Hive Mind or "We sure do think alike"

[V3N0M1300]

And what do you think of the end result?

It's an interesting idea but playing without any internal politics doesn't sound fun. CK2 is my favorite game of all time because you have all these complex interactions between characters, and doing clever things like giving your border provinces to war mongering vassals, or looking for excuses to arrest faction members to keep them from getting too powerful, or getting the HRE to press your claim on castille while you sit on your ass. EU4 takes all of that and reduces it to spending administrative/diplomatic/military power to adjust other stats and as a result it's just a boring map painter. The constant rebels are the only reminder that your nation is made of people and not crayola colored provinces.

On the other hand, I could see hive mind being the first of many "extreme" ethics that would cost 3 points, be mutually exclusive to everything else, have their own systems of government and have unique gameplay mechanics.

Hive minds would be the extreme authoritarians, while extreme egalitarians could be collections of tribes that have a low fleet cap during peace time but can spawn ships for free while at war.

Extreme spiritualists would be lead by an immortal psionic "god" (possibly of a different species) with the power to cause supernatural events, while extreme materialsts would start the game as robots.

Extreme militarists would be space nomads traveling across the galaxy and pillaging everything, while being an extreme pacifist would let you play as a sentient planet-you would be locked to 1 world but it would be resource rich and almost impossible to conquer.

Extreme xenophobes would be inhuman space monsters that don't fear or hate other species but don't recognize them as sentients-just a source of food and trophies, and would get special wargoals to reflect that. Not sure what what extreme xenophiles could be like, maybe body snatching parasites that can't live without alien hosts, at least as larvae. Alien vs. predator.

Granted, it would be hard to make special rulesets for all 8 ethics but 4 or 5 would be a good start. The theme is that these ethics (and their associated governments) would be alien in nature-humans would not have the biology to be a hivemind, nor do they have a sentient homeworld to coexist with. Maybe, just maybe we could travel through the void of space in giant ships, conquering and enslaving alien worlds, but we function better with sunlight and elbow room.

 

[Cagliostro]

I think like anything else it will be fun for some players some of the time. I also enjoy CK2, but I gravitate toward certain kinds of starts and don't play every available type of character, especially in replay. One of the things I look forward to in a fully-developed Stellaris is that different races will really *feel* like different game play. This is an important step towards that happening.

 

[V3N0M1300]

I think like anything else it will be fun for some players some of the time. I also enjoy CK2, but I gravitate toward certain kinds of starts and don't play every available type of character, especially in replay. One of the things I look forward to in a fully-developed Stellaris is that different races will really *feel* like different game play. This is an important step towards that happening.

Well that was the other thing I liked about CK2-each system of government had its own set of rules, and therefore its own playstyle. I still haven't tried nomads though.

 

[Cagliostro]

Well that was the other thing I liked about CK2-each system of government had its own set of rules, and therefore its own playstyle. I still haven't tried nomads though.

Yeah, that's the thing. Like, I have never played in the HRE, or played Byzantium. But I still enjoy the game. I think things like this will end up adding depth to the game by providing more kinds of options.

 

[Sibericus]

It's an interesting idea but playing without any internal politics doesn't sound fun. CK2 is my favorite game of all time because you have all these complex interactions between characters, and doing clever things like giving your border provinces to war mongering vassals, or looking for excuses to arrest faction members to keep them from getting too powerful, or getting the HRE to press your claim on castille while you sit on your ass. EU4 takes all of that and reduces it to spending administrative/diplomatic/military power to adjust other stats and as a result it's just a boring map painter. The constant rebels are the only reminder that your nation is made of people and not crayola colored provinces.

On the other hand, I could see hive mind being the first of many "extreme" ethics that would cost 3 points, be mutually exclusive to everything else, have their own systems of government and have unique gameplay mechanics.

Hive minds would be the extreme authoritarians, while extreme egalitarians could be collections of tribes that have a low fleet cap during peace time but can spawn ships for free while at war.

Extreme spiritualists would be lead by an immortal psionic "god" (possibly of a different species) with the power to cause supernatural events, while extreme materialsts would start the game as robots.

Extreme militarists would be space nomads traveling across the galaxy and pillaging everything, while being an extreme pacifist would let you play as a sentient planet-you would be locked to 1 world but it would be resource rich and almost impossible to conquer.

