Alright, I've been thinking. When life gives you lemons, I mean, the Progenitors. Who are they? What are they? Everything we know is that they were the enemies of Dominus, and according to what he says, they seem quite powerful. Now, we know that this war against them was in the past. There are plans for Progenitor Commanders. To make the game balanced, those would need to start from zero buildings and units too, like the other commanders. That would imply that the Progenitors are extinct too, and that their commanders were left behind, just like the other commanders. One of them probably reactivates too/survived somewhere. He will most likely remember his command to destroy all members of the other empires. (Or the other species? In case the Progenitors were an alien species.) Now, the abandoned, metal "battleplanets"... They're probably superweapons of either the Progenitors or the other empires/species. Maybe they were the last stand of the other empires, and they all activated together, killing all intelligent life? (Just like the Alien device the Core Commander tried to use back in Total Annihilation: The Core Contigency.) That's what I think, atleast. Please speculate and call me a rotten fish if I made a huge mistake somewhere
Waring factions both create robots to fight for them. Even although these people are now extinct, killed by their own when they tried to turn them off or the enemy creations, their robots fight on. However, a faction of the creators have survived and this is why the commanders are reactivating as they come into range of ships. Or perhaps alien tech was detected by some sensor and this activated commanders to seek out and destroy/acquire it. All previous tech having been destroyed save for the Commander system which appears to be the same tech to the sensor, and the factions and Progenitor enemy are the result of the memory corruption. Or the creators are gone, killed by disease or natural disaster, and their robots were mistakenly activated and assumed various programmed factions before carrying out standing orders despite the fact it wouldn't help.
I've always theorized that humans created the robots, and the progenitors (some kind of weird tentacled alien long gone from this universe) gave them life. Then the robots rebelled against everything, fighting for dominance over the galaxy. Thus humans were all killed off by brutally efficient self-replicating mechanisms of war.
Right now, I'm thinking of the Progenitors as something similar to the unknown enemies of the Vasari in Sins of a Solar Empire. They're less a race, and more an unavoidable force of nature that Invictus and his fellow commanders are teaming up to survive.
We don't know that for sure. All we know is that at least one robot has bad memories attributed to what it thinks are the progenitors (something involving tentacles, right). And that this robot now believes that it needs to destroy these progenitors. Leaving room for plot twists (the progenitors are their allies and they just don't know it; the progenitors aren't the tentacles things that tormented these robots; the progenitors are figments of the alpha robot's imagination and it's just a crazy Roman empire wannabe with an active hallucinogenic glitch), anything is possible. I think it's name should be Nero actually. Because to me it seems like a rather crazy faction of human-imitators.
That doesn't fit with the meaning of the word progenitor. They'll need to be named something else for that.
Yes, but that's unrelated. Progenitor has the whole I came before you, and did stuff vibe. Force-of-nature doesn't.
Fair enough. I've been basing my assumptions from the way Dominus (Invictus?) thought of them in the bit of lore we saw.
Progenitors probably are the link between the machine commanders to a civilization that earlier created those machines. Probably Progenitors are those Commanders who were created by humans, while the other Commanders are created by the Progenitors. That would be my guess. Why they are fighting? dunno, it seems to me that Commanders have really a high AI. If the Commanders created by the progenitors are intelligent enough they finally wanted to get independent. This is why they fought with the progenitors.
Judging from the lore tid bit that we got, I would say that its more like they that the commanders are uploaded intelligence rather then artificial intelligence.
Perhaps humanity, knowing it was on the brink of destruction, found a way to upload emotion, desires, and goals into a computer. So the different groups of the world uploaded themselves (and their histories) into machines. A Noah's Ark of humanity! So even though humans did pass on, they're still 'living on'
In making the faction that is fighting against the progenitors, what of those who were early backers and got a progenitor commander? Does this mean that a progenitor faction is planned in the future after release? This would be a very cool feature for the early backers who would be the only ones that could play as the "protagonist" faction as a reward for their early contribution. I know that only one faction was planned but obviously there is a strong lean towards a progenitor faction in the lore.
