They Don't All Have To Be Robots, Lifeforms Can Be Created

Re: They Don't All Have To Be Robots, Lifeforms Can Be Creat

Guys, let it go. Not everybody is familiar with all the intricacies of English grammar or spelling, this being an international forum and all.

Please refer to my easy 7-steps-guide for details.

Re: They Don't All Have To Be Robots, Lifeforms Can Be Creat

WE ARE GETTING OFFTOPIC!

Simple yes/no answer: would organic units, either created or local fauna, be Awesome?

Re: They Don't All Have To Be Robots, Lifeforms Can Be Creat

In terms of combat units under the control of the player, I say no, for reasons I have mentioned earlier in the thread.

Re: They Don't All Have To Be Robots, Lifeforms Can Be Creat

No, they made the simple style of the video for a purpose.

Re: They Don't All Have To Be Robots, Lifeforms Can Be Creat

This. It's easier if you can animate units build from geometric shapes instead of organic meshes. Organic shapes usually mean more polygons and bones and therefore less performance or units.

IIRC SupCom2 and Demigod licensed Granny because they needed support for organic shapes and it was a pain for modders. I'd much rather have Uber working on features that improve gameplay, modding and mapping like a good map editor and exporters for 3D software.

Re: They Don't All Have To Be Robots, Lifeforms Can Be Creat

On the contrary. The commander who uses the least metal, will have the most leftover metal to throw rocks with. Whoever can throw the most asteroids wins.

This really is an argument about lore. I'm working liberally from TotalA, where the thousand year war looked something like:
- minus ???? years: First transhuman.
- minus 1000'ish years: Conditions between man and machine become irreconcilable.
- minus ??? years: Stuff happens.
- minus 2-50'ish years: Commanders teleporting across the galaxy wrecking everything- the game.

The part I'm looking at is the giant window of time where "stuff happens". It is ridiculous to think that a civilization could go from stone age to fabricating giant robots in seconds from nanomachines, and they didn't learn a damn thing about organic behavior along the way. Perhaps most of that knowledge just doesn't apply to the current state of war. However, the TotalA conflict spanned over a thousand years, which is more than enough time for everyone to have been there AND done that. Anything that worked, would have remained. Anything that didn't, would have been weeded out.

The kind of organic tech that COULD survive a thousand years would be things that are good enough. Being able to accomplish strategic goals without using metal is no small novelty. It is yet another strategy to be exploited by the most successful commanders in their never ending conflict. Several uses for organic systems have already been proposed: static barriers and as platforms for systems that don't demand a rock solid chassis.

It has nothing to do with an "organic look" or some kind of game performance thing. The argument is that using organic stuff is already justified in game. Why? Because metal is a valuable resource, and a nanolathe is a terrible thing to waste.

Re: They Don't All Have To Be Robots, Lifeforms Can Be Creat

So your argument is "organic tech is viable on a future battlefield because if it weren't it wouldn't be viable on a future battlefield". Try less circular reasoning next time. We learned about flight by first watching birds, but you don't see any flapping wings on modern planes, even though they would conserve metal due to not needing high performance engine parts.

You can accomplish making static barriers and platforms without using metal without going to all the trouble of creating a living breathing organism that's vulnerable to a whole bunch of things that an inorganic system is unaffected by. You seem to think that the only non-metal objects in existence are alive, so for the following test, you should go outside, find a large rock, and hit yourself over the head with it. As the rock is nether metallic nor organic, it must not exist, and so this should not cause you any injury. Alternatively, pour a bag of sand down your throat. Sand, being neither organic nor metallic, does not exist, and so you should suffer no inconvenience from pouring a fictitious substance into your body.

Re: They Don't All Have To Be Robots, Lifeforms Can Be Creat

Why the heck would you want organic units? I want an army of robots, not an army of dinosaurs.

Re: They Don't All Have To Be Robots, Lifeforms Can Be Creat

Cmon jurgen, I expected more from you. He's saying that it would be inevitable for a transhuman/posthuman society to have learned almost everything there is to know about biological organisms by simple projection of research.

Re: They Don't All Have To Be Robots, Lifeforms Can Be Creat

And thats a argument for organics why? Robotic tech would evolve too.

Just becuse they have access to advanced organic technology dosent necessarily make it any better then advanced robotic technology.

Re: They Don't All Have To Be Robots, Lifeforms Can Be Creat

Because the one key difference is METAL. Everything important for a robotic killing machine is based off this abstract representation of essential raw materials. The case for organic tech is as easy as looking at the periodic table. Organic. Materials. Aren't. Metal. It doesn't get any more complex than that.

If a commander is drawing out all the metal he can, putting everything possible into his war machine, and he still needs just a little bit more, what is he going to do? The answer is this: he's going to take all the left over elements, wrap them up into something he can use, and throw that on the field too. It doesn't have to be great. It doesn't have to work everywhere. All that matters is there are 50 thousand tons of wasted elements sitting around, with nothing better to do. That's the organic side of the war.

