Once again dropping hints and only nudging players towards a certain direction without forcing them there can lead to much stronger and more dedicated communities, just look at the Souls fanbase and its presence of lore speculation on Youtube.
Also, shameless self plug, since I have more free time over the summer, I will be working more on my game design videos, some of which will focus on what we have been discussing here, along with more comparisons between Mass Effect and FreeSpace.
As a side note, I remember playing ME1 for the first time and being pumped to have another mysterious force to face with the Reapers and being extremely disappointed that they attempted to explain their motives to the extent they did.
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Well, ME1 was just straight-up a better game than the other two. The atmosphere was unmatched. And there was a greater focus on detective work, and side-stories that were mysterious and eldritch in their own right without being connected to the Reapers, rather than the focus being on whether you're a bad enough dude to stop the Reapers.
@Luis: Again, it only worked with the Shivans because the story never ended. And it's still unsatisfying that all we can do is speculate. Again returning to the ME comparison, I see people argue all the time that Bioware should have left the Reapers unexplained. THAT IS A TERRIBLE IDEA. Unless they were planning to explain it in a future game.
Basically, a mystery can only be sustained so long as there's hope of solving it. If it becomes clear to the audience that the writers don't have an answer in mind, the mystery loses its magic. We still wonder about the Shivans because there's enough ambiguity that we can fool ourselves into thinking the writers had a plan for what the Shivans were, even though they were probably just making it up as they went along.
Conversely, a mystery that has a pretty obvious explanation that's almost certainly the intended one can be sustained if the writer simply refuses to confirm it. See: Procedure 110-Montauk. It's quite clear what the procedure entails, but the author refuses to tell, which generates curiosity.
The point is, this sort of story only works if you have a plan. You CANNOT make this stuff up as you go along. Steven Moffat learned that the hard way with the whole Silence arc that turned out to be something stupid because he didn't plan ahead. (Although oddly enough, the pertinent episodes in Series Six still retain their mystique, even knowing that it adds up to jack squat in the end.)
And yeah, you can't explain everything about a Lovecraftian entity. Again with my ME concept, the big reveal doesn't actually explain what the Reapers are, or where they came from. It actually just explains what we are. But it explains what they're doing here, and what the point of their actions is, and that's enough. You don't have to explain everything, but you do have to explain something important.
Also, though, it depends on what kind of story you're trying to tell: mystery or horror. For horror, you don't need to explain anything, really, and explanations are generally a bad idea for a Cosmic Horror Story. However, the stuff I write is generally more along the lines of Cosmic Mystery, which leans heavily on horror, but is ultimately more about creating awe. The Eldritch Abominations in a Cosmic Horror Story are pretty much invariably evil or at least antagonistic. In a Cosmic Mystery, they're frequently neutral or even friendly, albeit still far from comprehensible.
(Also, the Exodus thing isn't a theory. It was very clearly intentional. The game was going to be subtitled "Exodus", and Bosch explicitly references the story a couple times.)
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Montauk is bad, and dumb.
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One of my favorite aspects of FreeSpace was the complete mystery behind the Shivans. I always figured that was the point, to make them as alien and strange as possible by making their motives and behavior completely opaque. I forget where exactly :v:'s tiny hint at what FS3 might have been is, but I recall it talked about following Bosch to Shivan space. Given the opaque nature of the Shivans, I doubt there would be as much of an explanation as some might want.
The thing with explanations for entities like the Shivans is that every individual has begun creating their own idea of why the Shivans behave the way they do. If we got an official explanation, regardless of how well done it might be, it will still stifle discussion (look at Mass Effect). I'll keep referencing FromSoftware primarily for this reason. Whether or not they have a complete story hidden somewhere in their offices doesn't matter. They've inspired many theories and interpretations of their world, which was part of their goal all along, give people something to latch onto and see what happens.
Whether or not that too was :v:'s intent with FreeSpace doesn't matter anymore, since the probability of them ever working on a third game is practically nonexistent. What they left us was hints to draw our own conclusions from. If that third game had come out or even simply an expansion pack, I don't think they would have answered all with the Shivans.
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Montauk is bad, and dumb.
?
I mean, I'm not totally sold on it myself, but what's your reasoning?
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@Luis: Again, it only worked with the Shivans because the story never ended. And it's still unsatisfying that all we can do is speculate. Again returning to the ME comparison, I see people argue all the time that Bioware should have left the Reapers unexplained. THAT IS A TERRIBLE IDEA. Unless they were planning to explain it in a future game.
It worked, didn't it? It was mostly by accident because I agree with you, Bioware would have ****ed up and explained it away with some terrible idea. I'm saying that this would have been the case, because the stakes were just too high, the material they should have come up with would have most probably fall short of what they had built in FS2. Such a case was even hinted by Petrarch by postulating how the Shivans were just trying to "get home", a "ET goes home" idiotic tearful idea that I'm glad it was just a wild speculation that can be dismissed as such.
But the point remains, it worked. And sometimes, these accidents do bring about jewels.
Basically, a mystery can only be sustained so long as there's hope of solving it. If it becomes clear to the audience that the writers don't have an answer in mind, the mystery loses its magic. We still wonder about the Shivans because there's enough ambiguity that we can fool ourselves into thinking the writers had a plan for what the Shivans were, even though they were probably just making it up as they went along.
I agree. I think that the writers should always outthink their own works, that is, the things that are "explained" in their material should always be one or two steps behind what they really know about these beings. The point is that all the behavior of these beings should imply by itself a lot more than what is told or even admitted. But to imply, it must be present and explained in the writer's mind. The point is to give a sense of coherence and solidity to these beings that enact from more than the lore and canon, but is merely felt, never exposed. This gap between what is canonically "known" (even by "show don't tell" standards) and what the writer actually knows, gives profundity to the material, and thus life.
If all you see is all that there is, there's never a there there, there's never a feeling that there's more to it than we know, because we already know it all. And to fall short of providing that "all", and let your imagination fill the blanks by yourself, is the hallmark of true art.
And yeah, you can't explain everything about a Lovecraftian entity. Again with my ME concept, the big reveal doesn't actually explain what the Reapers are, or where they came from. It actually just explains what we are. But it explains what they're doing here, and what the point of their actions is, and that's enough. You don't have to explain everything, but you do have to explain something important.
They almost reach that explanation with the Leviathan DLC. The end product still sucks balls. I don't even like Battuta's solution, but it's a case of hopelessness to solve all these loose threads.
(Also, the Exodus thing isn't a theory. It was very clearly intentional. The game was going to be subtitled "Exodus", and Bosch explicitly references the story a couple times.)
By the time I wrote it, I didn't know that subtitle! The game references a *lot* of things, from the Second Crusades (Aquitaine), the Iceni revolution from the roman empire (by queen Boadicea), the tower of Babel, the story of the Collossus, and even the psychological arc of Francis Petrarch. When I found this working subtitle, I was indeed quite happy that I had nailed it.
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My solution is good, and smart. It's all in the execution, you're not going to get real effect in forum posts.
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Execution is indeed king in many ways, but afaict it's mainly a doomsday device with an inherent fragile Nash equilibrium there. A temporary stalemate. The Reapers will not kill themselves just because you ask them to, so you have to hold the hand over the button forever. Eventually, they find a way to kill you and the device. Even if you demand their suicide and are able to convince them your bluff is for real, there's no method to quickly evaluate their compliance. A hiper-intelligent actor will always prefer to hide several agents from your sight, falsely comply and then try to destroy the device and restart the harvest. Ply evals obviously determine full compliance with Shepard as being as bad a decision to make as letting Shepard press the button (for it equally ensures the failure of its mission).
