It is a time honored tradition of space opera to have the local race of honorable yet bloodthirsty ultrawarrior aliens...

It is a time honored tradition of space opera to have the local race of honorable yet bloodthirsty ultrawarrior aliens to hail from a stupidly deadly homeworld where the entire foodchain is made up of predators, every plant is toxic and every afternoon it rains volcanoes.

For the sake of the slightest pretense of realism, just how deadly and in what ways would you say a planet can be while still feasibly supporting a civilization which evidently went on to become starfaring advanced?

Bonus points for mentioning how specific hardships would guide said warrior race's evolution with specific traits beyond the generic "strong, sharp senses, redundant organs" they all seem to have.

Tuchanka was a decent place though, until space frogs decided to give them nukes before they were ready for it.

IIRC, they nuked themselves back into the stone age pretty fine without outside help (SEVERAL TIMES) even before the space frogs. The space frogs just allowed them to become a galactic menace to the point that sterilizing them was the only effective alternative to killing them all on the "save the galaxy from krogan consumption" question.

The krogan are actually an interesting study on how this trope doesn't always work like you might think (owing to the first Mass Effect having a head writer with an actual passion for science fiction who genuinely wanted to create an interesting setting, rather than a platform for SJW preaching). Tuchanka was so retardedly deadly the only way the krogan could SORTA survive was by becoming retardedly durable. This maintained a sort of status quo by which JUUUUUST enough krogan scraped by every year for the species to not go extinct. However, by developing more and more advanced technology the krogan ultimately fucked up that balance, since now they were no longer being killed by the ecosystem but they were still durable and reproducing like they used to. This caused population explosions which (the krogan having evolved to be so aggressively deadly) time and time again caused them to nuke their own civilization into rabble fighting over resources and territory. When they were uplifted to the galactic scale it was only a matter of time before they were going to become a menace.

>Tuchanka was so retardedly deadly the only way the krogan could SORTA survive was by becoming retardedly durable
That and absurd breeding rates. One point though is that it doesn't make much sense for Tuchanka to be a desert world, since deserts typically don't have much megafauna. A jungle world would be more fitting.

It WAS a jungle world before the last time the krogan nuked it. In some of the endings it's implied to return to jungle state in a matter of decades, presumably because everything alive on it is exactly as durable as them and quickly repopulates in the absence of nukes.

>and every afternoon it rains volcanoes.
Volcanoes probably wouldn't be too bad - actively continuously erupting ones aren't really a danger unless you get stupidly close, and even ones that erupt violently don't exactly dissuade people from living near them - look at Naples.

Yeah, but does it *rain* them in Naples? Like, entire volcanoes, falling out the sky?

When exactly did ME become a SJW pandering platform? I never played them and apart from the homo shipping I didn't know there was a lot forced variety going on.

It's only the new one really, which is a piece of complete shit because of many others aspects as well. The original trilogy was fine, it's just that having a single black character in your team or a gay crewman is enough for /pol/tards to sperg about "muh SJW bullshit pandering". Well, maybe ME3 did cross a line slightly, but back during Tortanic everyone was trying to find as many reasons to criticise ME3 as possible, so it's kind of blown out of proportion.

Isn't it implied that Tuchanka when you visit it has seen some mad max-tier desertification more than once ? It's a post-post-post-post-post-apoc setting basically.

It is. As was mentioned before, they've nuked themselves to dust, got back on their feet then nuked themselves again a bunch of times before meeting the salarians.

...

This meme was stupid even back when it was fresh.

B-but we breathe poison!

The deadliest, most agressive races should actually hail from pretty peaceful planets. The more time you spend surviving the fucking planet, the less time you have to think of reasons to hate other people.
At least that's a conjecture we can make based on humans.

>arabs
>turks
>mongols
>nigs

Used to live in pretty decent places or were peaceful as fuck. In certain places of Africa "war" was a couple of dudes spitting and insulting each other with the occasional punch thrown until one side was fed up and went home until the fucking 1800s.

