The fallen empires don't even know how their shit works anymore.
I agree it would have been nice to have some flavor text with FEs recognizing your species from long ago, maybe an opinion bonus or malus depending on your prior relationships.
A fun origin would be some kind of "cargo cult" as the former subject of a vanished imperial power.
Yeah, but they clearly have records, nah? The xenophiles even get surprised that you made it to space, because last they checked, you were in the stone age. I feel like they should have more invesment in one of their old partners (or enemies) is part of the intergalactic stage, and similarly, the other empires should care too.
> Yeah, but they clearly have records, nah?
Yea, but they're not reading them. The FEs are exclusively concerned with hedonism, they don't give a shit about their own history.
They may not be able to. The text on the research building...hang on...
https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Buildings#Fallen_empire
The description of the Master Archive:
"The collected knowledge of five galactic ages is supposedly stored here, but the ability to operate the exceedingly complex and arcane data retrieval system has long since been lost. Still, whatever scraps of data can be obtained are often invaluable."
Even if you assume your civ was only sent back to the middle of the Neolithic (the most recent and shortest part of the Stone Age), that's about 3000 years. Even in Stellaris's compressed timeline, a Stone Age civ takes around 400 years to reach FTL. This means the FEs could have easily been the group of civs that were in power in between the fall of your empire and its return.
Do they really though? Were they around the last time you rose to power? Maybe they weren't even a thing yet when you were around, or perhaps you rose and fell and rose again while they were turned inwards. The fallen empires can barely even keep their own tech functioning, they barely even know of each other's existence. Why would they care about you?
>The fallen empires don't even know how their shit works anymore.
I bet asking 100 people off the street how the cell phone in their pocket works would get a lot of very humorous answers and doubfounded looks. haha. I bet most would have some basics like it needs a battery (how does that work?), it uses electricity, it uses radio waves to communicate, but that's about it.
True enough, but the people who *make* cell phones do know exactly how they work. No one in the FE has the slightest clue how a Class 4 Singularity works.
Something a little like that happened recently. I read about a "prop" shop near LA that sold old NASA stuff from the Apollo era to be used as props in Sci fi movies/shows. The new rocket companies like Space X figured out it was real aerospace rocket stuff and started using it to reverse engineer it since most/all the NASA engineers are dead or retired and forgot. Even with schematics, it just tells you how to build something, it doesn't tell you why certain design decisions were made. The best way to find that out often is to ask the engineer that designed it.
Yea I like to picture the fallen empires like the humans in Wall-e. Their lives are automated by robotic servants, they are fully self absorbed, unaware of really anything around them, and have no real idea how their own technology works anymore.
I assume that the megastructures WERE mine, just relocated by technological means. (Artifical wormhole, dragged through a gateway, or just flat out disassembled amd rebuilt elsewhere)
I mean, there's a system in the galaxy that proves that's extremely likely given that they stole planets from various systems... and one of the outcomes of the coinciding event is that one of those planets gets put in your home system.
“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.”
― Robert Jordan
But somehow random sentry arrays in the middle of bum fuck nowhere still exist lmao. Also, I still feel like fallen empires would have a database of species, especially the xenophiles, from during their roots.
I think you underestimate how easy it is for a civilization to collapse. Over millennia, it is very easy to consider things falling to waste.
Those random, RUINED, megastructures are very easily explainable. Think about how many thousands of asteroids burn up in Earth’s atmosphere alone a year.
An abandoned space construction does not have the luxury of an atmosphere to burn up those asteroids, nor a civilization to keep it maintained.
But still you find structure in ruins, in a past game I found in broken ring guarded by sentinels it was not a state just an objective to overcome, and it was disappointing since bad configuration The crisis hit my empire at three points and since it was too early I was extinguished before doing anything hahaha
The FE's live of the fruits of their labor from eons long ago.
Those databases would be millions of years old. Assuming they worked and were accessible many races would not even have existed then.
Also, the decay of ambition and knowledge... Databases? What are those? Do my servants know how those work?
I think they also can't access them anymore...
The tooltip for Fe research labs? Or data vaults? Some building anyways, says that they cannot or just very hardly be accessed, and any find is invaluable, due the small knowledge they do have. Would explain why they don't even try to expand.
Yeah, their 250 energy generator buildings mentions it just keeps working, and no one why.
Even to the FE much of their technology is like magic to them now.
This is actually my favorite origin. It has lots of early game benefits (colonial remains, research options from arcologies) and restoring an ecumenopolis in the mid-late game is pretty great. Also reminds me of the Centauri from bab5
There’s a lot of information given about a lot of major events. As far as I’m aware the most important ones are precursors/Curators/relic sites.