IOW, it's a stalling solution. Not a real solution for the problem that the Reapers were "made" to solve, and as we learned from Leviathan, is a real issue in the universe, the technological singularity followed by the eventual destruction of all organic beings in the galaxy.
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As so often happens in these conversations, you're responding to a detail you yourself introduced! I don't think I would ever want 'Reapers self destruct' to be part of the ending.
The most basic mechanical and narrative theme in Mass Effect, almost from the first line, is the tension between playing by the rules — 'we have to think about the consequences in the long run, we have to consider our place in the community' — and saying '**** the rules, I have violence!' This is paragon/renegade.
The final choice should embody that. The choice itself isn't that important, after all. It's watching the consequences unfold for the characters we care about (even when those characters are entire species). The tension and ambiguity you take issue with is a strength in my mind.
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I totally see the tension, which I agree is excellent, it's just difficult for me to see the resolution sharply and satisfactory. Without the Reapers commiting suicide, it's just Shepard (or any other substitute), forever, holding the hand over the button while the Reapers watch closely until you flinch / crack. Even if you are able to come up with a kind of a treaty with the Reapers, any good evaluation of the problem would reach the conclusion that it is an inherent fragile state of affairs. And by "fragile", I mean absolutely prone to failure (Battlestar Galactica to the power of 10). Either someone ends up pressing the button or the Reapers manage to infiltrate and sabotage the weapon. From that moment, it's harvest time again!
Of course, if they calculate it and find no solution to sabotage it, they would have still to remain in the shadows to prevent the machines taking over.
I can see why you like these solutions, they are open to a sequel! But are they good for a satisfying ending to a trilogy? Should the ending tone be one of remaining tension, remaining stress, a guillotine that was paused but still hovering your head?
My main question would be, what would then the paragon / renegade choices be like? Isn't that solution completely straightfoward? You *have* to hold the gun to your head. If you shoot, everything's over. That ain' no fun ending for a Renegade. You can only do *one* thing. The worst execution would have you decide in which tone you'd issue the threat (talk about colored endings, this would be the "virtuous or badass smile endings").
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Mass Effect was never going to have an intellectually watertight ending. The intellectually watertight ending, given the setup, is 'Reapers do whatever the **** they want'.
The ending had to be cathartic, emotionally satisfying, tonally interesting, and open to intellectual speculation. You had to be able to imagine Shep and friends/enemies cruising around the new galactic status quo partying and getting into trouble. Or, at least, a new galactic status quo mourning Shep and taking on a shape (a shepe, har har) defined by Shep's decisions. The great sin of the original ending was that it flipped the table and refused to let you imagine your choices propagating out into the lives of the people and civilizations you cared about.
The proverbial Good Mass Effect 3 Ending gives the player a range between
'we won locally, hell yeah, we're cool reaper punch heroes, but if you think about the cosmic picture it's got some ominous drums'
and
'it's all over, look at this beautiful disaster, what a good tragedy!'
With some degrees between.
The Reapers were two things: a plot device to drive every other plot thread to crisis, and a tone device to create awe and fear. The ending can't defeat the Reapers, but it doesn't need to. We spent three games learning to love and invest in the status quo. All Shep has to do to 'win' is to put the demons back out in the dark for a while, with some hope of a final resolution and some mad sideways insight into their purpose. Then the story can be what it really needs to be to end well, which is Mass Effect 3: The Citadel DLC.
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My solution is good, and smart. It's all in the execution, you're not going to get real effect in forum posts.
Would you mind saying what your solution is? I have to say I find the Kestrellius's alternative version brilliant, although maybe I haven't thought it through enough.
btw. I'm very unsure about the ME1 was gold, and then it went downhill mindset. My impression was that "rough around the edges" is a kinder assesment, and applies to more then one aspect of the game (story included).
Compared to Shivans, Sovereign's speeches are pathetic in both senses of the word, and would fit poorly in any interpretation besides the dumbest these machines are just plain evil one.
As for the mystery vs. resolution thing, I think both can work, but the chances of the first one being done right seem to be minuscule. It's a potential easy way out and is often used that way, and the longer it's drawn out, the more tenuous it becomes.
The fact that there are great theories about Shivans and readings of FS in general is not an inherent property of fan theories, but rather of FS, and I find it very exceptional in this regard.
Also saying that you shouldn't go for a resolution because there will always be better fan theories doesn't strike me as a convincing argument. Anything you do someone can do better, fan theories are often overhyped. It's true that you can leave room for more interpretations, and that's certainly a valid goal, but not _the_ goal, right?
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I don't think ME1 was anywhere near the peak of the series, no. I think that's a narrative created by misunderstanding of what made Mass Effect successful.
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As for the mystery vs. resolution thing, I think both can work, but the chances of the first one being done right seem to be minuscule. It's a potential easy way out and is often used that way, and the longer it's drawn out, the more tenuous it becomes.
The fact that there are great theories about Shivans and readings of FS in general is not an inherent property of fan theories, but rather of FS, and I find it very exceptional in this regard.
Also saying that you shouldn't go for a resolution because there will always be better fan theories doesn't strike me as a convincing argument. Anything you do someone can do better, fan theories are often overhyped. It's true that you can leave room for more interpretations, and that's certainly a valid goal, but not _the_ goal, right?
Yes, there are plenty of garbage fan theories out there, and much of it could be attributed to source material that either doesn't support it through the narrative structure or simply because the creators shot them down so early on. Both FS games have an amount of closure regardless of how much they answer, which is why we've been able to come up with interesting theories about the Shivans. Just look at Dark Souls and Demon's Souls for another great example of having a fleshed out world with a ton of mystery and interpretation still to be had. It is important that the creators have more knowledge about the world than they give the audience, but the point is they don't need to force their interpretation down people's throats like has happened in the past.
Depending on the type of story, the end goal can be to open it up to interpretation. That is what the Souls series has done and it has some extremely well regarded storytelling. The point is, you don't need to outright say what a story is about, you only need to provide direction. Your audience/players are intelligent enough to make connections for themselves without you having to spoon feed them everything.
In terms of Shivans vs. Reapers, their biggest difference, and why the Shivans worked better than the Reapers was the Shivans were pure action. We interacted with them numerous times and never got much closer to understanding them. Being brought to the brink of annihilation twice by something so unknowable is scary and effective. The Reapers on the other hand were almost pure talk and we barely interacted with them, even when we were supposed to be fighting them in a war. If they had been more puppet-master-esque, the all talk could have worked, but they got stuck in the uncomfortable middle ground of being physical antagonists and puppet masters with their mystery gone and only speeches to have any impact.
In short, if we compare the Shivan actions we see with the Reaper actions we see, the Shivans have far more impact, directly and indirectly, on the narrative than the Reapers do.
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I think Bioware made a huge mistake when they settled on superantagonists who couldn't be represented in gameplay.
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That's true. Making the main antagonists of a ground-based RPG living spaceships was a weird decision.
And, of course, ME1 wasn't perfect. In some respects it was inferior to the other two. ME2 had in a lot of ways the best character interaction, and ME3 the best combat gameplay. But ME1's story and atmosphere was unsurpassed, and to me at least, that's the most important element. The trouble was that ME2's central plot was both stupid and completely irrelevant. ME2 needed to do a ton of things, and it did almost none of them. It needed to be about gathering allies and information about the Reapers, and instead we got "lol look Collectors". And the Collectors were built up as a major threat in and of themselves, rather than being the pawns of the Reapers that they were.
