Exotics[]
- Connected races:
- Connected devices: ExoticsCommunicationTool that you need to speak to these guys, BlackOrb
Summary info[]
Principle antagonists. Ancient. They manipulate gravity waves naturally as the Chmmr do hyperwaves, and are very advanced in gravitational tech. Could be implied that they're composed of dark matter.
An Exotic individual can be discerned as a strong gravity lens from afar... and at close zoom as a shifty, shadowy, �wraithlike� creature. The community of Exotics form a hive mind.
During the course of game the Exotics presence starts to show. New stars start appearing, messing up nearby star systems... stars start blowing up transforming into black holes... hyperspace might go partially haywire too. This is the work of Exotics and you need to stop it before Sol, Procyon etc. are destroyed!
The Exotics take a large scale view of everything. The well-being of what we see as "sentient races" is irrelevant in Exotics' point of view: to them a living thing is anything that can make an observation, the minimal thermodynamic requirement for which is free energy. With this generalised definition of life in mind, the exotics consider everything to live - the stars, even the galaxy itself is a living thing to them.
Far from intending to extinguish life for their own purposes, the Exotics actually seek to maximise it (from their point of view), by maximising the entropy increase.
Difficult to communicate with - you need a special communication device to speak to them.
They could be inseparable from their ships / actually be their "ships", so they at least wouldn't have separate crew units.
There are several possible ways to win/lose the game:
- Worst ending. Do nothing / take too long, and the Exotics destroy the galaxy for their benefit. Death march equivalent.
- Bad ending. Sell out: Make a deal with the Exotics (once you know how to communicate with them) - let them destroy / grow new stars to numerous locations, and they leave satisfied. This leaves the NAFS world in scars. Everybody will hate you for this decision.
- Martyr ending. Venture into the Exotics' boss place unprepared / without allies and confront the boss. You could even destroy the boss but alone you get killed by the remaining Exotic forces.
- Good ending. Amass enough allies / right equipment to attack the Exotics' boss. Win the fight and your allies help you. WIN!
- Alternative good ending. Steal Exotics' devices, sneak into the exotics' boss system and use their own tools against themselves!!
The 4. and 5. could and maybe should be combined. To get the good endings it is required to have enough allies: You must fix the Chmmr, enroll Faz into your ranks, give Shofixti their new homeworld, maybe free the VUX, and not kill both SlaveRace and MasterRace etc.
Detailed info[]
Motives[]
The Exotics are so far removed from "life as we know it" that they have a rather different definition of it to what we do. Specifically, to them a living thing is anything that can make an observation, the minimal thermodynamic requirement for which is free energy. Physically, this amounts to defining life as the increase of entropy. To intuitively expund - a living thing by its actions imposes its own pattern, its own routine on its environment - locally, this pattern means Order. The second law of thermodynamics, however, says that the decrease in entropy for the local system (the living thing) must be accompanied by an overall increase in the environment's entropy. So any living thing ends up increasing entropy.
With this generalised definition of life in mind, the exotics consider everything to live - the stars, even the galaxy itself is a living thing to them. Far from intending to extinguish life for their own purposes, the exotics seek to maximise it, by maximising the entropy increase.
So the exotics are conducting "Galaxy gardening": madly making stars (and weeding out some) with their gravitational powers, which is good for life as they know it, but problematic for life as we know it.
Some of the new stars introduced by the exotics will be unnaturally massive supergiant stars, which won't live very long, going supernova pretty quickly. Those events would also leave behind some black holes.
Exotics as gardeners, seeding more entropy into the galaxy sounds more original than the slavering enemies. It would also make the player sympathize with them a little more once he found out about this (although at first they really could and should look like merciless monsters). Spreading the Hive mind/making it more efficient could be a by-product of their galaxy gardening instead of the sole purpose of it. Kind of like human settlements growing and being able to reach better standard of living (for the most part) when there's more people being able to specialize and making the society function better as a whole instead of few individuals trying just to stay alive.
Physiology[]
The Exotics are a hive mind, all their "individuals" are nodes in their neural network. Their being a hive mind also contributes to their different concept of life from ours: Because they're a hive mind, their culture doesn't have a concept of sharing or "getting along" with others, since as a race they absorbed all competing exotics hive mind "instances" into their own hive mind eons ago. They are one. They won't appreciate why the other individualistic sentient races are so annoyed when they kill other races' individuals; individuals are irreplaceable, but they have no concept of that, they assume other races' individuals are actually just nodes like it has. They also don't have the concept of an individual's value, so it won't think twice about throwing a few of its ships into the fire, as it's no great loss, to them it's like losing a few brain cells that grow back.