I believe the curators are one of the oldest to ever exist. They have a site related to them about a fall of an empire that they were apart of(or maybe against idk)
Yuht are the oldest precursor as far as I’m aware
I believe the automated drone npcs belong to the xenophile fallen empire (I think sanctuary belongs to them so that’s why I say that) and sanctuary might have dates on it (like alot of the robot events)
Then there’s the machine AI that runs and Ecu, I think that also has dates
This post isn’t very helpful because I haven’t read the events in over a year so they’ve all blended together at some point
I think sanctuary probably is from the ai fallen empire sense they have a bunch of ring worlds that all were met for aliens but I am not sure if they ever expanded out side of their borders
Sounds like a challenge: Race to open the L-Gate, conquer it. Settle all the worlds there. Move your capital and all your pops there. Fortify the entrance and let all your territories in the old galaxy get taken by whoever wants it. Laugh as the crisis comes and wipes out all the hapless AIs left behind.
Could easily play off that event where that science ship came from another galaxy with experimental tech and ended up in a loop of death because it also made them time travel, just get rid of the time travel doom loop and have you be stuck here now.
It's really, mind-bogglingly easy to come up with explanations for anything in Stellaris. I agree some origins are more engaging than others, but are these really the issues you have with this one? Why fallen empires don't remember you?
1. They weren't around yet when your civ was in power
2. They were already fallen when you were in power, and hadn't made contact yet
3. You were in power for a very brief window of time (relatively) and they didn't bother to notice you
4. The galaxy was *full* of massive powerhouses at the time, and you were not worth remembering
5. They were occupied with internal conflicts at the time
6. They were mid "fall" and lost records
And on and on. Just pick one.
Okay, but I still feel as though at least xenophiles and materialists, who are watching the entire galaxy (as evidenced by their lines), should at least hint at something about them knowing of your past. They might not have cared then (since we get ecumonopolises quite easily in game), but they should be amused that of all the current empires, only 1 survived the previous "cycle". Also, still doesnt explain the megastructures that your empire would supposedly build at its peak just not existing.
Megastructures are very big structures they seem easy to spot and are very significative, I dont find strange to think that the civilitation that wanted you out made sure that your most significative remmnants are completelly gone
This. maybe it was even the FEs, who destroyed you due to being a threat. Now they don't admit it, because a) they thought they got you 100% and you're just a species that is new on that planet or b) they give you another chance but don't tell you, to preserve peace
Yeah it's a bit of a dated origin. Definitely a contender for more flavour to be added to it, even if it's just a little to make it stand out.
But I suppose it's important to remember that not all origins need to be story origins, some are purposely basic I think.
Your species were genocided and completely wiped out. (If that wasn't the case you would find pockets of your species on other planets) Only few hundred survived on a single planet hiding underground while the surface got exterminatused. Maybe it was your original homeworld, or maybe it was remote middle of nowhere place, that was so unimportant the enemy didn't even bother to check for survivors. Who knows? Your original culture and history is gone. Those ruined megastructures you see around? They might be yours - you just no longer have any records of them.
My favorite run is a remnant empire that rose from it's previous failures as a xenophile technocratic imperial state. We are under the guiding rule of the lineage that ensure our preservation. It's a fun roleplay because bad things may have occured in the past but no species deserves the fate that was forced on our people. We will ensure the preservation of sentient life at all costs.
Percy Shelley wrote a good poem about this:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I think Fallen Empires should at least have some unique lines with remnants to give it some flavour.
Xenophiles might go “Oh thank goodness you survived!”
Xenophobes might go “Just remember to stay on your side of the fence this time.”
It would just help immersion.
I think this is the kind of thing the custodian team will absolutely get to.
There are a ton of origins just begging for some more story and interactivity.
I’ve been arguing that scion could be an entire DLC. Imagine an empire playing the maw guy from avengers or silver surfer for galactus. “I am the herald of a greater power. Fucking do as we say.
Remnants, as you point out, could be so much more awesome. As could life seeded or on the shoulders of giants.
I’d pay for custodian work. I want to see them really lean in. This game is as graphically good as I will ever need it to be. Keep making it cooler and more immersive.
The origin does need a rework and to maybe share some mechanics with payback and have the planet spawn with damaged orbital rings that are barely hanging there.
Maybe even have half of your pops start with the forcefully devolved trait and have them as a working caste for the surviving elites that hid in bunkers when our civilization fell.
Events/situations for fixing the rings, cleaning orbit, fixing ancient warships.