Also, the whole "gathering a team" thing would have worked a lot better if the focus had been gathering a team to fight the Reapers. With the Collector base (or whatever final mission) being sort of a first test run. And then, you have the same teammates into ME3, rather than having to do the whole tedious regathering the team thing again.
To elaborate a bit on my alternative conclusion: essentially, the Reapers are sort of an afterlife. If we take, for example, Turians: in order to make a Turian-Reaper, you have to liquefy a couple million Turians. However, once you do that, the resulting consciousness includes every Turian who ever lived. There's a sort of genetic memory technobabble handwave thing. It doesn't include the ones that are still alive, but once they die they get assimilated too, provided the Reaper isn't destroyed.
The end of the series, then, gives you three basic choices, each with a paragon and renegade variant. You can either just go along with it, which is a happy ending because everybody gets to be a giant space cuttlefish and reunite with their dead loved ones. Or, you can tell the Reapers to piss off and come back later, and they're just like "okay, fine. But next time you're going to college, kid!" which is sort of a happy ending because that's pretty much what your goal was to begin with. Or, you can convince the Reapers to stick around and be responsible parents, teaching the races of the galaxy about stuff rather than running off to dark space and getting drunk with their friends. And that's a happy ending because the cycle still continues, as it should, but the galaxy now knows what to expect and won't have to experience all the terror and confusion.
So, yes, the Reapers pretty much do whatever they want. You can convince them to alter their behavior slightly, but you can't break the cycle, because the cycle was never a bad thing. It just looked like one from a limited perspective.
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The other problem ME had was how separate each game became in the narrative in spite of being a planned trilogy and being so closely connected temporally. There were plenty of plot elements from ME2 that went completely by the wayside for any number of reasons, probably because one of the lead writers left the studio.
One of the narrative elements in ME2 that I always found odd was how far everyone back tracks on the existence of the Reapers, in spite of one showing up and taking control of the Citadel only 2 years previously. Compare this to the repercussions of a war 32 years ago still being felt in FS2.
I'm sure money and marketability were partially to blame for major, required events from earlier games being glossed over in later games, but it breeds lazy storytelling when something has been built and then immediately torn down.
@Kestrellius:
I agree that ME2 was not a strong second act for a trilogy. We needed an Empire Strikes Back and got something with far less overarching narrative relevance. And yes, the choice to make space cuttlefish robots the main antagonist in a ground based game is strange, and probably part of why Cerberus played a ridiculously large role in the third game.
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Don't even get me started on Cerberus in ME3.
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Were the reapers so impossible to include gameplay-wise though? In the trilogy, you fight Sovereign through the dead body of Saren (that was weird), and throughout ME2 you do fight Harbinger through ... assuming direct control... over collectors. Anyway, you do end up fighting a proto-reaper at the end. There's also an attempt to create gameplay within a Reaper (when you collect Legion). By ME3, you end up killing two smaller reapers.
So all of that tells me that they at least tried in multiple ways to do just that. This to me wasn't the main problem, they could have borrowed from Shadow of the Collossus some ideas about how it's possible to create a battle between two absolutely different scales of "fighters". Each Reaper could be more than an enemy, he could just be an entire "boss level" to overcome. Many cool ideas could be made here. They simply chose otherwise.
e: You could learn methods to infiltrate the Hull of a reaper and be able to sabotage its shields, making them vulnerable to the fleet. Some high tech device that would allow you to go through the reaper defenses if you are small enough, hell, you could even make it some kind of Protean finding or something.
Let's not forget that in FS2, the only relationship you end up having with a Sathanas is, one, scanning its hull, and two, sniping its front beam weapons. It doesn't prevent it from being awesome.
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The main difference is that the Shivans and Reapers are the primary antagonists as a whole and the amount of interaction with the Reapers is fairly minimal for such an important antagonists. In ME1 it was alright since Sovereign was the only Reaper, though the battle against it was pretty anticlimactic. Once ME2 rolls around, you have nearly no interaction with the Reapers and even the derelict Reaper is a missed opportunity to show off how powerful and unknowable a Reaper could be. It was just a bunch of mobs in hallways at the end of the day, all of which we'd seen before. I'd have loved at least some moving geometry in the Reaper to make it feel more alive. The problem with ME3 is that it's supposed to be a war against the Reapers, but their presence isn't maximized as it should have been.
In both FS games, our interactions with the flagship(s) isn't huge either, we are fighting and losing to the Shivans for about 2/3 of the campaigns and the effect they had on the world is felt even when they aren't directly involved. The main point is, the Shivans, even when their flagship isn't around are still treated as important while up until the Reaper capital ships are landing on planets, no one in the ME world except a few, take it at all seriously, which a major part of the story, though I never felt it was handled gracefully.
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All those points are absolutely true, I was just pointing out that Mass Effect did indeed try to engage with the main antagonists gameplay-wise, and that further ideas that were never implemented could absolutely be designed. So Battuta's sentence "superantagonists who couldn't be represented in gameplay" isn't really true.
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It is, though. ME is a game about fighting bipedal animation rigs in basically two dimensional cover mazes. Anything else that occurs is special-cased, not a system. They could've made Shadow of the Reaper but they didn't.
The Harbinger/reaper infantry solutions in 2 and 3 were solid, though.
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Though I guess I agree that there are hypothetical Mass Effects in which Reapers could be gameplay entities.
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I wish they do that in 4. Ah. I was about to say retcon the hell out of the reapers but it would be funnier to have a Rogue reaper that followed this expedition to Andromeda and started his own agenda on his own.
That game will have so many answers to give it's not funny. They will be absolutely ignored.
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I just want to see a ME space sim. Of course, that would bring up questions of its own, like why the engagements portrayed in cutscenes are somewhat different from how things are described in the Codex. Although I have my own theories on that; all the battles we see are battles over something. There's a stationary object involved -- a planet, a station... As such, the ships aren't just going to leave, so the battles get a lot denser and you actually have things in visual range.
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The codex was written by Chris L'etoile and he probably didn't have the political influence required to get any animators or designers to listen to him (especially after he left the company).
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I get that the feeling the writers didn't have the whole high-level story planned out and were making it up as they went along, one game at a time. So, we cannot infer what the Shivans were supposed to be, or what their motivations were, from the information in the games since the creators would not be able to answer these questions.
As a player, though, I felt that in the Freespace Universe there would probably be a very large number of species much more powerful than the Shivans controlling different galaxies. If the Shivans were only just a bit more advanced technologically than the Terrans or Vasudans, then it would not be likely that they controlled all the galaxies in the universe. They're more likely just the dominant species in our galaxy and a few others.
As for their nature, I get the feeling that the Shivan beings were creations, either by another race or they evolved/engineered themselves into 2 subspecies - one fully sentient and the other semi-sentient. The Shivans we interact with would be the semi-sentient ones, as they display some characteristics of machines and some characteristics of lower animals.
Regarding their motivations, I feel that the Shivan fully-sentient higher-order beings were not reacting to us at all, but were going about their own business. Their blowing up the Capella star was to create a jump node for their own expansion. The semi-sentient lower-order Shivans were probably reacting to us territorially, like animals or insects defending their space. They considered our stars to be their territory and did not consider it occupied, as we were not causing enough space-time disturbance to get noticed.
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I get that the feeling the writers didn't have the whole high-level story planned out and were making it up as they went along, one game at a time. So, we cannot infer what the Shivans were supposed to be, or what their motivations were, from the information in the games since the creators would not be able to answer these questions.