Extreme xenophobes would be inhuman space monsters that don't fear or hate other species but don't recognize them as sentients-just a source of food and trophies, and would get special wargoals to reflect that. Not sure what what extreme xenophiles could be like, maybe body snatching parasites that can't live without alien hosts, at least as larvae. Alien vs. predator.

Granted, it would be hard to make special rulesets for all 8 ethics but 4 or 5 would be a good start. The theme is that these ethics (and their associated governments) would be alien in nature-humans would not have the biology to be a hivemind, nor do they have a sentient homeworld to coexist with. Maybe, just maybe we could travel through the void of space in giant ships, conquering and enslaving alien worlds, but we function better with sunlight and elbow room.

I don't see hive minds like that. I see it as it's own ethos, because it doesn't fit on that scale, and we shouldn't try to either. It is neither authoritarian, nor egalitarian. Every drone is part of the same mind here, so there isn't any way to apply individual focused values. Authoritarians are about the individual serving a greater good (i.e. the state, religion, science, the war effort, each other), while egalitarians are for the good of the individuals. A hive mind is both in a matter of speaking, since all of it is the individual, its drones are it and exist to serve it. It's hard to wrap ones head around extremely alien values like this.

Now some of those ideas are really cool, particularly the parasite one and the nomads, but they shouldn't be attributed to existing ethos, because those parasites could well be xenophobic and hate their disgusting meatshells, or those space nomads should have the option to be pacifistic traders and space miners. And some of these ideas, are already going to be covered with civics, ike fanatical purifiers, or starting robots. Others, like the sentient planet, I'm wondering how it could be compelling to even chose. It basically takes all four of the X's out of the game.

 

[Ikael]

I honestly think that if Paradox get creative enough with the Hivemind's policies, you will be able to roleplay extremely different and flavourful types of hiveminds just fine with no need to attach them to any kind of particular ethos. Something along these lines, for example:

Devourer: Must purge pops by eating them, always. Eating xeno pops grants you extra food, unity and production. Insane extra 50% damage bonus for your armies due to terror tactics. Incompatible with benevolent harmony
Benevolent harmony: Non-species pops can survive and assimilate inside your hivemind, your species can recieve happiness bonuses (will still not recieve unhappiness penalties). Incompatible with devourer and impregnation drones
Sexual pheromones: +15% atraction towards your hivemind ethoi, +50% foreign pop migration attraction. Unlocks planetary unique building "Eros flower" (happiness + inmigration bonus, acts like a magnet for foreign pops of empires with open borders with you)
Cibernetic consciousness: You can build pops as if they were synths, unlocks materialist ascension path. Incompatible with psy vampires
Psy vampires: Purging pops will provide your empire with extra energy, unity and research (bonus if the consumed pops have psy capabilities). Unlocks the psiquic ascension path. Incompatible with machine consciousness
Queens: Adds the unique "Queen" type of leader. These type of leaders will provide growth and combat bonuses for your fleet and planets, as well as automatically generate armies. They will be marked in the map. Incompatible with "one mind"
Hive-fleets: +200% fighter capacity for your carriers, +15% total naval cap
Oracle: +5% research speed, +10% anomaly research speed
Omniscient: All the galaxy map is revealed, -10% to chances of anomaly research failure
Natural architects: +10% habitability, unlocks the unique planetary building "hive world" (+20% habitability for the planet)
Genetic assimilation: Conquered pops will slowly transform into your species over time, purging pops trought breeding larvae and devouring them will also speed up this effect. Unlocks "assimilate genetic code" special research project for each species whenever you can get one new foreign pop inside your empire
Bio-metal: Slowly regenerates your fleet and army HP, +25% production speed towards buildings
Genetic-imprinted blueprints: +5% towards mineral and food output
Tactical predatory brain: +15% to fleet speed and weapon damage
Territorial instincts: +30% to weapon fire ratio when fighting defensive wars, +15% strenght to armies, +20% border projection
Organic terraforming: You may terraform any planet once with at least 50% of its tiles occuppied by your pops. +15% speed to terraforming
Impregnation drones: +15% to popullation growth speed, can purge xenos trought "breeding larvae" process (think alien facehuggers). Said process will greatly increase the growth rate and energy output of the planet

And so on and on. They just need to play with the concept, the core fundamental mechanic is solid enough I think.

 

[CiderMuffin]

I don't get why everyone instantly assumes a hive-mind is similar to how they are with ants and bees. What's to say a advanced hive-mind doesn't have individuals in them? The idea that all hive-minds are just a singular leader and everyone follows in place without question is really limiting. Sure, sure everyone wants to think "Well an advanced Hive-Mind will just be like the Borg!" but it's a really limited way of thinking.