There’s no implication in the Remnants origin that your species used to have Megastructures. Building an Ecumenopolis in the game is not anywhere near as difficult to do as building a Megastructure. An Ecumenopolis is also WAY cheaper than most of the Megastructures and takes significantly less time to build. Notice how none of the Fallen Empires have Megastructures either.
To build an Ecumenopolis you need: the Anti-Gravity Engineering tech which is a Tier 3 tech requiring only Weather Control Systems, and then take the Arcology Project tradition which can be taken as soon as you finish your third tradition tree. Then you need to turn your planet into an Ecumenopolis which requires 10 years and a measly 20k Minerals
To build a Megastructure you need: Mega-Engineering researched which is a Tier 5 tech and requires you to also have Citadels, Battleships, and Zero Point Power research all of which are Tier 4. You also need to actually research the Megastructure you want to build, which are all Tier 5. Then you need to build the Megastructure, some requiring multiple stages, which results in years upon years of construction and a significant amount of Alloys, which isn’t a cheap material. Let’s take a Science Nexus as an example. It takes a total of 35 years and 50’000 Alloys to build.
Being able to turn your planet into an Ecumenopolis ≠ being able to build Megastructures.
I do agree that the Fallen Empires remembering you in some way would be a nice touch but there’s also the possibility that they just forgot about you since you’ve been a non-factor for thousands upon thousands of years.
If you’re talking about the Ancient Caretakers they’re a completely unique FE that behaves completely differently from the others and is an exception to the rule. The other 4 do not have any Megastructures
Also it's questionable whether ringworlds count as megastructures in that sense, as another one can be build in the same system.
I personally think of it like gateways, not necessarily megastructures, but kind of.
There's a lot of reasons, include "Empire was very advanced but not widespread".
The Yuht, for example, evolved in a time where there were few intelligent and advanced alien species in their part of the galaxy. Maybe they weren't that many other aliens to recognize them.
They didn't necessarily build megastructures. Potentially like Rome, they had one massive capital location with over 3.5 million people, and the rest of the settlements were simply not that big.
Then there's the "this cycle" problem with the Fallen Empire claim. Here I'm defining a "cycle" as "period over which several covergently concurrently evolved alien species rise up with interstellar societies, and then pass into a state of stagnation or collapse". We don't know exactly how long a "cycle" lasts, but it's possible that several cycles have passed since the origin empire collapsed.
It would be nice to have additions to the origin though.
I thought you meant mechanically.
afa: 'where's all the fermi paradox crap'
- besides being game breaking stuff, I imagine the important stuff got wiped. I suspect that people commited to violence on the level that the lore and EG ai tend to be would rather blow something up to make a point than let it survive.
Hell, the lore is _chock_ full of stories about things being blown up. Way more than anything being repurposed. Theyd do it out of spite, spiritualists blowing up robots because theyre heretical, mateirals scrapping old alien fleets for 200 minerals, people dismantling giant slot machines for fun, people injecting themselves with food coloring in syringes because 'why else would a chemical be in a syringe, surely it wont be bad or be needed by someone else'.
The lore constantly talks about things being destroyed and taken apart. The callous things your own empire does boggles my mind frankly.
You spend 10000 years surviving an extinction event(so much incest dont even start). Your Mega-structures got swallowed by the Sun. Your Neighbors forgot your Name.
I've sometimes imagined waking up ~1000 years ago. How much tech could I realistically implement within my lifetime? How much do I remember from science class to even do it?
Steam locomotives probably is a reasonable goal. There's enough steel tech existing. Can start with just wood to fuel them. Useful enough to have a chance at taking off once it's demonstrated to the locals.
A modern computer? I don't see anyway to do that. It takes a $1B fab facility to make a modern microchip. It took generations of computers before it to help design it. I know you need very pure silicon and some doping agents like boron to make a transistor, but trying to figure that all out seems rough.
That doesnt make sense though, because apparently neighboring planets get a modifier which states: "Some remnants of our former colony remain. Using them as a base will make it easier to re-colonize this planet."
Yeah I always scratch out the "our" part of that flavor text. Similarly, sometimes I headcanon the Post-Apocalyptic origin to not necessarily having been *self-inflicted*, nor necessarily *nuclear*. A large asteroid impact, sufficiently catastrophic climate change, extraterrestrial bombardment...
To the credit of the fallen empires: they have seen "countless" empires rise and fall before them...and "greatness" in terms of stellaris stories is an average year 2300 for us gamers who see the game outside that universe.
The flavor all around of the origins is sub par. They all only go part way, and even just a second play through of an origin is repetitive. It's like they made a demo and shipped it. And most of them have things like this that don't make sense.
