oshron

doing yet MORE personal research, again into ATLAS(which you may or may not have heard of--its basically a half-historical, half-fictionalized RTS game). anyway, just earler today, i FINALLY came up with an idea for the 25th and final faction for ATLAS, which would be introduced in the expansion pack, "Final Frontier": Orion. its an entirely fictional alien culture thats something of a mix of a number of different alien species native to--again, fictional--planets belonging to the major stars and other celestial bodies in the orion constellation, but the "basic" units(foot soldiers, citizens, tanks, etc) are all superficially the same as the basic units for other cultures just for simplicities sake.

anyway, im asking for some help in devising a fictional history for the culture. it goes through basically the same historical events as earth did(from the renaissance to the modern day) and developed technology in the same way(converegent technological evolution, basically). im also asking for ideas as to what their units could be called(mostly being named after whatever a soldier is equipped with or what vehicle he uses). lets assume that their planets, for the most part, look like this:

http://lh6.ggpht.com/_gRAm9Ln1n2c/Sb...nus%5B5%5D.jpg
anyone willing to help me? again, non-human-like aliens are, for the most part, out of the question, but some would be acceptable as unique units. in the case of the orion faction, some highly advanced technology--in the form of unique units--could be available before other cultures, like early guns, tanks, planes, spaceships, etc

DesertPilot

Question 1: Are non-human mentalities also out of the question? Are these guys basically people, with people-type histories and cultures?

Question 2: How weird is too weird?

oshron

1. superficially, yes, there can be human-like cultures and history as well, like there may have been a world war at some point similar to one of our own

2. id say too weird would be something along the lines of incredibly complex-looking lifeforms like xenomorphs(from aliens), various life forms from the game SPORE, and animals like the native life of Snaiad ( )

Scourge

Or you could turn your alien history around and claim they are "God" only citing the book of Ezekiel as your proof and then start the cult of "Oshron" Alien Human Hybrid being from the next step of "Evolution Beyond Human" and then provide proof of this through a series of elaborately setup "scenes" to fool the morons. Idk just food for thought all I'm sayin.

oshron

...no. no. just...no.

Scourge

It was a joke though I am genuinely interested in helping you with this story. I love writing intergalactic stories and placing very human elements in them. I extend my help if need be to you. What type of alien species are you going for? nomads? peace keepers? knowledge bringers? evil aliens?slavers?

DesertPilot

One possibility, which might be on the border of 'too weird', would be to copy the history and culture of Polynesia. The advantages are

1) We know it worked for an expanding colonizing culture in a situation analogous to space travel.

2) It has a neat hiearchical society with complex customs, lost technology, ancient ruins, etc.

3) Sultry island maidens. Or planet maidens, as the case may be.

The disadvantage is, of course, that you've got this weird non-money-based civilization with a complicated social structure that still isn't completely understood.

Scourge

I say go for a intergalactic war of Humans VS Aliens and the winner controls the galaxy; with underlying themes of love, hate, extermination and necrophilia and friendship.

oshron

well, ATLAS is an RTS, so theres no real "bad-guys"; the Orion faction is just that--a faction.

however, the polynesia idea is pretty interesting. ill look into that.

as for the aliens themselves, what i was thinking is that their collective cultures are essentially the same as those of earth, maybe with some individual species working as analogues for different real-world nations, like there may be an imperialist britain analogue, a rights-emphasizing america analogue, and an autocratic soviet analogue, etc (remember, this actually spans several different planets but they all belong to the constellation Orion and other celestial bodies within it, like the Horsehead Nebula) and the only thing that really links them together is the fact that they actually develop a form of complex space-travel before other factions(its just an exploration unit, but the Orion cultural power allows them to transport one unit at a time between islands or planets) and they kind of form an interplanetary union, and for the in-game history would only come in to contact with humans belonging to any of the twenty-four other factions in the "Interplanetary Age" when space-travel becomes common to all factions

so, the aliens are more like an empire

DesertPilot

Checking out the martime history of Melanesia and the Indian Ocean might turn out to be a big win. It's got empires, colonies, warfleets, beautiful princesses,: everything you could possibly want. Though I'm not entirely sure about the beautiful princesses. All you'd have to do would be add an overlay of technology. I just googled 'maritime history east asia' to track down some of the references I have back home, and found zillions of neat new sites of which I was entirely unaware. I'm gonna have to look through these myself to get more material for the Infamous Airships Story (http://airships.paulgazis.com)

Among the stuff I have back home is the allied miltary's guide to the economies and societies of the Pacific Islands in WWII. I won't be able to get my hands on it for a week or two, but if you're curious, I'll look through it then to see what I can find.