Re: They Don't All Have To Be Robots, Lifeforms Can Be Creat

...and from that research concluded that they suck and shouldn't be used. "We might discover magical properties of organics in the future that makes them good" is not an argument. It applies to everything. In the future we might discover magical properties of cream cakes that make them better than nuclear robots (they're also low in metal), so PA should feature a faction that uses cream cake-based technologies.

So, gotten around to braining yourself with that rock yet? It's not metal. It's not organic. And there's certainly a lot more rocks in the world than there is biomass. Or better yet, go to a jeweller, buy a diamond. Stab the pointy end into your eye, because it's neither organic nor metallic, and so can't exist. Diamonds are not organic, yet they use the very element which makes up the basis of organics, so using organics isn't even an efficient use of carbon.

Re: They Don't All Have To Be Robots, Lifeforms Can Be Creat

You are assuming that asteroids are only thrown once all the metal is used up, you also fail to take into account the massive loss of resources on the planet that are not to be used now that you have thrown an asteroid at it. My point still stands, if your goal is to be efficient in your utilisation of resources you would not be throwing asteroids around. This means that arguing from a point of reusing everything is a fallacy. The only thing the machines are interested in is destroying each other. Finding the most efficient use of all encountered resources is a waste of time when you have whole solar systems as your battlefield, hell whole galaxies even.

Now you are taking liberties with my intentions. I never said that nothing was learned about organics. Lessons can be taken from design, like here we have made artificial muscle fibres that are stronger than organic tissue http://news.discovery.com/tech/artificial-muscle-stronger-121115.html.

Learning from organic life does not translate to "it must then have been used in battle". jurgenvonjurgensen is right here, things that are researched would pretty much have been rejected as not being more effective than the simpler conventional solution. The race that came up with the machines, made them to destroy whatever other factions existed at the time, and resulted in their extinction. The application of tech, whilst advanced in replication etc still applies really basic mechanisms for destruction. Everything in the visualisation indicates an acme style escalation of conventional warfare conventions, not borg style assimilation of organic resources.

I am speaking from the PA perspective. Keep in mind that despite being a spiritual successor to TA in terms of the kind of game it is, it is not a direct sequel and is not a continuation of that lore. Your arguments must stand on their own and not rely on the lore from another game.

What I am saying is that if you have developed nuclear weapons and more by the time that you have made your self-replicating robot army, why would you regress back to using anything biological? Resources are better put towards making larger and better brute force methods of destroying as much stuff as possible. That doesn’t mean growing semi biological units or harvesting local fauna and augmenting them, the lack of effectiveness of them in the field does not make the time working on them worthwhile.

Wasting time supporting organic systems in a bid to save some resources is not worth it. You lose time in working on it, you lose resources in trying to provide for the complex needs of organic tissue and it doesn’t pay off in the field when they get shredded by a smaller (or larger) number of superior units.

You keep hammering this point about metal being rare. I don’t think you realise how much iron there is in the universe. It is the 6th most common element in the Milky Way galaxy. It is true that Carbon is more common, so all that means is that carbon fibre will be utilised in the machines too, we already know that it is rather bullet resistant (more so than any flesh), and it is in common use today.

What is more rare is encountering all of the other elements that make up organic tissue (oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium and this is without getting to trace elements) in sufficient quantities to make organic tissue. Then being lucky enough that these resources are in environmental conditions that organic tissue can operate, otherwise you have to artificially support it.

Even assuming as you have, that organic units are only operating on life friendly worlds, you still have to providing a stable environment operating within very narrow environmental tolerances whilst in combat to ensure they do not fail. Any number of conventional weapons that are specifically designed to END life will tear them up with ease and the machines are not going to care about things like nuclear fallout or destroying the planets ability to support life. A tank can actually take a hit from pretty significant firepower and keep on rolling. Organics (even augmented organics) cannot. One well-made conventional unit is worth hundreds of hacked together organic units.

Finally organics simply don’t stack for PA as they are too niche. PA is going to take place over many planets and asteroids, many of which will not be life friendly, are you seriously suggesting that it would be worthwhile investing into developing tech that will only operate on life friendly worlds, which are likely to be decimated with nuclear weapons and more? It is better to invest in more generalist mechanical units that are able to operate in a range of environments and get really fast and efficient at producing them.

Re: They Don't All Have To Be Robots, Lifeforms Can Be Creat

I'm going to go ahead and assume there isn't easy/cheap access to useful materials transmutation, because then why not let us just spam mexes all over the land and have it convert the ground to metal?

Organics are dirt cheap. Literally. By the time you get to whatever setting the game is at, fabricating organic parts would cost no "metal" and next to no power. Even if organic materials are significantly inferior to non-organic materials, there are strong gameplay and thematic reasons that an ultra-cheap type of unit or 3 would make sense.

I'd also like to point out that PA is functioning faaaaar in the future. Not only are there organisms that function in extreme situations here, we're talking a potential universe of extraordinary creatures to draw from in creating fictional semi-organic units. Throwing out the idea is doing so because "I cant see how it would work based on what we know NOW and assuming a universe wherein there is no other life, period."