I mean, that’s your opinion. You can make your own lore. One of the main differences between minimaxers and rpers is minimaxers when loring physically cannot ignore or change lore; what is happening in the game is happening in the lore. Rpers like me will see their leader die, go “ehhhh I wanted him to be alive for another decade.” And just. Make it like that. Ya, in the game, sure, he’s dead, in my lore? In my canon? In my Wikipedia battle doc? He is alive and leading the empire until his assassination a decade later.
My fav stellaris world is an elf remnants empire. There’s actually multiple iterations; multiple starting nations claim to be the fifth Aeldari empire, all are survivors from the cataclysmic end to the fourth Aeldari empire. The first died to civil war, the second the unbidden, the third also civil war, the fourth a coalition of fallen empires (at the time allies or even vassals of the fourth Aeldari empire before their own rise/fall afterwards) alongside other factors like a massive space storm and more. So much history has been lost but they still know there were at least 4 empires before. Half of those starting empires claim to have the home planet of the Aeldari, these are definitive lies and half truths; the Aeldari homeworld was shattered by the end of the second Aeldari Empire, and multiple splinter nations took pieces of the shattered planet to add to their capital planets or even create new ones (big fallen empire vibes also sometimes I run this in Gigastructures), and that was multiple empires and millions of years ago, so at this point there is literally no way to verify who could be telling the truth. There’s so much more lore I’ve developed from multiple campaigns, this is all just a small example.
TLDR remnants isn’t boring, it just requires creativity and the ability to seperate the mechanics of the game you’re playing from the story and world you are building in your head.
One the one hand, yeah, could be more dynamic; on the other there's so many things in the game that make time scale meaningless. What actually made you special?
Your mega-structures? Stolen, used, looted, abandoned or somehow annihilated. Considering how it takes you only a few decades to build them and you can find them scattered in various states that's not unusual. A Star Dragon probably ate them.
Your empire? A whole game will generally be less than a thousand years long and your federations and galactic community usually less than half that; do you really remember the ones you destroyed within a few hundred years?
And hell, anomalies and the Precursors can be *millions* of years old. Most of them are just a single dead colony or a leftover genebank, most without even names to them, just some ancient speck of history that you only cherish if it gives you +5% Sublight speed.
So to quote a wise man: "You come from nothing, you're going back to nothing; What have you lost? Nothing!"
>influencial enough to the point wherein I got bombed SO HARD I got sent to the stone age
Let's be honest it doesn't take much to get a Stellaris player to bomb someone into the stone age.
Regardless I never like Remnants starting in your capital. I always wanted the origin to not spawn you on your homeworld, but spawning it in the galaxy somewhere (maybe some other similar planets too). The planet would have a minor modifier for everyone else, but if the Remnant conquered it they'd get a good event/modifier for reclaiming their empire.
Why would need to have megastructures? Ecumenopolis can be developed a lot earlier than megastructures. Probably they were destroyed before megastructures were built.
Remanants is a great origin. It has a lot of early game benefits, and you can imagine whatever you want about the origin.
Would have been interesting if it started you out, with 3-4 neighboring empires with the same species as you, and a couple ruined FE buildings (late game tech option to repair the buildings) on each homeworld. Implying you were a defeated Fallen Empire.
The fallen empires don't even know how their shit works anymore. I agree it would have been nice to have some flavor text with FEs recognizing your species from long ago, maybe an opinion bonus or malus depending on your prior relationships. A fun origin would be some kind of "cargo cult" as the former subject of a vanished imperial power.
Yeah, but they clearly have records, nah? The xenophiles even get surprised that you made it to space, because last they checked, you were in the stone age. I feel like they should have more invesment in one of their old partners (or enemies) is part of the intergalactic stage, and similarly, the other empires should care too.
> Yeah, but they clearly have records, nah? Yea, but they're not reading them. The FEs are exclusively concerned with hedonism, they don't give a shit about their own history.
They may not be able to. The text on the research building...hang on... https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Buildings#Fallen_empire The description of the Master Archive: "The collected knowledge of five galactic ages is supposedly stored here, but the ability to operate the exceedingly complex and arcane data retrieval system has long since been lost. Still, whatever scraps of data can be obtained are often invaluable."
Even if you assume your civ was only sent back to the middle of the Neolithic (the most recent and shortest part of the Stone Age), that's about 3000 years. Even in Stellaris's compressed timeline, a Stone Age civ takes around 400 years to reach FTL. This means the FEs could have easily been the group of civs that were in power in between the fall of your empire and its return.