We're talking about a game that lets us play sentient plants and fungi, a game where an inter-dimensional worm turns the capital world of a space empire into a black hole and a game that has a teapot floating near a sun that could be from another dimension itself. Expand your mind on what something can be and don't just assume bees and borgs.

 

[Morbid Gerbil]

A shoal of fish is a collective of individuals, but does not 'share' a consciousness.
The same can be said of corals.

Ants, bees, wasps & termites are a collective where there is only 1 individuality .. the queens
all other entities within these social groupings exist purely to serve, protect & feed the queen
this is what defines the term 'hive mind'

a shared or conjoined consciousness (ie due to psionics, or cybernetics) does not mean it is a hive mind
the 2 are different and can be mutually exclusive

 

[V3N0M1300]

Speaking of fungi, which hive mind civics will get me closest to government by juffo wup?

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

I don't get why everyone instantly assumes a hive-mind is similar to how they are with ants and bees. What's to say a advanced hive-mind doesn't have individuals in them? The idea that all hive-minds are just a singular leader and everyone follows in place without question is really limiting. Sure, sure everyone wants to think "Well an advanced Hive-Mind will just be like the Borg!" but it's a really limited way of thinking.

We're talking about a game that lets us play sentient plants and fungi, a game where an inter-dimensional worm turns the capital world of a space empire into a black hole and a game that has a teapot floating near a sun that could be from another dimension itself. Expand your mind on what something can be and don't just assume bees and borgs.

This nicely proves a point I was making in the latest Dev Diary.

Ants and bees don't have a single guiding intelligence at all- they are made up of individuals. The behaviour of eusocial hives IRL is an emergent property of complex interlocking behaviour on the part of (admittedly simple but still, as increasingly shown by research, autonomous and even "emotional") organisms each working towards their own goals. The proper term is "swarm intelligence".

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

A shoal of fish is a collective of individuals, but does not 'share' a consciousness.
The same can be said of corals.

Ants, bees, wasps & termites are a collective where there is only 1 individuality .. the queens
all other entities within these social groupings exist purely to serve, protect & feed the queen
this is what defines the term 'hive mind'

a shared or conjoined consciousness (ie due to psionics, or cybernetics) does not mean it is a hive mind
the 2 are different and can be mutually exclusive

Blatantly false. Queens have no special "leadership" role in a bee or ant hive (well, outside of founding new colonies, but that's not quite the same thing.)

 

[Arizal]

I think it would be fun if hivemind could be tiered, and as V3N0M1300 is saying, if other ethics had a third step, granting them special abilities. He talked about ideas of how those ethics could have ultimate steps, I'm going to talk about how hive minds could be less than absolute.

In my opinion, you are not either part of an hive mind or not. The idea currently on the table is that the hive mind cannot allow any ethic. While this would be true of the third step, in which the alpha and the omega would be the collective, there are ways to think about an imperfect hive mind. This would be a society in which shreds of individuality would still exist. On the contrary, a full hive mind would be a sole creature whose only goal is to grow.

The first idea that comes to my mind is the Zergs, who are controlled by the Overmind, but also by the cerebrates, who have shown they can have some agency. Arguably, the Borg could be seen as a as a second tier hive mind, since they are obsessed by technology and able to communicate with their ennemies. However, this is less clear to me since they have no individuality.

What would be good in that idea of progression would be that you could theorically start from a non hive-mind society, then through technology, ascendancy, or something else, become one. I would like to see some factions opposing or advocating for such shifts. And until you would be the third tiered hive mind, you would have internal opponents. Maybe an hive mind could even break, given some events about residuary conscientiousness.

 

[BootOnFace]

As someone who has been watching Voyager for the last few weeks, the Borg do have individuality, it's just subsumed by the collective consciousness. Seven-of-Nine says that in a way she will never die thanks to the Borg always retaining her individual experiences and memories. Their cognition is collective, yes, but it is composed of individuals who all experience reality separately.

 

[Kat Tsun]

Voyager is bad though.

 

[BootOnFace]

No u

 

[Untrustedlife]

Yay for confirmation of being able to gene mod pops into the hivemind

 

[lukesilveira]

It would be interesting if hive minds with assimilation characteristics could only research by consuming worlds and pops.