When we start a game, we live the beginning of each major civilization and some of them have an alien population who lives among the principal population. We have an explanation for the Vaulters (Sisters of Mercy escape from Auriga with them) but what about the others races?

This has bothered me from the beginning, and I've never read a complete explanation for it (although I've been away for a while, might have missed it). On the meta level, it's obviously a game mechanic brought over from Endless Legend. At least in that game it made some sense, with Auriga being an abandoned/experimental biological laboratory.

In ES2 though, it's a mix of factions where it might be easily explained, with others that don't make sense. The ones where it makes sense are the "migrants" like the UE and Horatio with back stories that imply an earlier history elswhere in the Galaxy. The could have landed on planets with indigenous intelligent life. The Cravers are artificial and abandonded constructs, who could have ended up anywhere. The Unfallen are shown in their intro trailer as seeing other factions buzzing around their planet before "waking up." Maybe one of them settled down.

The ones I have a hard time with are the Sophons, the Lumeris, and Vodyani, who are presented (in the trailers at least) as taking their first steps out of their home system. We're asked to believe that two intelligent races could co-exist and evolve on the same planet without one wiping out the other, before the industrial space age. I don't buy that. Maybe could happen once or twice, but not for every non-migrant faction in the game.

The ultimate hand-wave is that we're playing in a fictional Galaxy shaped in many ways by the Endless precursor race. They could have seeded worlds with an additional intelligent race just for kicks or experimental reasons, before they disappeared. The whole idea of a precursor race in science fiction is the ultimate Deus Ex Machina, that can explain anything once it's invoked. 

The Vodyani don't start with a minor faction (although they do a whole bunch of assimilatin').

The Sophons start with the Pilgrims, who are a diaspora of fugitives from the Empire, so it makes sense they'd traveled far and wide, and eventually met a kindred spirit in the Sophons.

The Lumeris start with the Gnashast, who are thematically very close to them (and are in fact an early concept draft for what the Lumeris could have looked like!), and while they are said to be "horrors from the deep", it would stand to reason that the Lumeris first met representatives of this faction through early commercial endeavors in the close vicinity of their home planet/system.

Thanks for the info! I had forgotten that the Vodyani don't start with a minor faction. Okay, so the Pilgrims with the Sophons are explained since it's the minor faction that are the migrants. Their affinity for the Sophns is even mentioned inthe Wiki page on Pilgrims, which I hadn't noticed.

True, the Lumeris and Gnashast are thematically related -- both fish folk from wet planets -- but the planet mentioned in the history of the Gnashast on their Wiki page sounds an awful lot like Jenes, the "atoll planet" of the Lumeris. And that's where the Ghanshast start out at the beginning of the game. I suppose it's possible that the Gnashast left whatever water world they started out on, and ended up on Jenes somehow? But since they are so closely related in appearance and water environment to the Lumeris, maybe this is the one case where there are two intelligent species from the the same evolutionary tree on Jenes.

At least it's only one case. :) The other starting setups with two apparently unrelated intelligent factions on one planet seem reasonably well explained, or at least plausible now.

The thing you have to keep in mind on top of that, is that these minor factions appear on planets, but also randomly throughout the galaxy. This makes writing them into a major faction's background in their own biography tricky...

About the minor factions and the planet anomaly firendly locals. If a planet has that anomaly shouldn't there be some population or minor faction already on the planet and filling some population slots? 

for the second part I'm gonna try my french.

Qu'en est-il avec l'ebene de science avec les factions minor? Tous les factions minors sont dans un ebene de science que compare avec le level des factions major, ce dit tous les factions à l'abilité de travail au espace. Ne devras pas être là des factions minor qui sont à le moyen âge ou modern âge? (translated: all minor factions are advanced, but it would be more immersive to also meet a minor faction which is in the middle age or stone age or modern time, I think. This is just a thought on immersion however, I don't know if there's any way to create this thought into the game, but it would make the minor factions more distinct.)

Frogsquadron wrote:

The thing you have to keep in mind on top of that, is that these minor factions appear on planets, but also randomly throughout the galaxy. This makes writing them into a major faction's background in their own biography tricky...

