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plasticpanzers

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Oct 6, 2007
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if you think fantasy and magic cannot be in a sci fi game then you have forgotten techomages from
Babylon 5, The Klingon war chant from Star Trek Armada, and the electonic phaser bow that seems
to be in a recent console sci fi game.

It will be nice if PDX can keep the magic/fantasy part of the universe out or more restrained than it
appears in some other games/areas of sci fi. It is hard to take seriously a +5 sword for all your Space
Marines.

I like fantasy and magic and I do understand at a point technology can appear to be the same but I am
hopeful PDX will lean towards science rather than magic rings and squirrel riding Chewbaccas (oh yes
someone posted pics of that over on the HOI4 forum..)
 
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I generally agree, fanciful elements aren't all that fanciful if they're ubiquitous, IMO.

From the RPS article, I got the impression that the really crazy, magical, technologies would be relegated to late game/rare discoveries. That works for me, since it should make the "esoteric" stuff feel like more of a game changer.
 
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Clarke's Third Law. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
And that's the only magic I want in there. sure you may encounter things that seems like magic when you venture out there but as you learn the rules that govern them you realise it's not actually magic just science on a whole other level.
Any sufficiently advanced alien is indistinguishable from God. I don't mind sufficiently advanced aliens, star trek for an example have used that trope for years in a good way. The ascended from star gate are another great example.
 
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Yeah, i mentioned that magic can be seen as tech and vice versa. I am hopeful tho the obvious (your leader is now a level 5 wizard) stuff
is prunned out of the game before release.
 
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I think that vanilla should keep this down to a minimum, and everything is plausibly sufficiently advanced science, and we should have a DLC (or three) dedicated to science fantasy. We don't have a science fantasy 4X right now, and Stellaris with DLC + mods could easily fill that gap. It could even be hand-waved as Psionics or the like. I think giving the people the tools to make their own Jedi, while being able to turn them off, would be a great idea. Just not in the base game, where you're stuck with them.
 
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any magic/mystical elements in the game would be a huge turn-off for me.
its true advanced tech can appear as magic, but spells and mind control of ships captain (like in SoSE) dont belong to a space strategy game (imho of course)
 
any magic/mystical elements in the game would be a huge turn-off for me.
its true advanced tech can appear as magic, but spells and mind control of ships captain (like in SoSE) dont belong to a space strategy game (imho of course)
I'm perfectly ok with mystical elements as long as they can be turned off. Jedi powers are very much magic, and star wars is very much sci-fi. If you described the force without calling it that, you would call it spells in a sci-fi setting (and thus actually science fantasy). Having actual magic as an option would be very cool, but only as an option.
 
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Star Wars is generally regarded as space opera and sometimes as space fantasy, but only rarely as sci fi.
 
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Stupid question: what's the difference between space opera and sci-fi? It seems like a sub-genre of science fiction to me. It seems that others do not agree.
 
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Stupid question: what's the difference between space opera and sci-fi? It seems like a sub-genre of science fiction to me. It seems that others do not agree.

Space opera doesn't care how the science works, it's completely about the character arcs. Science fiction cares about the science plots. It is a sliding scale however. Even your completely hard science fiction like The Martian has space opera elements in it's character arcs. Even a completely technobabble world like Star Wars will have some internal rules about the way that machines work. In between you have things like Star Wars where the rules of how the universe works can sometimes be important but the authors also freely invent technology as needed.
 
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Stupid question: what's the difference between space opera and sci-fi? It seems like a sub-genre of science fiction to me. It seems that others do not agree.
A space opera is a 'sci-fi such as that you cna replace all space and science elements with elements from another genre and get a working story.

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While there's nothing wrong with using a sci-fi setting as sort of a fun-house mirror to reflect out own or other times to us and make us consider those, thatäs the opperative wotrd here, rela sci-fi requires you tp think, and it even more importantly required some messure of throught from the author.
Star wars as I understand it is based on some japanese movie about samurais that's been moved to space, even if it wasnät it'd have strong elements of a fairlytale, again with it's setting set as space.

And the martian looks a lot like space opera to me, a mere survival story displaced to mars. They can have as accurate science as they want to if it's more about the feelings of people than about actuall science then it's a space opera. And from the trailers the martian looks so melodramatic than I want to throw up on it. star trek on the other han takes liberties with science, but always (in the earlier works, it starts diminishing fast in the last season of TNG and sometime in mid DS9) challanges you to think.
 
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The trailers for the martian are melodramatic because it's hard to make a trailer about a dude trying to keep the food from running out on Mars. Not an overly dramatic movie, go see it!
 
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Science Fiction has many different subgenres. Some are the hard sci-fi, with strict adherence to physics; some are much softer, with lots of handwavium or even psychic powers. It's not a binary, either; any sci-fi involving faster than light travel is bending the laws of physics somewhat, no matter how "hard" it tries to be. Saying "Star Wars isn't Science Fiction" is imposing a personal definition of what is or isn't science fiction; you may not consider it as such, but plenty of people do, and genres are such fluid things that it's not clear why your definition should be privileged.

Plenty of classic science fiction works have used fantasy-elements (beyond FTL, which is almost ubiquitous, and also fantastic); E. E. Doc Smith's Lensman Series and Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series are classics of the Golden Age, and both involve telepathy/mind control. Now, I don't think that telepathy should be in the game, but border-policing between genres is ultimately futile; the devs should do what makes the game the best. I may roll my eyes somewhat at faster-than-light travel, but I also recognize that it's essentially required for any game/series taking place with more than one solar system, and don't begrudge it if it makes the story/game better.
 