This is almost certainly the case, but nonetheless I summarily invite "authorial intent" to go take a walk in a minefield. I really don't care.
There was a recent (unsatisfying but well-intended) interview with the head writer of Fs2, whose responses are a representative example of why interpretation and speculation should not be bound by authorial intent.
Regarding their motivations, I feel that the Shivan fully-sentient higher-order beings were not reacting to us at all, but were going about their own business. Their blowing up the Capella star was to create a jump node for their own expansion. The semi-sentient lower-order Shivans were probably reacting to us territorially, like animals or insects defending their space. They considered our stars to be their territory and did not consider it occupied, as we were not causing enough space-time disturbance to get noticed.
Wow, I really like this theory. The lower-order Shivans (strikecraft, cruisers, corvettes, destroyers) attacked convoys and fought the GTVA for the Vega and Epsilon Pegasi jump nodes. Meanwhile, the higher-order Shivans (juggernauts) quietly went about their mysterious star-killing business for the most part. Remember that one Juggernaut did take a five-minute break to help out the lower-order Shivans at the Gamma Draconis node.
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Wow, I really like this theory. The lower-order Shivans (strikecraft, cruisers, corvettes, destroyers) attacked convoys and fought the GTVA for the Vega and Epsilon Pegasi jump nodes. Meanwhile, the higher-order Shivans (juggernauts) quietly went about their mysterious star-killing business for the most part. Remember that one Juggernaut did take a five-minute break to help out the lower-order Shivans at the Gamma Draconis node.
That's also a good way to look at it, but my thought was that even the Shivans in the Sathanas were semi-sentient and we never got to interact with the fully sentient high-order Shivans who were controlling them. Examples of instinctive semi-sentient behavior from the Sathanas included attacking the Colossus after its beam cannons were destroyed, sacrificing themselves to destroy the Capella star and not attempting to communicate.
We only see the fully sentient higher-order Shivans indirectly. For e.g., they receive the transmission from the captured Shivan cruiser and send the lower-order Shivans in the Lucifer. They receive the transmission from Bosch and send lower-order beings to pick him up, who then instinctively slaughter all the other humans on board, as they didn't have instructions on what to do with the others. Finally, they send instructions to the Shivan Juggernaught fleet to blow up the Capella star, sacrificing some juggernaughts in the process. All these communications were relayed through the Shivan comm nodes that we see at the end of Freespace 2. Perhaps the Lucifer and the Sathanas classes also acted as comm nodes on a smaller scale.
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There's nothing about the Shivan tech levels we see that necessarily rules out them being the dominant form of life in the universe. But it'd be cool to see their competition too.
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The fact that they can be killed at all kind of does. This is sort of a weird thing with the Shivans; they seem to be thought of as somehow godlike, but...they're kind of just not. I mean, I recall in the Shivan Manifesto (which I don't think is all that popular around here, and I can understand why, but nonetheless) it talks about how the Shivans are already so powerful that the idea of another species even more powerful is unthinkable from a story perspective, and that's nonsense. The Shivans aren't much more advanced than the GTVA. There are just a lot of them.
Then again, numbers without advancement can work for dominance. I mean, for all our technology, bacteria are still the dominant lifeform here on Earth.
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The Shivans aren't much more advanced than the GTVA.
Let's not get too carried away, though. The Shivans, and only the Shivans, possess shielded super-destroyers and star destroying super weapons.
They blew up a solar system. When you're on the receiving end of something like that, it just makes you want to throw up your hands and get out of the intergalactic community game.
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Also, just because the Shivan tech we interact with on the per-mission level is (relatively) comparable to Terrans/Vasudans doesn't mean that it represents the highest level of Shivan advancement. A few campaigns (including BP I think?) have explored the concept of the Shivans tailoring their response to the tech level of their opponents.
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The fact that they can be killed at all kind of does.
It doesn't in any way. Your conception of godlike is too narrow. (As always, I'm advocating a range of possible choices, not one over others.)
A cell in a person doesn't have much advantage over a cell in a fish, for instance.
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The Shivans aren't much more advanced than the GTVA.
Let's not get too carried away, though. The Shivans, and only the Shivans, possess shielded super-destroyers and star destroying super weapons.
They blew up a solar system. When you're on the receiving end of something like that, it just makes you want to throw up your hands and get out of the intergalactic community game.
The rogue GTI were working on a Shielded Super-Destroyer just a few years after it was seen. Not a few billion years later, but a few years. The player stops them before it is completed.
And, from the video cutscene, turning a star supernova seemed to be just a bit more advanced than warping into subspace... it seemed like a way to allow the fusion explosions at the center of the star to escape the gravitational force, resulting in the supernova, using the same warp tech.
The real might of the Shivans was in their enormous economy, established over thousands of years, evidenced by their possession of a fleet of Juggernaughts (the Colossus, in comparison took the Terrans and the Vasudans 20 years to build).
We didn't see any technology so advanced as to suggest that the Shivans were millions/billions of years more advanced than we were, which would be the case if their empire spanned billions of light years across the universe.
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You're assuming we did get more than just a tiny glimpse of their magnitude. The second incursion could have been merely a second-rate shivan contractor building a highway with some 80 space excavators that apparently got some small trouble with local wildlife.
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Ah, the Vogon Theory!
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No one survives shivan poetry.
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We didn't see any technology so advanced as to suggest that the Shivans were millions/billions of years more advanced than we were, which would be the case if their empire spanned billions of light years across the universe.
Not necessarily. If the universe is full of little GTVAs, then the Shivans could expand and expand like a gas filling an infinitely expanding container.
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I think Valrog is falling prey to anthropocentric assumptions.
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I think Valrog is falling prey to anthropocentric assumptions.
I hate you for using that blasted word. "Anthropocentric"...I want to throw myself down a mineshaft. I WILL TRANSLATE.
The real might of the Shivans was in their enormous economy, established over thousands of years, evidenced by their possession of a fleet of Juggernaughts (the Colossus, in comparison took the Terrans and the Vasudans 20 years to build).
In other words, don't assume that humans have the best-practices on ship construction. It took 20 years for us to build the Colossus. It may not take nearly as long for the Shivans to build comparable warships.
The GTI was not close on shielded capships. The GTVA buried some of the crazier GTI research projects but no waaay would they discard capship shielding. Nevertheless, the GTA was pretty badass in how quickly it closed the tech gap with the Shivans.
Humans are the best, nothing can stop us from eventually accomplishing the impossible at the last minute after a series of seemingly endless self-inflicted setbacks (such as pointless wars with our neighbors, executing intellectual peace-makers, and back-stabbing our own people at the worst possible moment for no reason).
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The GTI was not close on shielded capships. The GTVA buried some of the crazier GTI research projects but no waaay would they discard capship shielding.
Unless it's not useful anymore. We have no real evidence that the Lucifer's shielding would hold up against more modern weaponry.
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Unless it's not useful anymore. We have no real evidence that the Lucifer's shielding would hold up against more modern weaponry.
I guess, but we also have no real evidence that it would not. Unless by "modern weaponry" you refer only to beam cannons; but, if this is the case, the shielding would still provide protection from enemy fighters and bombers (the greatest overall threat to any destroyer).
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I was actually thinking of bombs, instead.
Though not knowing how the Lucifer's shield works, or if it works in the same fashion as any other shields (circumstantial evidence says no), then there's no guarantee it's not vulnerable to primaries either because it can be neutralized by exterior forces or attacked in some novel way different from other shields.