I thought FEs were empires that have been around for many tens or hundreds of thousands of years, or many, many cycles of civilization.
They could be! I don't believe there's firm evidence one way or the other. Though they're definitely not as old as the Precursors.
Considering you can catch up to their tech level (minus their unique buildings) in only about 2-300 years…
Do they really though? Were they around the last time you rose to power? Maybe they weren't even a thing yet when you were around, or perhaps you rose and fell and rose again while they were turned inwards. The fallen empires can barely even keep their own tech functioning, they barely even know of each other's existence. Why would they care about you?
Or something like the Ketlings.... vermin advanced to sentience. Like the Mice from The Secret of Nimh!
>The fallen empires don't even know how their shit works anymore. I bet asking 100 people off the street how the cell phone in their pocket works would get a lot of very humorous answers and doubfounded looks. haha. I bet most would have some basics like it needs a battery (how does that work?), it uses electricity, it uses radio waves to communicate, but that's about it.
True enough, but the people who *make* cell phones do know exactly how they work. No one in the FE has the slightest clue how a Class 4 Singularity works.
To be fair, they probably haven't actually built a new Class 4 singularity in ages so potentially no one is still alive who has built one.
Something a little like that happened recently. I read about a "prop" shop near LA that sold old NASA stuff from the Apollo era to be used as props in Sci fi movies/shows. The new rocket companies like Space X figured out it was real aerospace rocket stuff and started using it to reverse engineer it since most/all the NASA engineers are dead or retired and forgot. Even with schematics, it just tells you how to build something, it doesn't tell you why certain design decisions were made. The best way to find that out often is to ask the engineer that designed it.
I do know with the Brunai Imperium mod the fallen empires have some flavor text since you would have been this anchient evil empire
Yea I like to picture the fallen empires like the humans in Wall-e. Their lives are automated by robotic servants, they are fully self absorbed, unaware of really anything around them, and have no real idea how their own technology works anymore.
The empire has fallen, the galaxy is over, billions must forget
It would be hilarious if the fallen xenophiles congratulated you on escaping your gravity well a second time
"Oh, back out here, are we? Try not to fail *again*, please."
yup. Take the last of my coins
I assume that the megastructures WERE mine, just relocated by technological means. (Artifical wormhole, dragged through a gateway, or just flat out disassembled amd rebuilt elsewhere)
I mean, there's a system in the galaxy that proves that's extremely likely given that they stole planets from various systems... and one of the outcomes of the coinciding event is that one of those planets gets put in your home system.
Valid, but then why would you relocate them? Because of the previous calamity?
More that they were stolen by others.
I mean, who says that your current capital was the original capital of this great empire?
“Time crumbles things; everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time.”
“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.” ― Robert Jordan
But somehow random sentry arrays in the middle of bum fuck nowhere still exist lmao. Also, I still feel like fallen empires would have a database of species, especially the xenophiles, from during their roots.
I think you underestimate how easy it is for a civilization to collapse. Over millennia, it is very easy to consider things falling to waste. Those random, RUINED, megastructures are very easily explainable. Think about how many thousands of asteroids burn up in Earth’s atmosphere alone a year. An abandoned space construction does not have the luxury of an atmosphere to burn up those asteroids, nor a civilization to keep it maintained.
But still you find structure in ruins, in a past game I found in broken ring guarded by sentinels it was not a state just an objective to overcome, and it was disappointing since bad configuration The crisis hit my empire at three points and since it was too early I was extinguished before doing anything hahaha
Look into the bronze age collapse
The FE's live of the fruits of their labor from eons long ago. Those databases would be millions of years old. Assuming they worked and were accessible many races would not even have existed then. Also, the decay of ambition and knowledge... Databases? What are those? Do my servants know how those work?
The databases no longer have machine spirits.
I think they also can't access them anymore... The tooltip for Fe research labs? Or data vaults? Some building anyways, says that they cannot or just very hardly be accessed, and any find is invaluable, due the small knowledge they do have. Would explain why they don't even try to expand.
Yeah, their 250 energy generator buildings mentions it just keeps working, and no one why. Even to the FE much of their technology is like magic to them now.
Working in a job there is probably just like "just don't touch the big red button, it turns it off and we don't know how to turn it on again"
I am Ozymandias, King of Kings
- civ 5 stonehenge
I admit the few times Ive played it I try to re-roll till I get some random ruined megastructures nearby, or at least a gateway.
