Zelacoor (Advice thread)

[Le Blue Dude]

No, it's not done yet. But I want advice on what to do first, and what to work on next, and changes that can be made with what I have to make it more palatable, and other such things. I want advice and constructive critisim. If you have something you want to see as part of Zelacoor write it up, and I'll see if it fits in.

Zelacoor is a planet with three races that has had, until recently, little to no desire to explore the rest of the universe. This this one asshole lands, and riles up the hornet's nest at one of the major groups.

They are intended to loose, and loose fast, leaving an interesting RP problem behind... occupation. Also leaving behind some interesting cultures/races that a player can be part of. They are lower tech then anyone else, but they use different tech too, they developed differently, stuck on a low metal, high resource planet.

https://wiki.stararmy.com/doku.php?id=zelacoor

 

[Strangelove]

• Uhh, sorry, what? By "loose" do you mean "lose?" And if so, what do you mean by "lose fast and leave an interesting RP problem behind?" The phrasing "Leaving an interesting RP problem behind" suggests they are now gone, which means extinction. So how can they be occupied? Are they simply going to be enslaved, or eradicated completely by mysterious invader?
  
• Who is the invader? Keep in mind, if a race is advanced/expansive enough to conquer other planets, they would likely have a small empire already. A nation of this complexity would need a full racial writeup for them, including culture, origin, etc.
  
• Why did not one, but three Earth colony ships aim for the same planet, when there are dozens -- if not hundreds -- of colonizable worlds to choose from?
  
• The Swimmer forerunners had the time and resources to engineer an entire generation with gills, and raise the said generation before they died. Wouldn't it have been much easier and quicker to do something like...building a boat to find land? Or since their original starship is capable of sea travel, why couldn't they just use that to travel somewhere more suitable?
  
• Don't cram everything into one big ball of submission. Some of your leader profiles are too detailed to be article stubs (dress, personality, even who they have crushes on?), and should be separated into their own profile articles. Solar systems and planets should possibly be separated as well, since physical locations don't really fit into a race's culture article, unless they're culturally significant. Each species has its own government, culture, and ideology, technology...they have nothing in common aside from a home planet, it seems. So they should probably be split into individual articles once approved.
  
• Some of your writing feels very rushed; A few paragraphs seem more like lists crammed into sentences, while others are almost overly detailed. Try breaking up some of your paragraphs, using a more varied vocabulary when describing things, or using actual lists when appropriate.
  
• :!: Important: Try and keep your timeline straight. You context keeps jumping from before to after the "unification league." If they haven't even been invaded and united yet, such a league wouldn't exist, right? Please don't write SARP history before it happens. Not only is it bad roleplay practice, but all the jumping back and forth in time makes your article much more confusing when one tries to read it.
  
• Your article claims they're supposed to be a technologically inferior, yet they have achieved digital sentience, have 40-foot tall robots, and mecha that can "use with it's pilot's consciousness so that the pilot is the only person that can pilot it, but it grants them effectively +2 skill."
  
• You have more written on cities and planets than you do the culture and history of the races itself. Not even the Yamatai's homeworld article has many places listed.
  
• Might just be coincidence, but the Diggers seem to have a parallel history and development to the Freespacers. Much too similar for comfort, but I may be biased because I created them. I'll let others decide on this one. Similarities include:
  
  • They both left for parts unknown using slow ships (though they used generation ships instead of colony ships).
  • They both suffered from resource scarcity immediately after arriving in their home region.
  • They both make it common practice to recycle their dead in response to the above.
  • They are both very cybernetically-oriented, in both cases due to necessity and survival rather than choice.
  • They both achieving digital sentience via the same method; artificial neural net technology.
  • They have both developed a policy of AI egalitarianism, rather than the typical standards of hierarchy over machinery. Free willed digital sentience is common place in both societies.
  • They both use twin sets of names; official designations in the form of serial numbers, and personal that are only shared with close friends.
  • They both successfully established communistic societies. (By the way, the Freespacers maintain such a system by controlling natural greed through a combination of childhood indoctrination, self-shortened lifespans, and contentment via simulated realities. How exactly do the Diggers maintain a communistic society without the normal rampancy of corruption that follows such a system? How do they prevent technological stagnation from the lack of competition in such a system?)

 

[Le Blue Dude]

* Uhh, sorry, what? By "loose" do you mean "lose?" And if so, what do you mean by "lose fast and leave an interesting RP problem behind?" The phrasing "Leaving an interesting RP problem behind" suggests they are now gone, which means extinction. So how can they be occupied? Are they simply going to be enslaved, or eradicated completely by mysterious invader?

