Fridge / Galactic Civilizations

Fridge Brilliance

• In Twilight of the Arnor, why does the base Terran colony ship have a rotating ring with the colony modules on it? Simple - planets have gravity, and the easiest way to get gravity in space is to have things spin. The colonists are being kept from adapting to zero gravity so they take less time to get used to the new colony world! ...That and it looks cool.
• The biggest difference between major and minor civilizations in that unlike the former, they cannot be culture flipped regardless of how much influence another empire is having on them. However, this comes at the cost of them never extending their influence to other planets beyond their home world, even when given access to technology that would enable them to do so. In Galactic Civilizations 3, if you read the background history for the minor races on the diplomatic screen, they will all have a cultural/biological/political reason for never expanding. For example:
  • The Marauders are a bunch of anarchical scavengers, and as such, don't have the centralized government structure needed to organize any form of expansion;
  • The entire Lantern species got addicted to euphoric vapors, and ended up having their entire society restructured around getting more of the drug;
  • The Klepart's first united technical achievement as a species was the creation of a great beacon tower to send a signal into space.... Which ended up summoning a group of slavers to raid their home world, collecting every child on the planet. With an entire generation lost, this crippled them demographically, as well as making them wary of ever doing anything space-related again;
  • The Odair are extreme nihilists who see no point at doing anything since the universe will succumb to the eventual pull of entropy. As such, why ever even bother expanding into space anyway?
• In Galactic Civilizations 2, you can figure out what the Thalan are so afraid of and why they're so antagonistic towards the Terrans if you pay attention... but not by playing as them. You have to play as the Altarians instead and pay attention to their unique technologies, then begin piecing all the snippets of lore together. The Thalan are from the universe that was destroyed when D.L Bradley became Draginol, the Dark Mithrilar, and subsequently used his powers to destroy it in a massive Crusade. They aim to break the Stable Time Loop that brought Draginol into being and destroyed the universe. Little do they realize their own actions led to the Drengin conquering most of the galaxy, forcing Bradley to search a way to destroy them for good, which he found in the Bane, an ancient Dread Lord device that contained the souls of two Arnor, Ra and Gino. When Bradley utterly defeated the Drengin with the help of Jenna and Akari's forces, he used the Bane's full power to blow up their homeworld and destroy the last survivors. That act led to Ra and Gino being freed and fusing with Bradley, creating the Dark Mithrilar, and starting his universe-destroying Crusade. They have every right to be afraid.
• Earth has very good diplomacy skill against the AI, but that doesn't help them against a human, right? Well depending on the player, when playing as a different alien race, they might see the Terran Alliance and decide "eh, they're cool" and put less espionage, etc into their faction.
  • Strictly speaking it doesn't help them much against a human — the greater your diplomatic bonus over an AI race, the more willing they are to bend to your whims. Since this is dependent on the difference between your and the AI's diplomatic bonus, Earth tends to be less susceptible to it.