Lore ideas?

I would say that Uber intend for PA to have a fair level of humour. I am not talking Borderlands 2 style pop culture referencing and self deprecating humour necessarily. However given the visual aesthetic that Uber are going for with the blocky and stylised units, exaggerated curvature of planets, swirly terrain and slapping comically sized rockets onto asteroids I would say that PA isn't likely to take itself entirely deadpan serious.

It already seems quite self aware, given the style of narration in the gameplay visualisation and I think it is playing to it quite well without being overt. Less about cracking jokes and making overt references and more about the overall tone.

In my opinion, PA's lore should stay simple, like the background of TA or SupCom. But i don't want PA to become somehow of "giants robots fighting each others for no reason". I've played with the idea of what I would do if I had to write the story that led to a huge galactic war with massive armies of robots, and here is what I've came up with :

(sorry if there's a few faults here and there, but I assumed that you want to read it in bad english than in good french ^^)


As the 24th century was closing to an end, it was becoming obvious that Earth had reached the limit of its ability to sustain Humanity. Overpopulation, ressources scarcity, pollution, regional conflicts were only the most visible warnings that Man was on the verge of extinction.

In the turmoil of this era, an event goes mostly unnoticed : a small object was spotted in the solar system, in a collision course with Earth. People and News outlets quickly loose interest in it when it was determined that it wasn't an alien spacecraft, nor a big asteroid supposed to erase all life on the planet. No, it was just a small rock that should have desintigrated in the upper layers of earth's atmosphere, but surprinsingly, the core of the celestial body survived it's fall, and landed in the ocean. A small team of scientists was dispatched to salvage that core, and they came back with a small boulder of unknown material. It quickly became obvious that the material had properties far beyond any existing knowledge in many domains of science. The first discoveries unlocked by the unknown material gave mankind the ability to expand to other planets, and soon to other solar systems, and thus beginning a new Golden Age. The pinnacle of these new technologies was the creation of the Commanders, huge robots piloted by a single human, and capable of harvesting ressources and building structures at a complete different scale than before. Many Commanders were built, of many differents designs, and they reached for the stars in a colossal wave of expansion. Every Commander has its own goal, its own motivations for exploring the far reaches of space : power, greed, knowledge, curiosity, religion, peace...

In the following centuries, Humanity's tremendous progress in science began to fade, and eventually comes to an halt. We had learned all we could from the Unknown Material, the Commander's technology was at its highest, and the future of Mankind was assured for millenia. No other trace of this material was ever found on any of the countless worlds explored so far. The mystery of its origins remain complete.

The expansion of Humanity is continuing, as the Commanders relentlessly explores new solar systems in distant galaxies. Conflicts still erupts from time to time between them, and every single Commander hold in its hands the power to build a civilization... or annihilate planets.


This kind of background had the advantage of leaving a great deal of liberty to the players : does your commander is still piloted by a human, or is it a pur machine, or an human mind transferred into a mechanical body ? Are you fighting for peace, to conquer and destroy, to find where the Unknown Material come from, or are you just fighting to stay alive in a galaxy at war ? It's all up to the players' choices, we may imagine countless stories and situations with a lore that set the background with enough liberty for the players and modders to do what they wishes.

Humans are overrated.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAlqp0_a0tE

And what's wrong with having mankind peacefully and uneventfully go extinct? That's something that is sadly underused in SF.

For example, medical immortality was attained. At first, there were few overpopulation and scarcity problems, but things settled down as the economy adapted, and natality rates dropped. It didn't raise much alarm, as death rate had also dropped, but after a few millennia, ageless humans began to simply not see the point of continuing to reproduce, and even to live for some. After some time, despite the extraordinary realisations of mankind, the last humans passed away due to apathy, taking unnecessary risks for varied reasons, or random, rare accidents.
They didn't even care about their creations, machines built for forgotten wars. Near the end, their technological prowesses were so great that those machines didn't pose a threat at all. And after the end, there were their only creations to not crumble with millennia.

Or, if you want to stick with clichés, they simply ascended to a higher plane of existence and left their old warmachines behind because they didn't care. Because ascended beings are jerks who don't care about the inferior world.

Then, why do they continue to fight? Because it's literally the reason for their existence. And, more importantly, because it's fun!