That does complicate things. :)

I guess we just have to accept that this game is different from other 4X space games, where every faction is out there exploring space for the first time. In ES2, we're startng in the middle of a pre-existing state of Galaxy settlement, and picking it up from there. It's the only way to explain the Academy and how we get Heroes from other factions too, so we just have to roll with it.

translated: all minor factions are advanced, but it would be more immersive to also meet a minor faction which is in the middle age or stone age or modern time, I think. This is just a thought on immersion however, I don't know if there's any way to create this thought into the game, but it would make the minor factions more distinct.)

Stellaris has a game mechanic for discovering and "uplifting" aliens that haven't reached the space age yet. I don't think it's a good fit for this game though, because (as mentioned above), we're starting out in a history that's already been established by the Endless, and with major and minor factions migrating through the Galaxy before the game even begins. 

Well, let's say if most 4X games start at 6 AM on the dawn of a new age, Endless Space 2 starts at quarter past, when these budding empires have established some manner of contact with their close neighbors, and the most daring people are pushing the boundaries even further...

Sadly, this part of the lore makes no sense for me at all. Let's assume we start a United Empire game. Right at the get go, we get a hero who's biography states that he was traveling star lanes for years until he has found the Academy. First of all you can't reach Academy by star lanes if your galaxy has constellations (at least I never got a galaxy where I'd start a game in the same constellation as Academy). Also I find it hard to believe that after discovery of interstellar travel individuals were exploring, while government showed no interest in it (you start the game with zero knowledge about neighbouring systems). I'd like to think that you start the game right at the time as star lanes are discovered by your civilisation. But that also makes no sense, as pretty much everyone in the galaxy knows how to travel lanes at that point. Even individuals.

I don't know... Maybe it would make sense if we started the game with at least a map of our constellation? We still can have curiosities and resources hidden until our vessel visits the system (to preserve exploration gameplay). But at least it would show that there was prior effort to map the stars and our civilisation was doing that prior to the start of the game.

I don't think it would be a good idea to show the constellation and star lanes at the start. Part of the fun and challenge, is taking a risk on which direction you want to send your initial probes and scouts.

There are still many aspects of this game that don't make sense on close observation, like the entire Hero/Academy setup. That's the kind of organization you'd expect to develop mid-game as star-faring cultures developed and eventually met each other, not something already present at the start of the game.

Unless Amplitude wants to expound on this further (and they seem to prefer leaving much of this lore vague), then all we can do is choose whatever hand-waving explanation we like for it. Maybe everything in the initial state of the Galaxy is part of a long-range, Asimov/Foundation-like plan the Endless set up for the Galaxy, before they disappeared. Or the Academy's presence at the start of the game is because they discovered time travel, and warped back to the beginning of the game so everyone could have Heroes to start with. Take your pick.

This is a game. Don't try to over-analyze it, you just ruin it for yourself. If you wanna find all the things that don't make sense the list will be very long.

Oh, I can still have fun with the game, in spite of the contradictions and weirdness. 

The weirdness of Amplitude games -- the distinct flavor compared to everything else -- is part of the appeal, after all. ;)

the unfallen start with a guardian pop.

THEORIES! :D

Minor populations are kind of "failed" factions that have sent colonization ships to other systems before collapsing back into their own. They either had very little resources, or couldn't get together well enough to put an empire together as fast as the major factions could.

The UE's starting minor pop, the Hissho, were co-opted by the faction to train their militaries. After they lost their Concrete Endless masters, the race looked to the stars for new challenges to sate their affinity for war. Colonization was probably never as big of an ideal for them as the fact that it would let them meet other races. The UE saw their potential to be excellent warmasters, and decided to take them in.

Meanwhile, the Cravers enslaved the Haroshem in order to finally stop their cycle of internal war and expand outwards. The Haroshem that ended up on Husk were probably there by chance, and it gave the Cravers the opportunity to stop their infighting long enough to band together. Craver colonies with Haroshems didn't need to fight each other for food, and any colony without those slaves starved to death against superior forces. This probably allowed them to finally look towards the sky and build ships to expand.

The Pilgrims are nomadic and hardly ever settle in one place. Their scientific pursuits would have definitely gotten the attention of the Sophons, so at least one group of them would have been invited to settle amongst them. This is probably something the Pilgrims wouldn't particularly agree to, being nomadic as they are, so probably only a few agreed to it. The rest went on their way to do other things elsewhere, while these few stayed with the Sophons to further themselves at their new home.