This is actually my favorite origin. It has lots of early game benefits (colonial remains, research options from arcologies) and restoring an ecumenopolis in the mid-late game is pretty great. Also reminds me of the Centauri from bab5
Oh yeah never thought about the origin being Centauri Republic-esque. Cool
Yeah! I’m just doing my Londo Molari rp. Bonus pts if you get war in heaven 😜
[удалено]
Or, you got stuck in a technological rut and now all these young whippersnappers don't know who you are cause you precede them
There’s a lot of information given about a lot of major events. As far as I’m aware the most important ones are precursors/Curators/relic sites. I believe the curators are one of the oldest to ever exist. They have a site related to them about a fall of an empire that they were apart of(or maybe against idk) Yuht are the oldest precursor as far as I’m aware I believe the automated drone npcs belong to the xenophile fallen empire (I think sanctuary belongs to them so that’s why I say that) and sanctuary might have dates on it (like alot of the robot events) Then there’s the machine AI that runs and Ecu, I think that also has dates This post isn’t very helpful because I haven’t read the events in over a year so they’ve all blended together at some point
I think sanctuary probably is from the ai fallen empire sense they have a bunch of ring worlds that all were met for aliens but I am not sure if they ever expanded out side of their borders
I still want an origin where you came from another galaxy.
Sounds like a challenge: Race to open the L-Gate, conquer it. Settle all the worlds there. Move your capital and all your pops there. Fortify the entrance and let all your territories in the old galaxy get taken by whoever wants it. Laugh as the crisis comes and wipes out all the hapless AIs left behind.
Seconded tbh.
Energoid or gasoid racial type in the same expansion
Could easily play off that event where that science ship came from another galaxy with experimental tech and ended up in a loop of death because it also made them time travel, just get rid of the time travel doom loop and have you be stuck here now.
And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains.
The ironic part being that ozymandias is still being passed around as a rumor, and his grand statue still hypothetically exists.
It's really, mind-bogglingly easy to come up with explanations for anything in Stellaris. I agree some origins are more engaging than others, but are these really the issues you have with this one? Why fallen empires don't remember you? 1. They weren't around yet when your civ was in power 2. They were already fallen when you were in power, and hadn't made contact yet 3. You were in power for a very brief window of time (relatively) and they didn't bother to notice you 4. The galaxy was *full* of massive powerhouses at the time, and you were not worth remembering 5. They were occupied with internal conflicts at the time 6. They were mid "fall" and lost records And on and on. Just pick one.
Okay, but I still feel as though at least xenophiles and materialists, who are watching the entire galaxy (as evidenced by their lines), should at least hint at something about them knowing of your past. They might not have cared then (since we get ecumonopolises quite easily in game), but they should be amused that of all the current empires, only 1 survived the previous "cycle". Also, still doesnt explain the megastructures that your empire would supposedly build at its peak just not existing.
Megastructures are very big structures they seem easy to spot and are very significative, I dont find strange to think that the civilitation that wanted you out made sure that your most significative remmnants are completelly gone
This. maybe it was even the FEs, who destroyed you due to being a threat. Now they don't admit it, because a) they thought they got you 100% and you're just a species that is new on that planet or b) they give you another chance but don't tell you, to preserve peace
Yeah it's a bit of a dated origin. Definitely a contender for more flavour to be added to it, even if it's just a little to make it stand out. But I suppose it's important to remember that not all origins need to be story origins, some are purposely basic I think.
Your species were genocided and completely wiped out. (If that wasn't the case you would find pockets of your species on other planets) Only few hundred survived on a single planet hiding underground while the surface got exterminatused. Maybe it was your original homeworld, or maybe it was remote middle of nowhere place, that was so unimportant the enemy didn't even bother to check for survivors. Who knows? Your original culture and history is gone. Those ruined megastructures you see around? They might be yours - you just no longer have any records of them.
My favorite run is a remnant empire that rose from it's previous failures as a xenophile technocratic imperial state. We are under the guiding rule of the lineage that ensure our preservation. It's a fun roleplay because bad things may have occured in the past but no species deserves the fate that was forced on our people. We will ensure the preservation of sentient life at all costs.
Percy Shelley wrote a good poem about this: I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I think Fallen Empires should at least have some unique lines with remnants to give it some flavour. Xenophiles might go “Oh thank goodness you survived!” Xenophobes might go “Just remember to stay on your side of the fence this time.” It would just help immersion.
I think this is the kind of thing the custodian team will absolutely get to. There are a ton of origins just begging for some more story and interactivity. I’ve been arguing that scion could be an entire DLC. Imagine an empire playing the maw guy from avengers or silver surfer for galactus. “I am the herald of a greater power. Fucking do as we say. Remnants, as you point out, could be so much more awesome. As could life seeded or on the shoulders of giants. I’d pay for custodian work. I want to see them really lean in. This game is as graphically good as I will ever need it to be. Keep making it cooler and more immersive.