Each commander could contain the genetic code for our species, but as each type of commander came from a diffrent culture or nation they don't want their compeditors to rebuild civlisation.

The war started across the colonys and soon extended into a full scale galatic war, but as the war started the commanders soon found it easy to exterminate eachothers civilians.

The contingancy plan was to load commanders with the information needed to rebuild cilisation in each of the factions image, but to also activly deny the other commanders attempts to do the same.

Leading to a never ending war until one commander type can conquer the galaxy, exterminating all opposition to rebuild civlisation!


The kicker is that unless your victory is absolute, 1 commander left can propigate across the galaxy and exterminate attempts and re-construction....The never ending war continues as the only acceptable outcome is the compleate elimonation of the other.

ok i thought you meant it stunk (lets say i dont like that lol) but i dont know what else to do cause ik there's been when like the humans make the commanders to carry on their legacy'n'all but whateva

Some jerk thought it was a good idea for fully autonomous and self replicating robots to fight each other without mercy. That race is now extinct, a product of collateral damage.

Any remaining life in the universe is part of a tragic coincidence.

Well many good things have already been posted by people. It really depends on what you want to do. As mentioned before there already is a lore in the Kickstarter video. Do you want an explanation for that? Or do you want a something where you can easily make a campaign from?
I have a take on both of these:

A possible story for the PA canon lore
A highly advanced biological race starts to colonize the galaxy after there's been a **** storm of misery and overpopulation and most of the planets resources have been used up. The colonies are used to stabilize the home world. After some time the colonies don't want to give half their resources back to the home world and declare independence. Which creates many factions that distrust each other. Home world doesn't like this much and starts a war with the colony worlds. The extensive automation technology is now turned to creating self replicating war machines. These have the orders to destroy all intelligent organic life that is not of their faction and the war machines of these life forms. Exterminating the organic beings on the planets isn't hard but exterminating the resilient self replicating war machines proves a lot harder. At this point all intelligent organic life in the galaxy is gone and only the war machines are left. With one directive: Destroy all the other war machines.

Since the galaxy we play in isn't the Milky way that intelligent biological life form shouldn't be humans. Also since the orders are to destroy all other intelligent life and all other war machines that awnswers any questions about races that are not part of the initial comflict. They will be wiped out, too.

There isn't much more to the current PA lore and it's really hard to motivate any compelling story line from this for a campaign. So I have another take on the history of PA that better motivates a campaign but veers of from the kickstarter PA lore and it's not finished yet. I have to polish that so that it dosn't have any plotholes. So once it's done i'll post it

Yellow

Report 387. Date: 6th day of the 3rd month of TGS-560. Time of Great Star.
We have reached the planet covered largely in water known as Dera-24. We have indeed discovered life, however it appears all intelligent life is long gone.
The transmissions we first heard 5 years ago appears to have been the race formly known as 'Humans' first transmission into space. As we approached the planet we continued to intercept transmissions and have a relatively accurate idea of their development... and demise.
Currently scanning for radiation levels and will update blog on Human History summary as well as our results for whether or not physical exploration will be possible

Report 388. Date: 6th day of the 3rd month of TGS-560. Time of Great Star.

It appears within the last 20-25 'Earth' years [Human name for planet Dera 24] there was a great disruption over technological advancement. Robotic implants and food harvesting appeared to have seperated the gap between the rich and the poor beyond Human expectations.
War had appeared to be widespread for several years before the continent know as 'North America' finished construction of a self-replicating Robot army. Designed to overwhelm its adversaries as well as quell the Civil War between the 'USA' and 'Mexico'. The robot army appears to have been largely successful, quelling the Civil War and allowing North America to regain control of its continent.
From what we can understand it seems North Americas next advance was upon the Union lead by a country called 'Turkey'. However as the assault was in progress a major cyber-attack was launched on the North Americans AI mainframes.
All information becomes... unstable after this event.
The self-replicating robots require only mass and energy to function and were designed to attack any organic being that was not embedded with a 'microchip' [Their equivelant of a security band]. The attack not only removed this safeguard, it removed the safeguard to limit the expansion of the robots.
The machines defeated the army they had been deployed against then continued to consume the land around them.
My personal belief is that the Cyber-attack not only had the North American forces lose control of their armies but also any way to monitor the situation.
Again politics and such are fuzzy ands its difficult to lay down exactly what happened, but the North Americans appeared to reprogram the Robot army they still had deployed in their own country to fight back against their invasion force.
The countries in question got desperate and despite the seemingly nuclear apocalypse that followed the robot armies appeared to survive on both sides. And continued to self-replicate.

