Game-play suggestion: Despite their infamous position of being plague bearers, carrying debilitating diseases that weaken themselves and kill all others, the Pustral’s are a surprisingly friendly and warm race that value diplomacy and peaceful negotiations, knowing that they have scientific breakthroughs that others prize and crave. As a faction, because of their constant sickness and wasting diseases, they have horrible production stats (sick workers are not good workers), and their population varies wildly, going from billions to thousands over the course of a year, just to bounce back to the other end of the spectrum due to another medical breakthrough. In recompense, their science and farming production is incredibly high, due to their everlasting battle on the bacterial battlefield, developing cures and pesticides to combat their rapidly evolving sickness. 

While not a warlike species, they’re not afraid of battle or death, for they know that most of their opponents are more afraid of them. Viewing war as just another messy disease that needs to be cleaned, they would only do battle on the most extreme of circumstances, much preferring to offer trade and science agreements to help both parties.  If someone were to become truly aggressive and immune to diplomacy with the Pustral, then they would be forced unleash their biological curse (with great dismay and reserve) upon the enemy’s planets, bombarding them with plague-bearing capsules from orbit, quickly killing off the hostile planet’s population in droves, demanding that their opponent surrender and begin proper diplomatic relations in return for the latest cure for their diseased populace. In turn, all trade allies would gain a portion of the Pustral’s incredible food and science production, whilst the sickly giants gain massive production from their outside workers, and cultural boosts from seeing the ways of ‘clean’ beings. 

Viewing cleanliness and health as the most important parts of life (for who can enjoy it if they’re constantly racked with pain and dying by the minute), they covet peaceful and friendly civilizations, doing all in their power to encourage and befriend those who follow the good path of healing science and cultural goals. Like the Drakken from Endless Legends, 

Description: The Pustral are a species of large, thickly built humanoids (think ogre-like) that hail from a massive tropical planet, ridden with aggressive, deadly life of all sizes. Inside the bodies of the Pustral, a truly dreadful virus brewed that was only stemmed by their strong constitution and wild herbal remedies. The healthiest Pustral has a sickly combination akin to the effects of Leprosy and mild Alzheimer’s, bright but forgetful and sluggish, while the weakest are little more than shambling corpses. Becoming a religiously peaceful civilization through the shared struggle of survival, the cleanliness-obsessed giants spent hundreds of years traveling from planet to planet, purging their settlements and attempting to flee from the disease, only for it to rear up again in sterile and tube-born children. With their best and most able turned towards the development of newfound cures for the rapidly evolving disease that hounds their entire race like a curse from the Endless, the humbled, endangered species strives forward into the depths of space, hoping to one day find an end to their deteriorating conditions, and step into the civilized halls of diplomacy and peace among the other races.

A Silent Hill monster, called Insane Cancer, figured it was a good representation of body size/condition for the average Pustral.

I like how they are both wretched yet almost huggable at the same time. A unique concept indeed! Based on the mechanics, it is great how the other races are incentivized to not war with the Pustral (good name), but how are the Pustral incentivized to not declare war themselves (besides the lore reasons)? This feels key to being a diplomatic-based race. I try to find a way to do this in my submission, up to you if I succeeded.

Thank you very much, your submission is quite unique as well. I was trying to make a species that just had a tinge of innocence to them, and I figured horrifying monsters that were undeservingly cursed, yet still morally proper was a good way of getting it across.

As for your question about making war, I wanted to make this a bit more clear in my writing, but I was afraid to bloat up the page with too much to swallow down in one sitting. Basically they would also be quite religious (not sure how well something like that could be done in game, a la Civ 5 for example), but their beliefs stem from an overwhelming sense of survival and purity, wanting nothing more than for everyone to get along and try to make life as livable as possible. The race itself gameplay wise would be completely unable to declare war on, much less attack anyone at all unless there was a massive amount of hostility and the enemy was being too belligerent to do any proper political dealings. All of this, combined with their horrible production stats, means that it'd be difficult to start a war to begin with, and even harder to build the ships to fight it.

I didn't go into stats with such detail as your own because honestly, I haven't gotten all too used to Endless Space's mechanics just yet. My profile doesn't show it, but I've been playing Endless Legends since it came out, and it's been my favorite 4x game in forever. I just don't know how many mechanics the two games share, aside from food, dust, production, etc.

Bestie wrote:

I didn't go into stats with such detail as your own because honestly, I haven't gotten all too used to Endless Space's mechanics just yet. My profile doesn't show it, but I've been playing Endless Legends since it came out, and it's been my favorite 4x game in forever. I just don't know how many mechanics the two games share, aside from food, dust, production, etc.

Some things from EL are remade and some are new, a lot is discussed in the Game Design Documents.

Ooooh, these are very interesting, thanks. Ground battles huh? I would imagine these guys are frail, but could do my plague-spreading idea like I said before, make them every poor folks to go against in a ground attack since your entire army will rot in a week.

balancer12 wrote:

Like the zerg or the flood but with cuddles!

I was thinking the Urces from EL with a major case of the sniffles, but that works too, ha.

The way you have put a lot of lore in your gameplay paragraph make difficult the reading of actual gameplay (or is it just me because I don't read english as easily as I would maybe). Plus I think it is against the rules. Even if it is in the gameplay paragraph it is considered lore and it has to be under the 200 word count along with the description paragraph. Despite this, this is a pretty interesting idea.

TeddyTi wrote:

The way you have put a lot of lore in your gameplay paragraph make difficult the reading of actual gameplay (or is it just me because I don't read english as easily as I would maybe). Plus I think it is against the rules. Even if it is in the gameplay paragraph it is considered lore and it has to be under the 200 word count along with the description paragraph. Despite this, this is a pretty interesting idea.

I thought just the lore had to be underneath 200 to keep it simple, while the gameplay could be as long as it needs to be to describe them well. But I do understand your comment, I did go kinda overboard with the story telling up top. I've been studying more about the game, and I think I'm going to rewrite this page in a manner slightly more statistical, like carolean7's. Thank you for liking it regardless!