White wrote:Arioch wrote:
When we're talking about powerful Loroi families, strictly speaking, we're mostly talking about the warrior class. Most civilians are not permitted to reproduce; the majority of civilians were born to warrior families, with which they no longer associate, and so actual biological civilian families tend to be rare and small.
Wait, what exactly is the attrition rate on the Deinar trials? What happens if too many Loroi start to pass?
I gather that dropout rates in the American armed services training are somewhere around 15 percent, and that sounds like a reasonable ballpark figure, but civilians have something like four times the life expectancy of warriors. Civilian births make up the rest. There are places (like Maia and a number of new colonies) where civilian pregnancies are more common, but even there it's unusual to get "large" civilian families.
If there is a shortfall of civilian workers, they can allow more civilian pregnancies, export jobs to alien firms, or have surplus warriors do the jobs. There are some ultra-conservatives who would argue that there's no such thing as "too many warriors", and who would be perfectly happy if the warrior graduation rates were 100% and warriors took all civilian jobs, and civilians ceased to exist. But that's not the sort of thing people talk about during wartime.
I agree that any kind of game might be fun. My, admittedly unclear, use of "fun" in quotes was an attempt to grasp the aspect of games that delineates between chess, which is fun because of the rules and opponent, as compared to fighting games, which have a focus on art style and depictions of explosive punches.
To make it more clear, I'm not denying that chess isn't fun, it's just that I don't see how it would be much improved with better graphics or attack animations. (Although, I am suddenly curious about the idea.)
I was actually going to make an argument here about how many video games don't have stories, but it seems I was mistaken, as apparently they do. Which makes me wonder, whether Loroi games are similar to our own in any way.
Would the lack of story drastically change the kind of games they can make, or would they actually have their version of kingdom hearts which is nothing other than an artistic expression of a humanoid animal jumping over purple blobs while holding an over-sized key.
I'm not really talking about presentation. Battle Chess doesn't become a narrative game just because the chess pieces graphically kill each other. The Loroi would probably love Battle Chess.
I think you can divide most games into two broad categories: in the first, the mechanic is the game. These are the most basic games, like chess or Pong or Tetris or a simulator. The presentation might be detailed or artful, but there is no inherent narrative except the one you build yourself in gameplay. The second category, which I think is the largest category of games today, is one in which the mechanics of the game are really secondary to the story being told. This includes almost all RPG's, but these days also most shooters and platformers and strategy games and nearly everything that isn't like Bejeweled -- though even those types of games now include some kind of fantasy story element, like Hearthstone.
The latter type just doesn't make sense to most Loroi.
On another note, I was wondering what the main bottleneck for ship production is in the Loroi Union? I'm assuming it's not resources, so is it something to do with the limits of their automation? Or is it a limit on the number of workers or mechanics they need to make a ship? Or is it a lack of spaceports to make the ships at? The number of crew available to pilot and service those ships?
I think the main bottleneck is probably in the components pipeline. A ship is more than just a hull you assemble in a shipyard; it's build of components, weapons and engines which tend to be the most complex and expensive bits to produce. Bottlenecks might be different for different components: lack of particular resources, limited expertise or infrastructure for producing that component, unusually long build times for certain components, or too much demand for shared components... etc. But it's probably not basic like not enough workers or not enough construction slips. Any economy can only produce so much in a given time, even if it is operating at 100% efficiency.
Also, I might be wrong, but is fusion the main power source for all parties present?
Fusion is probably used for many planetside needs, but it's not used by the main combatants in their warships, if that's what you are asking. They use
taimat, which is an exotic alternative to antimatter.
And that's "taimat", not "tiamat".