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In other words, don't assume that humans have the best-practices on ship construction. It took 20 years for us to build the Colossus. It may not take nearly as long for the Shivans to build comparable warships.
So, you don't believe that their empire and economy were larger than that of the Terrans and Vasudans?
The GTI was not close on shielded capships. The GTVA buried some of the crazier GTI research projects but no waaay would they discard capship shielding.
From the dialog between the pilots in-game and the purpose of the Colossus, I get the feeling that beam cannons would rip through the shields pretty quick. That, coupled with the cost of shielding a target of that size, simply made it not worth the cost. That's a little similar to what happened with modern fighters - they have no armor; unlike the old IL-sturmovik, they rely on offensive capability.
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You're assuming we did get more than just a tiny glimpse of their magnitude. The second incursion could have been merely a second-rate shivan contractor building a highway with some 80 space excavators that apparently got some small trouble with local wildlife.
I was inferring the age of their civilization from their level of technology, not from their number of ships.
For example, if they had ripped the Terran and Vasudan planets apart gravitationally without entering their systems, or killed every Terran and Vasudan everywhere by erasing them from the timeline, then they would clearly be billions of years more advanced. On the other hand, if their technological level could be matched in just a few years by species that were in space for just 300 years , then it's likely that they're not.
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I think Valrog is falling prey to anthropocentric assumptions.
I was, but after taking a tablet, I feel much better. :D
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So, you don't believe that their empire and economy were larger than the Terrans and Vasudans?
How did you get that from what I wrote? :p
It took 20 years for us to build the Colossus. It may not take nearly as long for the Shivans to build comparable warships.
More efficient ship-building does not imply smaller economy. Maybe the Shivans have both scale and efficiency...oooh, scary! I forget what my original point was with this...maybe I was challenging the (human) concept of mass production being associated with a physically huge economy.
From the dialog between the pilots in-game and the purpose of the Colossus, I get the feeling that beam cannons would rip through the shields pretty quick. That, coupled with the cost of shielding a target of that size, simply made it not worth the cost. That's a little similar to what happened with modern fighters - they have no armor; unlike the old IL-sturmovik, they rely on offensive capability.
Both you and NGTM-1R make a good argument on this point; however, you'd think that at least a few ships would have capship shielding if it were possible. It has obvious applications in scenarios where the greatest threat is strikecraft attack. Or maybe modern bombs pierce shields...except, oh wait, they don't (they damage but do not pierce fighter shields).
Oh, face it. The humans/vasudans never developed capship shields. Give it up, GTI apologists! They never came close. :p
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You're assuming we did get more than just a tiny glimpse of their magnitude. The second incursion could have been merely a second-rate shivan contractor building a highway with some 80 space excavators that apparently got some small trouble with local wildlife.
I was inferring the age of their civilization from their level of technology, not from their number of ships.
For example, if they had ripped the Terran and Vasudan planets apart gravitationally without entering their systems, or killed every Terran and Vasudan everywhere by erasing them from the timeline, then they would clearly be billions of years more advanced. On the other hand, if their technological level could be matched in just a few years by species that were in space for just 300 years , then it's likely that they're not.
Again, you're assuming that the shivans' intentions or strategies should be obviously those. I'm not as convinced. I think that if you have a species that does not care about individual losses of ships that much (no "real lifes" being lost), a technological strategy that hides their true capabilities might be the best in the long run, for it prevents guerrilla tactics from the lower species, it encourages standard and classic tech developments from these lower species, i.e. wasting resources on Collossus, etc., rather than spending resources in unconventional strategies that could, by chance, survive a stricter "shock and awe" shivan strategy. They merely present something slightly bigger and better than what they detect lower species having, so that they (1) believe they can perhaps win them, (2) never get a real glmpse of their true technology, (3) have sufficient firepower to bring about their objectives.
IF your economy is sufficiently enormous and no "real" shivan lifes were lost, then ask yourself, what have the shivans really lost in both wars?
And do bear in mind that the biggest take from FS2 was how they really don't care about humans and vasudans, and that all we got from them was a kind of a sideshow. It could even be true that we haven't ever really seen their actual war fleet. The purpose of the "Vogon theory" is to bring some of Douglas Adam's ideas of scales to this. One could even think about that crazy meganormous fleet that went to destroy earth and its inhabitants and was immediately eaten by a dog on arrival.
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Matching their strength and beating them with similar weapons will inevitably be more wasteful than applying overwhelming force. You're arguing nothing is really being lost, but waste is still waste even if it's somehow "negligible" (which is something we don't know for sure). You're positing a scenario in which it prevents certain threats, but the scenario you describe would mean those threats are meaningless. If the Shivans could have buried the GTA underneath 80+ Sathanas then there is no winning scenario. There's no surviving scenario. No strategy, no matter how unconventional, could have coped with that disparity of force. No guerrilla resistance would be possible as everything would have been overrun in weeks, if not days. (That's kind of the point of FS2's ending, in fact.)
The argument you're making is circularly defeating. To have the resources to engage in this strategy means that the Shivans have more than enough resources to obviate any need for it.
(As to what it's cost the Shivans they can't get back, the answer is obvious; it's cost them time. Decades worth. No matter how supposedly godlike, that's still significant; it changed conditions on the ground significantly between FS1 and FS2 and it almost inevitably would for any spacefaring race, including the Shivans themselves unless they've run up against some kind of hard technical limit.)
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More efficient ship-building does not imply smaller economy. Maybe the Shivans have both scale and efficiency...oooh, scary! I forget what my original point was with this...maybe I was challenging the (human) concept of mass production being associated with a physically huge economy.
If my tribe has mostly wood tools and 1 stone tool, and your tribe has 80 stone tools, that merely suggests that your tribe is bigger. It does not suggest that you are much more advanced technologically. If you're attacking with "magic" mushroom clouds and "magic" M16 arrows, then, yes, your tribe would be more advanced.
Both you and NGTM-1R make a good argument on this point; however, you'd think that at least a few ships would have capship shielding if it were possible. It has obvious applications in scenarios where the greatest threat is strikecraft attack. Or maybe modern bombs pierce shields...except, oh wait, they don't (they damage but do not pierce fighter shields).
Oh, face it. The humans/vasudans never developed capship shields. Give it up, GTI apologists! They never came close. :p
I think you're missing the point that I was making. I'm not even interested in debating whether they already knew how to make the shields and it just took time to build them large enough for a capital ship or whether they needed 5 years of research and then decided it wasn't worth it, since that's not relevant.
Clearly, nobody in their right minds would start developing a product that would take billions of years to complete! :wakka: The difference between 5 years and 20 billion years is 9 orders of magnitude.
Therefore, for the GTI/GTVA, that were in space for just 300 years, to be technologically comparable to the Shivans, that would mean that the Shivans could not have been that advanced and could not have been the dominant species in the universe. They were likely dominant in the same galaxy and perhaps a few others.
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Therefore, for the GTI/GTVA, that were in space for just 300 years, to be technologically comparable to the Shivans, that would mean that the Shivans could not have been that advanced and could not have been the dominant species in the universe. They were likely dominant in the same galaxy and perhaps a few others.
Sorry for barging in like this. It's just...You seem to be forgetting about one other empire the Shivans annihilated - the Ancients. It's safe to assume they were quite more advanced than the GTVA during the Second Incursion, yet they were exterminated in a matter of what, weeks, months? Don't remember the cutscenes that well. It's also never mentioned in canon IIRC, that the Shivans would have some sort of universal/galactic-spanning empire.
