Communication Troubles

[Hyena (OP)]

Perhaps it's just been bad luck, but the only three alien races I've come across have attacked and destroyed my unarmed exploration vessels immediately, and went on to be impossible to communicate with.

I always put together a diplomatic team of between 120 and 160 combined Communication points, and the first five or so rounds of communication attempts tend to have minimally positive results. And then things go south, and get worse and worse until they give up.

Is communication failing because they attacked me? Is the negative modifier applied for the violence affecting the rolls? Is it impossible to overcome a diplomatic penalty from a first contact attack? Or is the fact that they immediately went hostile caused by the same 'trait' that is making them impossible to communicate with?

I feel like attacking a strange alien ship in their system out of a sense of paranoia/defensiveness shouldn't necessarily mean that the aliens are impossible to communicate with. If I leave their system and try to communicate, I feel like it should be possible to bridge the gap and put the lost ship down to a bad first contact.

I also am curious what exactly 'Impossible to communicate with' actually means, and whether it is a permanent thing. Is it saying that communication is literally not possible or is it saying that the aliens have no interest in communicating? Is that status permanent? If it is, then is there some way of ensuring that the communication attempt doesn't go off the rails, beyond putting together better teams?

[Bryan Swartz]

The two are different things as far as I know.  There as some aliens that simply cannot be communicated with because they are simply so different that there's no common anything that can be established.  I.e., think of two people who speak different languages and are from different cultures so they have virtually no common hand gestures.  Without an interpreter, it is nearly impossible for such people to communicate(it can be done eventually of course, but these are small differences compared to those which could conceivable exist between human and alien cultures). 

[ZimRathbone]

It depends very much on the races that you are trying to communicate with.  the various spoiler races are extremely unlikely to gain comms with athough it can happen if you get a good roll early on (I've had it happen several times with the Precursors. I believe all the spoilers have fairly poor translation skills - I KNOW they all have very high xenophobia, and thus will likely go to war with little or no excuse.

Regular NPRs seem to communicate a little more frequently - probably because their stats are more randomly generated.  

I dont believe that Aurora carries over the translation experience stat from Starfire (ie you get a steadily better chance of achieving comms with other races after you have done it once up to a max of 5 races IIRC).

Communication is not dependant on Diplomatic status - I have achieved full communications with NPR races that I am actively at war with at the time.

In the game 'Impossible to communicate with' is an end point.  Its saying that there is no common ground for exchanging information, like say one race communicates by scent, and the other has no sense of smell or even concept of what a smell is.   There is nothing more that you can do short of conquering the offending race, (the exchange of fusion warheads is one really universal form of communication!) and even that wont do much good for the spoilers other than the removal of a particular instance of threat. For regular NPRs you can then bring them up the Conquered/Occupied/Subjugated/Candidate/Imperial population states, which renders the communication issue moot.

[alex_brunius]

For regular NPRs you can then bring them up the Conquered/Occupied/Subjugated/Candidate/Imperial population states, which renders the communication issue moot.

Can a conquered NPR which you can't even communicate with really be brought up all the way to Imperial population stat? :S

[Hyena (OP)]

Thanks, that mostly answers my questions.

I'm pretty sure they weren't one of the spoiler races, as the one that was frustrating me was a race using a human image. It was driving me nuts that I couldn't seem to communicate with them at all. Obviously it's all very random. It'd be nice if I could change the image to something more.. 'alien,' but whatever.

I guess I've just had poor luck.