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Meanwhile I am still the only one person in the universe who hates telepathy and similar paranormal activity as a legitimate SF trope :(
Appearently you can't read minds, because there are plenty of people who don't like parapsychology. Started watching seaquest recently and every time psychic powers shw up I groan.

That said assuming that it's handwaved. I like the mad hatter (batman) version of mindcontrol/reading, just a guy using devices.
 
Meanwhile I am still the only one person in the universe who hates telepathy and similar paranormal activity as a legitimate SF trope :(
I certainly don't like unexplained psychic powers unless it's a very central plot point (superhero-like), it's very unbelievable that humans would suddenly discover how to do that. Unless various technological implants allows us to access some sort of hidden energy; then I'm ambivalent about it, it's kinda cool and yet still a bit unbelievable.

Same thing with aliens, but if the aliens do have telepathy then it must be possible in the setting and humans should be able to emulate it with technology. It's not entirely unbelievable, but I prefer just leaving that trope alone.

Realistically you could actually get pretty close to telepathy with technological implants, though you could probably only use it with other people with receptive implants.
 
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I certainly don't like unexplained psychic powers unless it's a very central plot point (superhero-like), it's very unbelievable that humans would suddenly discover how to do that. Unless various technological implants allows us to access some sort of hidden energy; then I'm ambivalent about it, it's kinda cool and yet still a bit unbelievable.

Same thing with aliens, but if the aliens do have telepathy then it must be possible in the setting and humans should be able to emulate it with technology. It's not entirely unbelievable, but I prefer just leaving that trope alone.

Realistically you could actually get pretty close to telepathy with technological implants, though you could probably only use it with other people with receptive implants.
Basically a direct internet dialup for your brain, and honestlt that's awesome enough.
 
I certainly don't like unexplained psychic powers unless it's a very central plot point (superhero-like), it's very unbelievable that humans would suddenly discover how to do that. Unless various technological implants allows us to access some sort of hidden energy; then I'm ambivalent about it, it's kinda cool and yet still a bit unbelievable.

Same thing with aliens, but if the aliens do have telepathy then it must be possible in the setting and humans should be able to emulate it with technology. It's not entirely unbelievable, but I prefer just leaving that trope alone.

Realistically you could actually get pretty close to telepathy with technological implants, though you could probably only use it with other people with receptive implants.

If it is achievable with technology it's imo weird and unnecessary but I can accept that. Mass Effect had cool 'psychic powers' because they were treated as something scientific, not paranormal: resulted from discoveries in physics, had strict rules etc. I have also nothing against technological upgrades connecting the brain with the Internet, or AI, or wonders like that, but I wouldn't call them telepathy or psionic stuff.

However I truly hate telepathy if it's 'organic', 'natural' and is used for an alien race as a lazy way to make it more alien without actually imagining something original. For example, alien without hands or way to move itself ---> telepathy explains it! Alien with weird, inhuman mind? Telepathy! Hive mind? Telepathy! It is almost never explored from 'scientific' point of view, or doesn't have any particular rules, and remains 'space magic' for me, much more than FTL travel or time travel. It is tired cliche and I really rarely encounter such 'paranormal abilities' in SF that manage to be more than shallow plot devices, or 'space magic'. I have even read Philip Dick's 'Ubik' which is viewed as 'the best book of a great SF writer' and 'one of the best books about telepathy' and I didn't like it at all so it's hard for me to imagine SF story where psychic abilities are actually explained and make sense.

Maybe one of the reasons why I hate telepathy is the fact I am studying cognitive and brain studies, and telepathy/psionic abilities grasp human mind so incorrectly they are not even wrong; and they greatly simplify mind's sophistication. I rarely encounter SF which actually tries to imagine how different consciousness and different mental processes may look like; usually the top of unorthodoxy in that regard is magic telepathy/very tired hive mind cliche.

I also despise hive mind cliche but a lot of people love it. Don't get me wrong, I think the initial concept of hive mind - as 'shared consciousness without individual self' - is fascinating. The problem is. IMHO, the fact that great majority of SF stories don't go beyond the name 'hive mind' and don't actually imagine 'shared consciousnes' but trivialize it to idiotic 'there are a lot of creatures but each of them is mindless and there is one Big Brain who thinks'. This is the second cliche I hate in SF because it removes any effort from designing alien race - you don't need to think about this race's society, culture or language because they don't have them; you don't need to develop alien characters because this bastardized vision of hive mind has 'one sentient guy per race' - and of course you don't need to explore how it thinks because of some lazy bullshit 'of course it is completely impossible to understand by humans'. So, a lazy writer has an alien race which is completely alien and yet absolutely unimaginative; 90% of SF universes I have explored reduce 'hive mind' to 'mindless zombies and god, kill them all' idiocy. On top of that, 'hive minds' tend to be insectoids (of course - because every writer and his mother copies ants), telepathic (space magic) and 'fully biotechnological' which is simply ridiculous (sorry, you can't get nuclear fusion from biotechnology, no matter what).

So, two cliches I hate and view as bullshit magic are one of the most popular in SF fandom: psionic powers and hive minds. I have powerful enemies. On top of that, I also don't like most of AI depictions in SF genre (they either make it not a big deal, underestimating the sophistication of mind, or make it idiotic hitler exterminators) but at least AI is not magic so it doesn't qualify here :D
 
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The 'hive mind' in the White 'bug' novels such as 'in deaths ground' are not driven by a master mind or overlord but each induvidual is an induvidual in
the hive just given a certain food to turn it to worker or warrior (or some type of thinker i imagnine). they show strategy and tactics in space and on the
ground in combat but are more or less insentivie to losses as you can alway hatch more. hive mind is too generalized, you have to look harder for real
interesting species in some novels on which we all understand sci fi is based upon.
 
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