Anyway, allow me to bring another comparison to the conversation. The Bentusi and the First Hiigaran empire. After destroying the Hiigaran fleet that was after their First Core, the Bentusi mostly demilitarized their vessels. Who can say the Shivans hadn't done the same thing after eliminating the Ancients? Who can say they weren't watching the Terran and Vasudan races, trying to (mostly) match their current technological level? Hell, the Shivans could've been playing Spore all along, the Lucifer fleet being the totem the player can launch to help other races advance. To what end? 'Do I look like a Shivan to you?'
Or we could play Admiral Khafre, who was overjoyed after the Colossus had taken down one juggernaut, then he got blasted to pieces, then the Colossus was obliterated, to show the GTVA that they're not the only ones who can build 6km long vessels, then the juggernauts blew up a star because grown-ups have to go to work, they can't keep playing with children.
On a more serious note, I like BP's take on the Capella explosion. They were needed elsewhere, so they were recalled, probably to be fit with more advanced weaponry to fight other err.. pests.
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You seem to be forgetting about one other empire the Shivans annihilated - the Ancients. It's safe to assume they were quite more advanced than the GTVA during the Second Incursion, yet they were exterminated in a matter of what, weeks, months?
I'm not sure if the Ancients were much more advanced than the GTVA by the end of Freespace 2, or even if they were more advanced at all. The Ancients were able to build Knossos portals, but they couldn't build beam cannons like the GTVA, or communicate with the Shivans like the NTF, for e.g. Considering that the only tech we know they had that the GTVA didn't was the Knossos portals, and that the GTVA eventually learns to build them, it's likely that the GTVA surpassed the Ancients technologically by the end of Freespace 2.
Anyway, allow me to bring another comparison to the conversation. The Bentusi and the First Hiigaran empire. After destroying the Hiigaran fleet that was after their First Core, the Bentusi mostly demilitarized their vessels. Who can say the Shivans hadn't done the same thing after eliminating the Ancients? Who can say they weren't watching the Terran and Vasudan races, trying to (mostly) match their current technological level? Hell, the Shivans could've been playing Spore all along, the Lucifer fleet being the totem the player can launch to help other races advance. To what end? 'Do I look like a Shivan to you?'
Let me invoke Ockham's Razor and say that a hypothesis that doesn't unnecessarily assume that the Shivans demilitarized after exterminating the Ancients is preferable to one that doesn't make this assumption. There's nothing to back this theory and the genocidal nature of the Shivans even conflicts with the theory of their disarmament.
On a more serious note, I like BP's take on the Capella explosion. They were needed elsewhere, so they were recalled, probably to be fit with more advanced weaponry to fight other err.. pests.
Okay, I have to ask: who is this BP that you and some others keep referring to?
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Blue Planet. Lotta Shivan crunch, including a comprehensive explanation of all the weirdness about Shivan technology, tactics, and force application. Reread the earlier posts in this thread, they good!
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Thanks! I saw some videos. It looks like a very impressive mod, much more than I could've expected from a fan project without a budget. Can't wait to try it out after I finish my current FS2 run.
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You seem to be forgetting about one other empire the Shivans annihilated - the Ancients. It's safe to assume they were quite more advanced than the GTVA during the Second Incursion, yet they were exterminated in a matter of what, weeks, months?
I'm not sure if the Ancients were much more advanced than the GTVA by the end of Freespace 2, or even if they were more advanced at all. The Ancients were able to build Knossos portals, but they couldn't build beam cannons like the GTVA, or communicate with the Shivans like the NTF, for e.g. Considering that the only tech we know they had that the GTVA didn't was the Knossos portals, and that the GTVA eventually learns to build them, it's likely that the GTVA surpassed the Ancients technologically by the end of Freespace 2.
Allow me to bring up another Ancient cutscene, the fifth. 'The destroyers that darkened our skies like a plague can be harmed.' How many destroyers did the GTA and PVN fight during the Great War? 1 Lucifer and 2 or 3 Demons? Going by that, the Ancients were being attacked by dozens or hundreds of Lucifers, plus who knows how many other capships and their fighter complement.
I must ask something regarding beamz. I've only played 3 campaigns that involved an attack on a Lucifer, other than FS 1. In Awakenings, they used the Pandora's Box to magically (magically meaning I don't remember what they did, some sort of subspace explosion I believe) disable the Lucifer's shield, so that it can be attacked by laser turrets. In Derelict, we have the Nyarlathotep (did I get it right?), an unshielded Lucifer that has regenerative abilities, I guess this one doesn't count. And in AoA you don't get a Lucifer icon when targeting it, but we all know what that impenetrable shield really is, an invulnerable flag. Back to the point, did some Faustus-class SCs discover some sort of fluctuation when the SSL penetrated the shield, or what exactly led them to the belief/certainty that building a 6 km bat equipped with 13 beam cannons would protect the GTVA from a future Lucifer threat?
I only asked that because Valrog assumed the Ancients lacked beam technology, while I assume there's no reason they wouldn't have developped it. They were either outgunned or they may have only discovered it, and they weren't powerful enough, there's any number of theories.
One more question: Do you know what plot holes are? Because, IMO, using one as an argument is seriously not a good idea (ETAK device). Sorry for bringing Mass Effect back in, but the same thing happens in both. Super-advanced aliens encounter more advanced alien life, are exterminated by it then most proof of their existence is destroyed. Some remains of the Protheans were discovered, that VI I can't name right now, just as some data remained after the Ancient massacre, information on how to defeat the Lucifer and the location and activation codes for the Knossos device, and that's only what the player was told about. There's no proof the Ancients were incapable of building their own version of ETAK, but there is proof they would not have attempted to. Ancient cutscenes again: 'Ours was a proud people, and always the strongest.' ; 'When the destroyers came for us, we attacked. Never had we been defeated. They are like the others. Strange, hideous, resisting, fighting.'
Ok, I rambled enough.
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You seem to be forgetting about one other empire the Shivans annihilated - the Ancients. It's safe to assume they were quite more advanced than the GTVA during the Second Incursion, yet they were exterminated in a matter of what, weeks, months? Don't remember the cutscenes that well.
Volition has stated that, canonically, the Ancients were about at technological parity with the GTVA in FreeSpace 2, except for their much higher knowledge and mastership of subspace. (And except for their apparent inability to develop or penetrate shield systems, though this was only implied.)
The cutscenes don't put a timeframe on the Shivan war against the Ancients. It could have been anything from months to years to even decades.
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You seem to be forgetting about one other empire the Shivans annihilated - the Ancients. It's safe to assume they were quite more advanced than the GTVA during the Second Incursion, yet they were exterminated in a matter of what, weeks, months? Don't remember the cutscenes that well.
Volition has stated that, canonically, the Ancients were about at technological parity with the GTVA in FreeSpace 2, except for their much higher knowledge and mastership of subspace. (And except for their apparent inability to develop or penetrate shield systems, though this was only implied.)
The cutscenes don't put a timeframe on the Shivan war against the Ancients. It could have been anything from months to years to even decades.
My mistake then. But if their technology was on par with the GTVA's during FS 2, and their theoretical beams were unable to penetrate shields, the question remains: Why was the Alliance so absolutely certain their beams would be able to destroy Lucys?
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My mistake then. But if their technology was on par with the GTVA's during FS 2, and their theoretical beams were unable to penetrate shields, the question remains: Why was the Alliance so absolutely certain their beams would be able to destroy Lucys?
"On par with" means that they had about the same (or maybe slightly more) firepower and strategic capabilities. It doesn't mean they were the same in every respect. We have no idea if they had beams, for example.