Consistent with the gravity theme, the Exotics use zero-width wormholes to transmit data/communications instantenously across very long distances (say several thousand (or tens of thousands) light years). By comparison, the NAFS rely on hyperwaves, which while traveling FTL through hyperspace, are not instantaneous, and have limited accuracy over long distances.
The Exotics use their wormhole communication to not just exchange words, but actually transmit their psychic hive mind between their ships/nodes, instantaneously. Each ship contains a hive node, which connects to the ship's "brain", and is re-broadcast locally to control any mobile/non-tethered appendages. Using this, the exotics hive mind can instantly control and "think" through a neural network of nodes several thousand light years across with little delay.
The exotics individuals are like blank slates a spawning, and are imprinted with neural pathways when they're put into use.
Details[]
Did the Precursors know of the Exotics? Did the Precursors leave because of them? Do we want to go there? I say we can imply something like the Exotics being quite as old and of the same power level as the Precursors.
I definitely want the possibility to communicate with the Exotics with direct dialogue. However, it shouldn't be too straight/understandable... something like the Mycon would be great! The player could try to do guesswork from the bits and pieces of the seemingly incoherent ramblings, but it wouldn't tell much. (I would advise against this direct communication. Random unintelligeble blabber is already done with the Mycon and Orz, an even more of it would get boring/clich�. Besides, the Exotics are so strange and far removed from any society as we know it, they might not even realize that they're communicating with anyone, and instead figure that whoever is communicating with their hive is a 'bad node' and has to be removed. I suggest having all details of the Exotics be handled through some research party from a collective of NAFS members. -- jorisvddonk)Specifics about the star systems they've destroyed: The star in the center of the truespace view could be replaced with a black hole, which sucks your ship in if you venture foolishly too close. Also the planets in the system are destroyed when the Exotics blow up a star.
Possible idea for boss fight: some kind of periodic gravitational tide effect that adds a new challenge to navigating around the melee arena. Difficult, but if it affects projectile paths too that could be spectacular. We'd want the tide effect to perhaps be coloured waves (or otherwise visible somehow), so you can predict the effect of the tide. If it was just random, it could be a very frustrating boss fight.
More for the boss fight: The Precursors were aware of the Exotics and their hive mind, and figured out that the Exotics transmit their psychic hive-mind-consciousness through zero-width wormholes. The Precursors setup subspace field generators that project a field over the local quadrant(s?) which disrupt the Exotics' wormhole based hive connections between their nodes. These make it impossible for the Exotics nodes which enter the field to participate in the hive-mind; it's like the bermuda triangle for the hive-mind. However the gravitational flux caused by
the Black Orb weakened the field enough to enable the Exotics to get in and install a "dampener" around the generator (perhaps by design the Exotics' star/spacetime smashing tech isn't capable of damaging the generator, which seems a sensible defense for such a device). The boss fight is to get in and destroy the "dampener", re-enabling the generator, and preventing the Exotics operating in the sector. The generator would be a planet sized object (maybe a rainbow world of metallic or fluorescent colours?), and the dampener is some kind of space station which generates an energy field surrounding the generator planet.
But why/where have they been hiding???: The Exotics could have lived at the age of the Precursors/be older than them. They posed danger to the precursors as well since they were planning to modify the stars and HS, just as they are now. When the Precursors couldn't defeat the Exotics, they opted for a stalemate : They somehow put the Exotics to sleep, (and maybe somehow vanishing in the process themselves... but let's keep this unsayed rather). Perhaps the Precursors created massive gravitational disturbances with the black orb, which comatosed the Exotics, but nearly destroyed the very fabric of the space which resulted in the death of the Precursors and nearly everything else in the galaxy. Only some well-protected devices etc. lifeless objects survived. (The player wouldn't have to know anything about this "Why/where have they been"-part and, actually, it sure is better if we keep it secret - it would spoil the Precursor mystery and would sound lame no matter how we put it. But it could be background material for us to build on, and from which we could give small hints in the game. It helps in building the actual story when knowing more about it than will ever be revealed in the final product.)
Melnorme might know of their presence (or impending presence)?
Ship Details[]
Weapons come from their ability to influence gravity. Their primary uses their wormholing ability to convey destructive energy instantaneously to the enemy - like the Arilou laser but with infinite range, the catch being that it does less damage with greater distance. Another catch might be that it drains all their energy to use it, and the damage it does is proportional to their battery level. Their secondary was going to be a white hole - call it a ``whitsun". Projected at the enemy like the Chenjesu or Kohr-Ah primaries, they repel . . . . like the planet's influence but opposite (antigravity). Black color theme.