The lack of resources left upon this planet seems to be the reason we can no longer detect the Robot armies in question but there is evidence that a moob oribited Earth once, and it is no longer there. Information on the relocation of these Robot armies seems unsure but as we scan the other planets in this solar system it appears they did not stay around for very long, as there is clear evidence of harvesting on ALL planets.
They seem hostile to organic life, and only interested in self-replicating and gathering resources. That is also why I have forwarded this report along the quantum network with such urgency.

I believe an investigation into these Robot virus must be put into action to prevent destruction of any currently undiscovered organic life in the universe.

In the meantime however, we will be launching our first scout party onto the surface and are attempting to find any survivors of the Human race.
We do not expect to be successful.
What has happened here is a tragedy, however we must remain vigilant

Report 431. Date: 21st day of the 3rd month of TGS-560. Time of Great Star.
This will be our last transmission from Earth. We are currently fleeing the planet.
Attempting to breach the bunker listed in report 397 we discovered it to house not any human survivors but yet more dormant self-replicating robots, however this batch was much larger than any early discoveries. Our attempts at damage control was unsuccessful and we have lost The Torrent.
We believe we may have discovered another possible location for human survivors but the danger imposed by the robots is too much.

We are now of the collective opinion that the Federation put their resources into analysing our reports and finding a way to fight this Robotic virus created by the humans, before it reaches Federation controlled planets.


Meh, my pitch

I just had an issue with this part of your take on the lore

How do we know this isn't taking place in the Milky Way? I don't have any particular want for PA to be set in the Milky Way over any other galaxy but I don’t recall anything that specific being indicated. I would also say that there is more evidence to suggest human origin than alien origin.

No mentions of aliens, but there is of humanity. The design of the units so far are decidedly conventional and 'human-like' in design. Tanks, planes, Saturn V type rockets with gantries and bilaterally symmetrical humanoid robots with a head, two arms and two legs, (the commanders and the robot infantry).

exampleprime, I liked the idea of telling the story from an outsiders perspective watching it unfold.

Personally I would like the lore to be as minimalist as possible (much like the kickstarter trailer) with only hints at the past, but I did enjoy reading both of these (yellowdisciple and exampleprime).

Lore ideas?

SomeRace (can be humanity) invented AI.

AI is used to explore other stars. AI Deviates further and further from the progenitor race that it no longer feels attached and goes on to create it's own race. While the Progenitors are still struggling to put their own kind on another planet, the AI is spreading to dozens, and by the time the Progenitors got more than a star system under control, the AI has already resulted in a race of AI god-like beings.

This has resulted in multiple "AI god" or Archai beings, who now wage war for their own personal gain. No longer feeling safe in static constructs, the Archai created an armor suit capable of maintaining their vast intellect and executing their commands. They produce AI-slave beings to execute their orders, in order to destroy or subvert their enemies.

The progenitor race is a small multi-planet empire in a long-forgotten edge of the galaxy, and AI gods walk across planets, commanding a vast destructive army while waging war against their enemies.

Well we have detailed maps of all the stars in the milky way and since all the stuff in PA is proceduaraly generated it won't match the real milky way. Place it in any galaxy and you don't have that inconsitency.

But yes I didn't take into consideration that the age of humanity has long past. Although the age of humanit could have long past in a different galaxy

Yellow

The idea of a "long forgotten purpose" is that no one knows or cares how the war started.

If you start explaining it, then the war has purpose!

Well each galactic war could be in a different galaxy where humanity has seeded their technology.

Leaving our galaxy the true 'lore' one.

Ah I see what you are getting at now. I wouldnt use procedurally generated maps as evidence against the humans as the creators of the machines, that is more a nessesity for gameplay and replayability than anything lore related. If PA based on real location data, games would probably be pretty boring,

That is true, personally if I had to chose I'd still lean towards humans as the creators given the aesthetic and voice over. That said all the purpose has long since been lost with destruction as the only goal, so I guess it doesn't really matter in the end which it is.

This is actually very true...