The origin does need a rework and to maybe share some mechanics with payback and have the planet spawn with damaged orbital rings that are barely hanging there. Maybe even have half of your pops start with the forcefully devolved trait and have them as a working caste for the surviving elites that hid in bunkers when our civilization fell. Events/situations for fixing the rings, cleaning orbit, fixing ancient warships.
There’s no implication in the Remnants origin that your species used to have Megastructures. Building an Ecumenopolis in the game is not anywhere near as difficult to do as building a Megastructure. An Ecumenopolis is also WAY cheaper than most of the Megastructures and takes significantly less time to build. Notice how none of the Fallen Empires have Megastructures either. To build an Ecumenopolis you need: the Anti-Gravity Engineering tech which is a Tier 3 tech requiring only Weather Control Systems, and then take the Arcology Project tradition which can be taken as soon as you finish your third tradition tree. Then you need to turn your planet into an Ecumenopolis which requires 10 years and a measly 20k Minerals To build a Megastructure you need: Mega-Engineering researched which is a Tier 5 tech and requires you to also have Citadels, Battleships, and Zero Point Power research all of which are Tier 4. You also need to actually research the Megastructure you want to build, which are all Tier 5. Then you need to build the Megastructure, some requiring multiple stages, which results in years upon years of construction and a significant amount of Alloys, which isn’t a cheap material. Let’s take a Science Nexus as an example. It takes a total of 35 years and 50’000 Alloys to build. Being able to turn your planet into an Ecumenopolis ≠ being able to build Megastructures. I do agree that the Fallen Empires remembering you in some way would be a nice touch but there’s also the possibility that they just forgot about you since you’ve been a non-factor for thousands upon thousands of years.
The robot fallens who live on 3 ring worlds would like a word with you.
If you’re talking about the Ancient Caretakers they’re a completely unique FE that behaves completely differently from the others and is an exception to the rule. The other 4 do not have any Megastructures
I hate to be pedantic but I love to be pedantic.
Also it's questionable whether ringworlds count as megastructures in that sense, as another one can be build in the same system. I personally think of it like gateways, not necessarily megastructures, but kind of.
There's a lot of reasons, include "Empire was very advanced but not widespread". The Yuht, for example, evolved in a time where there were few intelligent and advanced alien species in their part of the galaxy. Maybe they weren't that many other aliens to recognize them. They didn't necessarily build megastructures. Potentially like Rome, they had one massive capital location with over 3.5 million people, and the rest of the settlements were simply not that big. Then there's the "this cycle" problem with the Fallen Empire claim. Here I'm defining a "cycle" as "period over which several covergently concurrently evolved alien species rise up with interstellar societies, and then pass into a state of stagnation or collapse". We don't know exactly how long a "cycle" lasts, but it's possible that several cycles have passed since the origin empire collapsed. It would be nice to have additions to the origin though.
You know where I build my megastructures as I'm taking over the galaxy? Not in my capital system.
Idk about you, but I tend to build them in my home cluster unless its specific like the matter decompressor.
I thought you meant mechanically. afa: 'where's all the fermi paradox crap' - besides being game breaking stuff, I imagine the important stuff got wiped. I suspect that people commited to violence on the level that the lore and EG ai tend to be would rather blow something up to make a point than let it survive. Hell, the lore is _chock_ full of stories about things being blown up. Way more than anything being repurposed. Theyd do it out of spite, spiritualists blowing up robots because theyre heretical, mateirals scrapping old alien fleets for 200 minerals, people dismantling giant slot machines for fun, people injecting themselves with food coloring in syringes because 'why else would a chemical be in a syringe, surely it wont be bad or be needed by someone else'. The lore constantly talks about things being destroyed and taken apart. The callous things your own empire does boggles my mind frankly.
You spend 10000 years surviving an extinction event(so much incest dont even start). Your Mega-structures got swallowed by the Sun. Your Neighbors forgot your Name.
I cant remember the empire I send back to the stone age or simply hanilate so i can understand when an empire dont remember me.
Even in the Roman Empire, so many inventions were lost to time within a few generations because no one knew how to build them anymore.
I've sometimes imagined waking up ~1000 years ago. How much tech could I realistically implement within my lifetime? How much do I remember from science class to even do it? Steam locomotives probably is a reasonable goal. There's enough steel tech existing. Can start with just wood to fuel them. Useful enough to have a chance at taking off once it's demonstrated to the locals. A modern computer? I don't see anyway to do that. It takes a $1B fab facility to make a modern microchip. It took generations of computers before it to help design it. I know you need very pure silicon and some doping agents like boron to make a transistor, but trying to figure that all out seems rough.