* They are intended to be occupied by one of the current races. Hopefuly Neplesia

Who is the invader? Keep in mind, if a race is advanced/expansive enough to conquer other planets, they would likely have a small empire already. A nation of this complexity would need a full racial writeup for them, including culture, origin, etc.

*The invader is Asmodeus. Rather he makes up an invader to get the Zelacoorians to attack the Neplesians. Asmodeus is a Nepleslian. He calls the new "races" (Neps, Yamatai, Elisians) the crawlers, runners, and fliers.

Why did not one, but three Earth colony ships aim for the same planet, when there are dozens -- if not hundreds -- of colonizable worlds to choose from?

*I thought I had included that... List is still quite disorganized. The star is holy. The three ships were from branches of the same religion

The Swimmer forerunners had the time and resources to engineer an entire generation with gills, and raise the said generation before they died. Wouldn't it have been much easier and quicker to do something like...building a boat to find land? Or since their original starship is capable of sea travel, why couldn't they just use that to travel somewhere more suitable?

*The swimmers were incredibly agorophobic. That means wide open spaces = teh fear. They've lost some of that since landing, having to leave the ship into the ocean, but they still have troubles about it. A swimmer who is not either surrounded by walls, or in a enviroment suit is an unhappy swimmer indeed.

Don't cram everything into one big ball of submission. Some of your leader profiles are too detailed to be article stubs (dress, personality, even who they have crushes on?), and should be separated into their own profile articles. Solar systems and planets should possibly be separated as well, since physical locations don't really fit into a race's culture article, unless they're culturally significant. Each species has its own government, culture, and ideology, technology...they have nothing in common aside from a home planet, it seems. So they should probably be split into individual articles once approved.

*Thanks for the advice. Will do. It's not finished yet, still in progress, which is why some is short and some long. when it's done it will all be long....

Exclamation Important: Try and keep your timeline straight. You context keeps jumping from before to after the "unification league." If they haven't even been invaded and united yet, such a league wouldn't exist, right? Please don't write SARP history before it happens. Not only is it bad roleplay practice, but all the jumping back and forth in time makes your article much more confusing when one tries to read it.

*The unification league is before they become "known" after Asmodeus crashes his ass on the planet and takes over. After the league is after the start of the league, not the end of the league. Just like a history class will probably go up to less then twenty years ago, I'm trying to get as close to the now as possible

Your article claims they're supposed to be a technologically inferior, yet they have achieved digital sentience, have 40-foot tall robots, and mecha that can "use with it's pilot's consciousness so that the pilot is the only person that can pilot it, but it grants them effectively +2 skill."

*Blink* It's not exactly digital sentience. And Ally, last I checked, was an AI. Rather what it is is human minds running off of chips. As for the +2 skill that needs to be removed *blushes* parts of this were originally written up for another source. (begins removal... realizes which computer he is using. Cusses because this computer can't touch wikies)

You have more written on cities and planets than you do the culture and history of the races itself. Not even the Yamatai's homeworld article has many places listed.

*Ummm. I thought that that would be fun, give it a sence of reality. It's not one planet spanning city, but a lot of smaller ones.

Might just be coincidence, but the Diggers seem to have a parallel history and development to the Freespacers. Much too similar for comfort, but I may be biased because I created them. I'll let others decide on this one.

*Coincidence, I swear. Anyways there are similer similarities between Abe Lincoln and JFK. Hell Yamatians and Neps are similerly similer. As for how the diggers maintain it without corruption, well A. it's semi-socialistic, large manufacturies are goverment, small stuff is not. B. there was no violent rebellion of the working class. C. CPUs have a hard time lieing. D. they, like computers, can have their memories read by others.


Anyways I'll get to work on it, but technical difficulties have been screwing with my usage of this computer. I will make everything in the write up clearer, and include the answers to your questions. Thanks for your help

 

[Le Blue Dude]

*Bump*

I managed to make some changes. Others must still go unfinished while I yell and scream at my computer. Sorry....

 

[Wes]

I've been reading the changes as they're emailed. to me. I must say I'm still extremely impressed with the level of imagination and detail that has gone into them and I can't wait to see them flourish into a very interesting plot.

 

[Strangelove]

I've been reading the changes as they're emailed. to me. I must say I'm still extremely impressed with the level of imagination and detail that has gone into them and I can't wait to see them flourish into a very interesting plot.