As for the GTVA, that is never explained. But one possibility is that they extrapolated from the knowledge that beams could penetrate fighter shields.
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"Destroyers" was the Ancient term for the Shivans. It doesn't refer to big capital ships. Of course, their surprise that the Shivans can be harmed is a bit weird, as it implies that they were never able to do any damage at all.
Of course there are plenty of ways in which the Shivans could possess massive advantages. I'm not discounting those. I'm talking about how people in-universe, and people simply talking about the Shivans as presented in-game, seem to see the Shivans as horribly powerful, when the Shivans as presented in-game...aren't.
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As for the GTVA, that is never explained. But one possibility is that they extrapolated from the knowledge that beams could penetrate fighter shields.
My guess is that they analyzed all the data they gathered on the Lucy during its attacks and figured out a theoretical ceiling for the amount of energy its shields can absorb or disperse, and then tried to build weapons systems capable of delivering enough firepower to exceed that capacity.
Whether or not the GTVA was right in assuming that they could break the Lucy's shields now is something we obviously do not know.
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Matching their strength and beating them with similar weapons will inevitably be more wasteful than applying overwhelming force. You're arguing nothing is really being lost, but waste is still waste even if it's somehow "negligible" (which is something we don't know for sure). You're positing a scenario in which it prevents certain threats, but the scenario you describe would mean those threats are meaningless. If the Shivans could have buried the GTA underneath 80+ Sathanas then there is no winning scenario. There's no surviving scenario. No strategy, no matter how unconventional, could have coped with that disparity of force. No guerrilla resistance would be possible as everything would have been overrun in weeks, if not days. (That's kind of the point of FS2's ending, in fact.)
The argument you're making is circularly defeating. To have the resources to engage in this strategy means that the Shivans have more than enough resources to obviate any need for it.
(As to what it's cost the Shivans they can't get back, the answer is obvious; it's cost them time. Decades worth. No matter how supposedly godlike, that's still significant; it changed conditions on the ground significantly between FS1 and FS2 and it almost inevitably would for any spacefaring race, including the Shivans themselves unless they've run up against some kind of hard technical limit.)
This is all classically true, but I risk a different mode of thought. Consider the Shivans as a multi-eon, galaxy-spanning species that has either annihilated or contained thousands, millions of other species. In such a scale of management, certain things we take for granted that are important, cease to be, and other issues that are more to the scale of their existence, become important. For instance, imagine that they would always annihilate every species they encounter with the best of the best tech they got. In 99% of these situations, it would run mostly well. The problem comes with the last 1%. All of these species would immediately recognize the sheer superiority of the shivans and then try to come up with weird tactics and long-term strategies. Their planets would be lost, but deep-space orbitals and hidden vessels could become a new nest of infection throughout the eons.
Think on Blue Planet. In this particular detail, they were correct. When Earth was almost lost to an incredibly powerful Lucifer, they spawned a very different attitude in many places. In some of these places, they invented this deep space strategy combined with genetic alterations and so on. When Capella happened, the GTVA itself changed enormously in terms of tactics and strategies. They no longer think on system domination strategies, they think of guerrilla tactics. If just a tenth of that 1% can come up with a solution that is able to *survive* the shivans, they might pass on the infection to other species, they might grow into a powerful shadow force on some blind spot of the shivan solution space.
Think, if you will, about the very problems we are having regarding antibiotics. The analogy isn't perfect, but I hope you get the sense of what I'm talking about here.
If the shivans are not only concerned with these subspecies, but also that ghastly 1% scenario, then they would choose a strategy to deal with all of these species with some semblage of what I meant. They could, for instance, choose some kind of weaponry that was merely just slightly above their capabilities. This would mostly never inflict on these species some kind of completely out-of-the-box thinking about multi-eon spanning strategies on their own. Capella was different. It clearly is some kind of an exception, the shivans were concerned with the star, not with the GTVA. By doing so, they gave the GTVA an incredible information, now they know how superior the shivans are (and thus, according to some mods, new guerrilla strategies were invented). Clearly, they had their reasons to sacrifice this leak of information for superior reasons of their own.
Oh, and you speak of "time"? These species have been here for at least hundreds of thousands of years, and some would say a lot more than that! Time is on their side, not against them. A species that managed to survive and beat the odds for that long is a species that isn't really concerned with a few decades. Their ply calculations are over eons, not centuries.
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"Destroyers" was the Ancient term for the Shivans. It doesn't refer to big capital ships. Of course, their surprise that the Shivans can be harmed is a bit weird, as it implies that they were never able to do any damage at all.
Of course there are plenty of ways in which the Shivans could possess massive advantages. I'm not discounting those. I'm talking about how people in-universe, and people simply talking about the Shivans as presented in-game, seem to see the Shivans as horribly powerful, when the Shivans as presented in-game...aren't.
Locally mortal, globally divine.
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Again, I do get that. It's a brilliant line of thought, and it's very likely correct. But people talk about the Shivans that we see as though they were far more powerful than the GTVA. That's all.
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Oh I don't think that's entirely correct. The "shivans that we see" seem quite tasty to GTVA's guns and I think everyone wouldn't disagree with this fact. Apart from the Lucifer in FS1 and the 80 Sathanas in FS2, we seem to be on par with them, except for numbers who are constantly on the "unknown" bracket. And we do know that at the end of FS2, our entire fleet has been deployed, which is to say, there's practically nothing left.
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Yeah, what's cool about that line of thought is that it lets Shivans be interesting (not godlike) antagonists in the gameplay space, while opening up a lot of cool future design space too.
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A game with only unbeatable enemy NPCs would be a very ridiculous game! It would only be "fun" in a JAD-like Douglas Adams-like satire kind of way.
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Another theory could be that the Shivans were running from a species (or multiple species) even more terrifying on the other side of the galaxy.
They don't bother to kill us off with their 80 Sathanas and supporting craft but instead destabilize a star. Doing this does two things. First, it opens up a node to another system where they quickly send their fleet. Second, it also prevents someone hunting them from entering the system for a short time. If that's not terrifying, I don't know what is :lol:
This isn't a "serious" theory, though. I just thought I'd throw in something different. I still think they're the dominant power in our galaxy (but definitely not the universe).
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This is all classically true, but I risk a different mode of thought. Consider the Shivans as a multi-eon, galaxy-spanning species that has either annihilated or contained thousands, millions of other species. In such a scale of management, certain things we take for granted that are important, cease to be, and other issues that are more to the scale of their existence, become important. For instance, imagine that they would always annihilate every species they encounter with the best of the best tech they got. In 99% of these situations, it would run mostly well. The problem comes with the last 1%. All of these species would immediately recognize the sheer superiority of the shivans and then try to come up with weird tactics and long-term strategies. Their planets would be lost, but deep-space orbitals and hidden vessels could become a new nest of infection throughout the eons.
You're arguing an outcome that doesn't follow from your premise. The Shivans operate on infinitely long timescales with massive resources against far lesser beings. They can afford to somehow recon their opponents, assess their tech level, build a new fleet tailored just to fight them, deploy that fleet in conventional war with the real possibility they will lose...
And the entire analogy falls apart right there, because the guerrilla war approach they are trying to avoid is something that is far more likely to happen this way. The losing side of a roughly matched war has a much greater ability (in terms of time and of resources) to consider and initiate exactly the sort of backup plans you are arguing the Shivans intend to avoid by this approach. By scattering enemy combat forces across dozens of systems you substantially increase the possibility some of them will be able to escape when the tide has turned decisively. This methodology is the worst of all worlds. The Shivan scouting attempt could be detected providing time to prepare and possibly leading to a discovery of what they are; their victory could be insufficiently rapid or decisive providing time for their opponents to escape; they could just straight lose.
