Story • The Sly

The Sly...funny we speak because I do have some ideas mulling over in my head.

Sly sketch *giggles*

No, what I could draw about gas bags, singing at the whole planet and farts (?) with spaceship fuel?..

It belongs in its own thread but I think I can work in civilisational mechanisms to penalise ownership transfer. My basic thoughts were this:

* They communicate by biolumenescence.
* The Sly should be not closed gas bags like blimps, but open bags like jellyfish.
* They should grow indefinitely with age, like how animals such as crocodiles just get bigger. Old Sly--untold millennia old--should be monumental. Think actual monumental architecture in size.
* Old Sly are so big that common Sly can fly around inside their various gas bags. They have no architecture in their civilisation: they *are* their own architecture.
** On the Sly world, let's say you want to go read a book at the library. You go to the library, the actual building who is also the librarian, who has masses of texts memorised, and you ask for a text, the librarian recites it to you, which is to say the text flashes on its skin in the manner of ordinary Sly speech. You could do this either inside or outside the building.
* They're good at maths.
** They need not be good at all research, only maths. This can be because they have such an ancient civilisation that they have accumulated an enormous amount of theory, so they need not be the absolute best, but they do need the ability to solve number theoretic problems and do arithmetic quickly.
* They used to be a planet-bound species.

The need for Old Sly is the key. Make it so that a player must have access to Old Sly--anywhere in the empire--in order either to build new colonies, or to construct buildings, or both. Have a homeworld? No problem. Don't have a homeworld? Problem. You can set it so that the planet had to have been inhabited for a certain number of turns, which allows non-homeworld Sly civilisations to come into play eventually and also allows an empire to continue playing, if it has lost its homeworld but still has some colonies which aren't brand new.

Statistics: Posted by Ophiuchus — Thu Oct 24, 2024 9:11 am