This is just my personal opinion, but I think it's a bit too fantastic in its current state -- in the fanciful sense, not remarkability. You have three separate sentient species develop with three radically different cultures, governments, and technology trees on the same planet. That in itself is a stretch to believe, simply because these differences appear so extreme that it would be more likely that they developed on entirely different planets. Even if their only contact was war, you'd think conquering one another's settlements would result in some sort of cultural and technological cross-contamination -- looting of ideas and tech conquered settlements, reverse engineering of destroyed war machines to understand and counter enemy tech, and so on.

On the topic of cross-contamination; each of them just sits in their own biome for roughly 10000 years without even exploring the rest of the planet? (You mentioned first contact between species happens about 200 year ago). You'd think they'd develop sonar, radio communications, basic flight, satellites, or something in that time to at least look around and accidentally stumble across one another. Humans went from the stone age to space flight in less than that. Even factoring the time it took to adapt to their new biomes, what could possibly stall Zelacorian development for that long? Given they had a technological head start from their colony ship remnants and survivors, it seems even more unlikely. (This could be explained if their religion make them take up a Luddite-like stance against technology, or if there was some kind of natural disaster that caused a particularly nasty dark age -- which you should probably mention it in the Wiki).

On top of all those improbable events, a complete stranger crashes in from space and -- somehow -- manages to take control of the planet. Not only does he convince them put aside their deep-seated religious differences, he "enlightens" them technologically to become a single, more advanced race. The chances of someone with a super-Napoleon level of charisma/cult-of-personality actually crash landing on such a world is ... well, very improbable as I've mentioned.

Of course, I tend to be particularly nitpicky when it comes to sociology, culture, history, and other "soft" technicalities in comparison to other reviewers. They may feel the same way, they may not at all; take my critique as you will. Improbability and inconsistencies aside, it's a very well written race that could certainly become a race of SARP. Keep up the good writing.

 

[Le Blue Dude]

I've been reading the changes as they're emailed. to me. I must say I'm still extremely impressed with the level of imagination and detail that has gone into them and I can't wait to see them flourish into a very interesting plot.

This is just my personal opinion, but I think it's a bit too fantastic in its current state -- in the fanciful sense, not remarkability. You have three separate sentient species develop with three radically different cultures, governments, and technology trees on the same planet. That in itself is a stretch to believe, simply because these differences appear so extreme that it would be more likely that they developed on entirely different planets. Even if their only contact was war, you'd think conquering one another's settlements would result in some sort of cultural and technological cross-contamination -- looting of ideas and tech conquered settlements, reverse engineering of destroyed war machines to understand and counter enemy tech, and so on.

On the topic of cross-contamination; each of them just sits in their own biome for roughly 10000 years without even exploring the rest of the planet? (You mentioned first contact between species happens about 200 year ago). You'd think they'd develop sonar, radio communications, basic flight, satellites, or something in that time to at least look around and accidentally stumble across one another. Humans went from the stone age to space flight in less than that. Even factoring the time it took to adapt to their new biomes, what could possibly stall Zelacorian development for that long? Given they had a technological head start from their colony ship remnants and survivors, it seems even more unlikely. (This could be explained if their religion make them take up a Luddite-like stance against technology, or if there was some kind of natural disaster that caused a particularly nasty dark age -- which you should probably mention it in the Wiki).

They live in three entirely different biomes, and I think I mentioned some dark-ages. The climbers KNOW the water is toxic, and were quite surprised when the swimmers emerged... Still numbers are my weak spot, and I WILL be playing with the numbers of years involved untill they feel right. I think I meant for it to be 1,000 years or so...

On top of all those improbable events, a complete stranger crashes in from space and -- somehow -- manages to take control of the planet. Not only does he convince them put aside their deep-seated religious differences, he "enlightens" them technologically to become a single, more advanced race. The chances of someone with a super-Napoleon level of charisma/cult-of-personality actually crash landing on such a world is ... well, very improbable as I've mentioned.

For that I have no explanation, except to ask how likely anything ELSE in this RP is.... Honestly the bigest trick is how religious the swimmers are, and how tech-frantic the climbers are. The diggers would be the hardest to get under control.

Of course, I tend to be particularly nitpicky when it comes to sociology, culture, history, and other "soft" technicalities in comparison to other reviewers. They may feel the same way, they may not at all; take my critique as you will. Improbability and inconsistencies aside, it's a very well written race that could certainly become a race of SARP. Keep up the good writing.

I value these sort of critiques, and I will work at making it as believable as possible, as well as making it as fun as possible