An instant death scenario in which juggernauts appear over enemy capital worlds only a few days after first contact is still preferable in terms of preventing an escape and guerrilla conflict. There will always be the 1% with their last-ditch colony ship ready to go the moment they encounter a hostile species, but you're saying the Shivans profit by giving them weeks or months to decide to use it, rather than days. That's ridiculous.
Think on Blue Planet.
Indeed. Think on the Sanctuary harder, because it sits in refutation of this argument.
Oh, and you speak of "time"? These species have been here for at least hundreds of thousands of years, and some would say a lot more than that! Time is on their side, not against them. A species that managed to survive and beat the odds for that long is a species that isn't really concerned with a few decades. Their ply calculations are over eons, not centuries.
It's not the Shivan timescale you're arguing matters in this post or indeed previous posts; you have been consistent on the point that the Shivans are effectively dumbing down themselves. Their timescale is not relevant to ground conditions as such. The Terran and Vasudan ones, though, are. And on that timescale major changes have occurred.
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Optimizing the use of force to accurately target your enemy's weaknesses is a clear, good first-order strategy.
Which is exactly why you might want to avoid it.
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It's a good thing we're discussing the unoptimized use of force then, though in different ways.
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I would've replied to specific posts, but you all have said everything I wanted to say (and much more). Instead, here's a shameless plug for my theory. (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=88081) It cheats by claiming that Shivan tactics are inferior, but the Shivans were just made that way.
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And the entire analogy falls apart right there, because the guerrilla war approach they are trying to avoid is something that is far more likely to happen this way. The losing side of a roughly matched war has a much greater ability (in terms of time and of resources) to consider and initiate exactly the sort of backup plans you are arguing the Shivans intend to avoid by this approach. By scattering enemy combat forces across dozens of systems you substantially increase the possibility some of them will be able to escape when the tide has turned decisively. This methodology is the worst of all worlds. The Shivan scouting attempt could be detected providing time to prepare and possibly leading to a discovery of what they are; their victory could be insufficiently rapid or decisive providing time for their opponents to escape; they could just straight lose.
Losing a battle or two is unimportant in the grand scheme of things. What is important is that the technological and strategic paths that these lesser beings operate in are never within a landscape of ideas where they have to think of outmaneuvering a godlike species, just a slightly better species than their own. Those two scenarios are strikingly different. Consider FreeSpace 2 and what has happened until then. In FreeSpace 1, the shivans launch an attack that I can describe as "genocidal" but with merely one technological level higher than they showcase. They risked losing, but if you think about it, in all odds they would have won. The Sanctuary that you bring to the table is proof enough of this. So, against all odds we "save the day" at the eleventh hour. "But this is madness", you'll say, "They could have scorched the entire alliance with two or three Sathanas, why didn't they and why wouldn't they?"
The difference of the approach is that in the small odds that the subspecies survived a Lucifer attack (level 1), they can scatter all they want and develop new technologies all they want, they still think their enemy is a Lucifer-building species, and they work with that in mind. Which means that in this (already assumed very rare) case, the threat is totally contained. They can waste their decades building a Collossus at will, it's just no biggie. There's no "Guerrilla tactics" in there because they fervently believe they have created an anti-shivan solution, a Big Kickass Ship. IOW, this "lost time" is not lost at all.
In the other approach, the survival rate is probably worse. Instead of 1%, perhaps just 0.1%. But consider the consequences. If such a species survives that encounter, they will immediately switch to a mindset of deep space shadow tactic, become invisible through the eons. They will think brainstorming crazy strategies are the only solutions left. Some will inevitably come close to an efficient and deadly answer.
If you have to battle tens of thousands of such species, if you use the first strategy, you'll get hundreds of these species surviving the first strike, but all they can think of next is to build a Collossus or something to that effect. If you use the second, you'll just get a few dozen that survive the first strike, but what follows might be much deadlier solutions in the long run than if you used the first strategy.
An instant death scenario in which juggernauts appear over enemy capital worlds only a few days after first contact is still preferable in terms of preventing an escape and guerrilla conflict. There will always be the 1% with their last-ditch colony ship ready to go the moment they encounter a hostile species, but you're saying the Shivans profit by giving them weeks or months to decide to use it, rather than days. That's ridiculous.
It's only ridiculous if you think on one instance only. It can become (it doesn't necessarily, but it *can*) quite efficient in the long run.
It's not the Shivan timescale you're arguing matters in this post or indeed previous posts; you have been consistent on the point that the Shivans are effectively dumbing down themselves. Their timescale is not relevant to ground conditions as such. The Terran and Vasudan ones, though, are. And on that timescale major changes have occurred.
Only after Capella we see people trying to figure out guerrilla tactics. And I argue that Capella can be seen as an exception. The point of the second shivan incursion wasn't to destroy GTVA systems, but to do something else entirely. They KNOW that to give the information about how bigger the shivans are is a tactical mistake, but they still do it because of untold reasons. Presumably, they have bigger goals and can sacrifice this leak of information to this species. But this is an important leak. It tells us that we *should* brainstorm about crazy solutions to this shivan menace, which would, in turn, create a landscape of solutions quite different in their nature from the ones that gave us the Collossus. IOW, post-FS2 shows the downside of your "Shock and Awe" solution.
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Just in case, BP Spoilers in this post (even though we're kinda far past that at this point).
On the note of the Sanctuary, we should keep in mind that it wasn't exactly an outstanding success. If anything, it was at least speculated by the in-universe characters that the old ship was going to eventually going to fall apart eventually. There wasn't any ongoing effort to build anything new either. In short, the Sanctuary was not anywhere near a credible threat.
Now if we hold Capella as the exception to the Shivan rule for destroying a species, does that then imply that Blue Planet's GTVA have begun adopting the more "guerilla" style of war? The use of Meson bombs to destroy jump nodes in FS2 was definitely a tactic that may not have been utilized if the Sathanas fleet had not shown up.
Obviously the GTVA haven't gone spaceborne, and the focus still seems primarily on fighting the Shivans head on. We see these features in the form of stronger beam cannons, the Raynor, and the strategic decision to retake Sol (a very static position) in order to boast their fleet.
However, we should also note that this is the first time we see fleet logistics vessels, the Titan, and the intervention of the Vishnan. Logistics vessels are essential to any species that plan to survive in deep space without planetary support. The Titan demonstrated its superb ability to fight while fleeing in AoA. And finally, the Vishnan's interest in the GTVA might be a result of the post-Capella effects, in which the Shivan's destruction of the Capella star forced the GTVA to change its doctrines in a manner that the Shivans had not intended. This kind of change in strategic development would make the GTVA interesting to the Vishnan, who may have otherwise viewed the GTVA as another to be eliminated soon species.
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Yes, I agree with all those insights, I just see now that NGTM was addressing the Sanctuary as the surviving boat that would generate a shivan resistance in the long term, while I was seeing it the way you do, as the last remnant of human civilization that was going to eventually die out.
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The Sanctuary barely has functioning fighters. A single Lilith could probably wipe the floor with them if its beam cannons are enabled (and if I remember right, in Forced Entry one will if you're not paying attention). Humanity is less of a weed growing in the Shivan garden, and more like a spot of lichen under a rock.
I'd say it was a pretty definite Shivan victory.