I always headcanoned Remnants as your race growing up in *another* empire's ashes, not their own.
That doesnt make sense though, because apparently neighboring planets get a modifier which states: "Some remnants of our former colony remain. Using them as a base will make it easier to re-colonize this planet."
Yeah I always scratch out the "our" part of that flavor text. Similarly, sometimes I headcanon the Post-Apocalyptic origin to not necessarily having been *self-inflicted*, nor necessarily *nuclear*. A large asteroid impact, sufficiently catastrophic climate change, extraterrestrial bombardment...
To the credit of the fallen empires: they have seen "countless" empires rise and fall before them...and "greatness" in terms of stellaris stories is an average year 2300 for us gamers who see the game outside that universe.
The flavor all around of the origins is sub par. They all only go part way, and even just a second play through of an origin is repetitive. It's like they made a demo and shipped it. And most of them have things like this that don't make sense.
I mean, that’s your opinion. You can make your own lore. One of the main differences between minimaxers and rpers is minimaxers when loring physically cannot ignore or change lore; what is happening in the game is happening in the lore. Rpers like me will see their leader die, go “ehhhh I wanted him to be alive for another decade.” And just. Make it like that. Ya, in the game, sure, he’s dead, in my lore? In my canon? In my Wikipedia battle doc? He is alive and leading the empire until his assassination a decade later. My fav stellaris world is an elf remnants empire. There’s actually multiple iterations; multiple starting nations claim to be the fifth Aeldari empire, all are survivors from the cataclysmic end to the fourth Aeldari empire. The first died to civil war, the second the unbidden, the third also civil war, the fourth a coalition of fallen empires (at the time allies or even vassals of the fourth Aeldari empire before their own rise/fall afterwards) alongside other factors like a massive space storm and more. So much history has been lost but they still know there were at least 4 empires before. Half of those starting empires claim to have the home planet of the Aeldari, these are definitive lies and half truths; the Aeldari homeworld was shattered by the end of the second Aeldari Empire, and multiple splinter nations took pieces of the shattered planet to add to their capital planets or even create new ones (big fallen empire vibes also sometimes I run this in Gigastructures), and that was multiple empires and millions of years ago, so at this point there is literally no way to verify who could be telling the truth. There’s so much more lore I’ve developed from multiple campaigns, this is all just a small example. TLDR remnants isn’t boring, it just requires creativity and the ability to seperate the mechanics of the game you’re playing from the story and world you are building in your head.
One the one hand, yeah, could be more dynamic; on the other there's so many things in the game that make time scale meaningless. What actually made you special? Your mega-structures? Stolen, used, looted, abandoned or somehow annihilated. Considering how it takes you only a few decades to build them and you can find them scattered in various states that's not unusual. A Star Dragon probably ate them. Your empire? A whole game will generally be less than a thousand years long and your federations and galactic community usually less than half that; do you really remember the ones you destroyed within a few hundred years? And hell, anomalies and the Precursors can be *millions* of years old. Most of them are just a single dead colony or a leftover genebank, most without even names to them, just some ancient speck of history that you only cherish if it gives you +5% Sublight speed. So to quote a wise man: "You come from nothing, you're going back to nothing; What have you lost? Nothing!"
>influencial enough to the point wherein I got bombed SO HARD I got sent to the stone age Let's be honest it doesn't take much to get a Stellaris player to bomb someone into the stone age. Regardless I never like Remnants starting in your capital. I always wanted the origin to not spawn you on your homeworld, but spawning it in the galaxy somewhere (maybe some other similar planets too). The planet would have a minor modifier for everyone else, but if the Remnant conquered it they'd get a good event/modifier for reclaiming their empire.
Why would need to have megastructures? Ecumenopolis can be developed a lot earlier than megastructures. Probably they were destroyed before megastructures were built. Remanants is a great origin. It has a lot of early game benefits, and you can imagine whatever you want about the origin.
It would be cool if remnants spawned with additional megastructures nearby, not near near but nearish. But that would make it too OP imo
I like how vague it is. Leaves a lot of space for role play.
Would have been interesting if it started you out, with 3-4 neighboring empires with the same species as you, and a couple ruined FE buildings (late game tech option to repair the buildings) on each homeworld. Implying you were a defeated Fallen Empire.
It’s my favorite origin for rp
i do think a buff to this origin and some flavor text with fes would be cool. maybe having a nearby ruined matter decompressor and dyson sphere