Donnerstag, 24. Oktober 2019

In the new Stellaris expansion, you can turn your home planet into a bomb

One of my favourite tropes in Science Fiction is aliens whose cultures are built around some hangover from the time before they made it to the stars. Take the Kelpiens from Star Trek: Discovery, whose existence is dominated by the inbuilt anxiety that comes from having once been prey species. Or Iain M Banks’s Idirans, the “top monster on a whole planetful of monsters’”, who lived in peaceful isolation until an alien invasion nearly wiped them out, after which they became fixated on brutal galactic expansion.

There are millions of weird things that can happen in space, and it’s fascinating to speculate about what sort of long shadows these formative events might leave on the development of a spacefaring culture. But why speculate, when you can play it out yourself? That’s the promise of Stellaris: Federations, the synth-heavy 4X’s upcoming expansion, which will include no less than eighteen origin stories for its customisable cast of mushroom-folk, misery insects and triocular platypuses. And yes, one of them involves your homeworld blowing up almost immediately.

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