Re: They Don't All Have To Be Robots, Lifeforms Can Be Creat

You cant have it both ways, you cant say that something is too expensive/not possible,

then speculate on wildly on something else.

If you are going to use prior games as an example, it was dead easy to mass convert entire forests with engineers. They just didn't amount to much in the way of useful materials. Also I was under the impression that mexes were mass extraction points rather than metal extraction points.

I dont want to spam the thread by copy pasting my argument but please see it in my post above yours. It covers some of my thoughts on the concept of inorganic verses organic resources. Additionally I cover aspects which are counter arguments to your assertion that there are strong gameplay and thematic reasons for having organic or partially organic units.

Re: They Don't All Have To Be Robots, Lifeforms Can Be Creat

Says the guy who also speculated wildly on this:

And this....

and this:

and this...

and this:

Honestly. For a guy who shoots down arguments for being based on speculation, your arguments are based an AWFUL LOT around speculation!

Fine, there are some decent points in there. However, some of these assertions are completely bogus:
1) Non-metallic research would have been completely ignored and discounted in every single way possible.
2) Every strategic and meaningful goal can't be accomplished without metal.

Both of these claims are ridiculous. Not from a scientific viewpoint, which is frankly impossible for any of us to know. Rather, they're ridiculous from a Sun Tzu viewpoint. These factions are at WAR. They are looking for every possible way to kill each other. Whether or not every single avenue of research is successful is irrelevant. It would have been researched. It would have been explored. Only the best answers would have survived.

What those answers could potentially be is completely unknown to today's science. However, it is already apparent in our world that the same goals can be accomplished in many different ways, using wildly different materials. If something CAN be done without using rare materials, who cares about its efficiency? That's not the point. The point is to use EVERYTHING you have. The faction that can use ALL their resources is going to win. How can anything else be true?

Re: They Don't All Have To Be Robots, Lifeforms Can Be Creat

There are many biological things that can't be improved upon. They say the neuron systems and brain, the muscle systems, the immune and regenerative, and the digestive systems, cant entirely be improved upon by function.

So, why wouldn't robots mimic the form of these, the function of these, even contain living parts of these? Robots can have muscle fibers, neuron systems and neuron brains, even digestive systems and regenerative systems.

Re: They Don't All Have To Be Robots, Lifeforms Can Be Creat

Every time you two make the "not metal, therefore organics" argument, you completely ignore the possibility of nonmetallic inorganic technology. You know what the ground is made of? Rocks. Not metal. Rocks are considerably more useful than living things as a building material, and when you've run out of them, you've literally mined out the entire planet beneath your feet. Once you've gone that far, there's no air for your organics to breath so they're worthless anyway.

Mimicking some functions of a living creature is not making a living creature. A neural net is not a squishy organic brain, smart materials that act like muscles are not protein-based living muscles. Self-repair systems are not the same as giving every component the ability to self-replicate, and some units having reclamation systems is not the same as making all of your units need to eat food and digest it in order to not die. Which is a fundamental drawback of any organic system. Even if you ignore the fact that chemically powered non-metallic unit is dealing with vastly weaker components and much less power than a nuclear powered metal robot, each unit has to be capable of doing so many more tasks than an equivalent robot, because you can't just connect it to a wireless power system, it has to eat and digest food, which is inherently less efficient than merely transferring electrical energy. Because it grows, rather than being made, every cell needs to have redundant self-replication capacity, while a robot doesn't need to waste space on that because most units don't survive long enough for their self-repair systems to become worthwhile. Even a brain is a terrible idea on a cheap throwaway unit. You don't want learning capability on your T1 Land Spam, because they have a combat lifespan measured in seconds. All you need them to do is go where they're told and shoot what they're told. The complex computing can be done by the ACU or more survivable units and relayed to the slave units. Actually giving expendables a functioning brain with learning capacity is an expensive extravagance that will only serve to reduce reliability.

Re: They Don't All Have To Be Robots, Lifeforms Can Be Creat

Ok then.....


Well in the lore of TA there was only 2 types of what you could call organic technology, the first was the clones that the arm had prefabricated into their units.

Because despite the fact that units themselves won't be that smart (Although some automation to stop them doing silly things would be good) this doesn't have to be directly tied to the lore.

The second kind was the spider tanks, or rather the ATV's that used spider nerve cells to effectively operate the many legs of the unit, so kinda like an anti-cyborg with machines being enhanced with biology rather then organics being enhanced with technology.

Any organic created by the 3d-printer guns (Nano-lathes) won't be like life as we know it anyway, and more like a non-metal machine.

Edit: lol mental machines!

Re: They Don't All Have To Be Robots, Lifeforms Can Be Creat

That's actually an argument against organics, not an argument for them. The Arm's use of cloned pilots and genetic manipulation was not because they were a good solution. They used them for ideological reasons because they were morally opposed to the Core's patterning technology. It even works out to their disadvantage during the campaign where they find themselves needing to secure sources of water to support their biological components. The cloning technology also relies on significant amounts of magic to compete with patterning, as Arm clones retain the memories of the original, which isn't how cloning works.