That's some Hilary Clinton tier reverse logic, holy shit.

It's pretty well documented that indigen societies in hospitable areas have a lot more aggressive and violent cultures, which makes sense. If life is harsh, the weak are already weeded out and fighting too much with others nets you very little but could fuck you irreversably.
Don't confuse science with some libtard defense of the religon of trucks.

Assume the equivalent of Australia is the most hospitable "cradle of civilization".

It started with ME3, when they introduced gay romance options in response to SJWs complaining that the only gayness in ME1&2 were the girl-on-asari options. However, part of the motivation for that was also to troll the conservatives who complained about the original girl-on-asari options. ME-Andromeda has had a bad reputation since before it launched due to some of the people working on the project being pretty hostile to white people in their public statements (pic related).

3 had some elements but didn't go anywhere near full retard at least in that respect

>just how deadly and in what ways would you say a planet can be while still feasibly supporting a civilization

Environments which are continuously deadly can select for tough individuals, but won't necessarily select for the pro-social traits needed to form a civilization. An environment needs to be deadly in ways which require cooperation to overcome if it's going to help drive the formation of social groups and thus of civilization. That could be deadliness due to seasonal extremes which requires cooperation to build habitations and manage resources. Also, deadliness due to prey animals being large and dangerous, thus requiring teamwork to bring down, can be a predicate for pro-social behavior. Dealiness due to predation can produce some prosocial traits, but you have to be careful due to the "running bear effect", i.e. you don't have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun the guy next to you.

The Edge Chronicles were a pretty good story about what was basically survival in a fantasy death world.

>Packs of seeminly harmless fluff balls are actually land piranhas.
>Your entire world is basically the size of a large island, for anyone who dares go farther past the deepwoods never returns to tell about it.
>Strange diseases that can only be cured by the sap of carnerverous Blood Oaks.
>Evil spirits capturing and eating people if you stray to far into the wastelands.
>Giant creatures larger than (the relativly small) known landmass of your sky(?) island live in the clouds, ushering sudden storms and blizzards in their wake.
>Nearly everything in the untamed wilderness is partially psychic, hungry, and wants to kill you for pleasure.
>This is only slightly more dangerous than city life, full of sky pirates, slavers, grifters, and no-sense-of-right-or-wrong wizards living in a sky castle.

It's a pretty good read if you want ideas on what a civilization has to do to scrape out a living from what's basically murderous fey wilds.

>I see white people
I don't know why I kekked so hard

Most enviromental hazards still fall under this headline. Even "extreme scarcity" is, counterintuitively, oftentimes easier to manage in a slightly larger group.

>reverse racism is real!

go jump in a lake

hiring someone whose beliefs are defined by a visceral and politicized dislike of Them White People (which often comes with an inability to tell "caucasian" from "white-passing") to write your racially diverse cast is never a good idea
reverse racism is a joke, sure, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand this

>You can't be racist against a shrinking minority of the human race
Go jump out of a helicopter.

I'm struggling to understand what you two are implying here. I consider the concept of reverse racism to be a joke because prejudice against a person based on their skin colour is racism regardless of what those skin colours are. But are you trying to imply that only white people can be racist?

Shut the fuck up /pol/cunt, go kill yourself.

Let's get back to space opera aliens that are deadkilly.

Come to think of it... let's file the GW trademark off the Orks and turn them into something we can put in our games.

Reverse racism is white people being racist against other white people in favor of non-whites. Minorities being racist against whites is just regular racism.

>arabs
Lived in shitty deserts and took all the nice places from the sassanids. This wasn't necesarily a bad thing until europe overtook them though.

>turks
>mongols

Neither of these statements are very true here, The Steppe is not a very hospitable place at the best of times, and steppe nomads were rarely that peaceful. Infighting within tribal "nations" was very common, as was fighting between ethnic groups, as was fighting civilised societies(and fighting for them against other nomads).