Caelari Conclave

What they are

Tall, light-boned humanoids, built for standing still and looking carefully. Large dark eyes that hold detail in poor light, hands made for instruments rather than loads, and a frame a Varkesh could lift one-handed and would not need to.

The fragility is not a figure of speech. A Caelari in a mineworks is a Caelari who will be hurt, and a Caelari under arms is a casualty looking for a cause. What they have instead is attention: the capacity to watch one thing for a very long time, write down exactly what it did, and find the error in what somebody else wrote down. It is not a temperament they chose. It is the only advantage their world ever offered them.

The world that made them

A thin, dry, extraordinarily clear atmosphere over light gravity, and a night that went on long enough to be worth studying. That sky made astronomy inevitable: the Caelari had a working map of their own system before they had metallurgy worth the name, and a rigorous calendar centuries before a plough that could be called good.

Nothing on that world selected them for strength. Low gravity, thin air, a biosphere with no large animals in it to be afraid of or to haul — and ground that was never rich. Caelari industry is poor because it has always been poor. They adapted by building fewer things and getting them right, which is a habit that reads as wisdom from outside and as a shortage of factories from inside.

The Long Count

The founding institution of their civilisation is a four-hundred-year record of the night sky, kept by hand, in one unchanged notation, by eleven generations of observers who all understood that none of them would see the end of it.

The Long Count is the whole explanation of the Caelari. It taught them that a result can be worth more than the life of the person who gets it, and it left them an archive that no other people has an equivalent of. When they finally made orbit they found almost nothing they had not already predicted — which the Conclave regards as the greatest achievement in its history, and which every other people regards as a faintly sad story.

Their first interstellar expedition carried instruments for twelve kinds of measurement and weapons for none. It did not come back. The Conclave sent another one.

They have lost worlds. They have never lost an archive: the standing instruction in every Caelari settlement under threat is that the records leave on the first ship and the people on the second, and it has been carried out as written more than once.

How a Conclave decides

A conclave is summoned, sits, hears what is actually known, and decides slowly. There is no permanent executive and no tradition of one; there is a convention, taken very seriously, that nobody argues from a position they cannot show their working for.

It makes them careful allies and maddening enemies. A Conclave at war will not be hurried into a battle and will not be provoked into one either, and it will go on surveying a contested system while somebody else fortifies it.

An anomaly, to the Caelari, is not a resource. It is a thing that has not been read yet. They will hold ground for one that has nothing else to recommend it, and they have gone to war over the destruction of several.

What is theirs alone

Every people has the same buildings and the same technology tree. These are the exceptions — the things only this one has, or has differently.

Advanced Surveying from the first turn

Nobody else begins knowing what their own ground is worth. The Conclave does, because four hundred years of the Long Count went into working out how to tell from a distance.

A fifth further sight

Sensor range +20%. They see a fleet before it sees them and find systems before anybody else knows the systems are there — which is their substitute for an army, and has to be.

Playing them

The opening

Survey, then place. You are the one people who can see what every tile yields from the first turn, so the usual opening mistake — a farm on poor soil because it was next to the hab — is the one error you have no excuse for. Put the farm on the best food tile on the map and the mineworks on the richest seam, then build the laboratory.

A scientist in a laboratory is worth half again as much as a colonist in one, and you begin with two of them. Research is +30%: by turn thirty you should be a full technology ahead of anybody you have met.

The real decision

Production is −15%, and that is the whole of the Caelari problem. Everything you unlock takes longer to build than it would for anybody else, so a research lead turns into a list of things you cannot afford to put up. The discipline is to spend some of the lead on factories you do not want, in order to be able to build the reactors you do.

The failure case is recognisable: forty turns in, three technologies ahead, one factory, and a Brood neighbour with six.

Do not fight on the ground

Soldiers are −20% and your bodies break. A land war against the Host or the Brood is a war you lose while winning every argument about it. Hold worlds with orbital guns, point defence and a planetary shield, keep a fleet that can refuse an engagement, and let your sensor range mean you are never surprised. Where you must take ground, take it from somebody softer — the Bloom are softer.

Everything in the guide applies to all six peoples; the above is what changes for this one.

Against the other five

Kharaxi Brood

They will out-build you three times over and arrive at every technology you have already finished. Stay ahead in the one dimension you own and never let it come to a landing.

Sepharai Shoal

No quarrel worth having: they want the eight per cent of the galaxy that is under water and you want the rest of it.

Varkesh Host

Their soldier is worth nearly twice yours and their bodies forgive what yours do not. Fight them in orbit or not at all.

Maketh Assembly

Slower to think than you and impossible to talk to. You will out-research them comfortably; you will not out-settle them, because nothing is uninhabitable to a machine.

Nemora Bloom

The only other clever people in the galaxy, and clever in a way you cannot copy: on a green world the Bloom read research off their own fields and out-think you. On rock they learn nothing at all.

All six peoples →