Nemora Bloom

What they are

Flowering people, soft and unhurried, who farm, mend and think in the same motion. A Bloom standing in good light on living ground makes about half her own keep out of nothing but the day — no farm, no tile of her own, no agronomist. On rock, on ruin or on a ship's deck she makes none of it, and that one rule explains most of what it is like to play them.

Their calm is proverbial and it is also structural: a Bloom settlement holds order against crowding that would have anybody else rioting, without a single civic building to help it. The ceiling still exists. Enough of them in one place still comes apart.

And they are the softest thing in the galaxy. Not merely poor soldiers — poor at every part of a land war, wounded easily, bad at holding ground. A Varkesh soldier is worth three of theirs, and the Bloom are entirely aware of the arithmetic.

The world that made them

Warm, wet, and generous to the point of having no large predators in it. Nothing on that world ever had to be killed to be eaten and nothing ever had to be torn up to be used, and the Bloom came out of it with neither instinct.

They are the only people whose science began in a field. The Caelari started with a sky and the Brood with a shaft; the Bloom started by noticing, over a very long time, exactly what made one stretch of ground yield more than the stretch beside it. Soil Science is theirs from the first turn because it is the oldest thing they know.

A field is a laboratory

The Bloom have no general gift for research at all — they read it off living things. Every point of food grown on ground they work returns a fraction of a point of research, which means a worked field is doing two jobs and a laboratory is doing one.

On a green world this makes them the cleverest people alive, a comfortable step ahead of the Conclave and its four hundred years of notebooks. On an asteroid it makes them the stupidest. There is no modifier anywhere in the game as conditional as this one, and no people whose choice of ground matters more.

The Quiet Spring

The Bloom did not race anybody into space and were not driven there by anything. They cultivated their way out: a very long period, remembered without drama, in which the question of leaving was raised, considered and raised again until the answer changed.

What they have done since is more interesting than how they got there. Ground the Bloom work recovers. Not quickly, and with no building to do it — a fifth of what a remediation plant manages, around every tile they tend, without being asked. Battlefield remnants go back to soil. Poisoned water clears.

The galaxy has noticed that this makes them the exact answer to the Assembly, who leave ruin behind them as a matter of routine and do not see why it matters. The two peoples have no quarrel either will state plainly. They simply follow each other across the galaxy, one breaking ground and one putting it back, and neither of them will discuss the other for long.

How a Bloom decides

Consensus, by attrition. A Bloom assembly does not vote and does not adjourn; it continues until the disagreement stops being held, which can take a season and occasionally takes a generation.

It makes them conciliatory to a degree that other peoples read as weakness and then, after a few decades of dealing with them, stop reading as weakness. They are slow to anger, very hard to insult, and they do not go away.

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.

Research out of the ground

0.08 Research for every point of Food grown on ground they work. A green homeworld puts them ahead of the Conclave; a dry one leaves them far behind it.

They feed themselves standing up

Half a unit's keep from photosynthesis on fully green ground, scaled by how green it is — and an unassigned Bloom still stands in whatever light the world has, which makes an overflow of population cheaper for them to carry than for anybody else.

Ground that heals around them

A fifth of a remediation plant, around every tile they tend, with no building and no instruction. The only people who repair a world by living on it.

Calm by constitution

Order holds 65% of head-count pressure before a single civic technology is researched, where everybody else starts at 50% and has to buy the rest.

Playing them

The opening

Find the green and stay on it. Food is your economy, your research and half your population's keep all at once, so the usual balance between farms and everything else does not apply to you: farms on the best ground you have, early, and more of them than any other people would build.

You begin with Soil Science and an extra agronomist, and an agronomist on a farm is worth half again as much as a colonist. Put her on the richest soil on the map and leave her there.

The real decision

Minerals run at 70% and production at 80%, which makes you the worst industrial power in the galaxy — and industry is what builds housing. So your limit is not food, and it is not mood: it is somewhere to put everybody. A Bloom world fills up long before it runs short of anything.

The consequence is that a second world matters to you earlier than it does to anybody else, and that every point of production you can find is worth more to you than the same point is to a Brood who has plenty. Build the works you can afford, and settle outward before the terraces are full rather than after.

How not to be invaded

Your soldiers are worth less than half of anybody's and your ground defence is little better, so troops are not the answer and never will be. The answer is walls, orbit and company: a planetary shield, a point defence net, batteries that fire on things in orbit, and a fleet — or somebody else's fleet — between you and the Host.

The way players lose with the Bloom is settling a dry rock for its minerals, watching research stop, and discovering that the colony they built to fix their industry cannot defend itself either.

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

Against the other five

Caelari Conclave

The other clever people, and the natural ally: they want dry ground and archives, you want green ground and quiet. Neither of you can fight, which both of you have worked out.

Kharaxi Brood

They will take every seam on a shared world, which you were not going to use. They will also take the world, if nobody is watching.

Sepharai Shoal

Green land for you, green water for them. There has never been a reason for these two peoples to fall out.

Varkesh Host

The thing to be afraid of. Their soldier is worth three of yours and they do not forget an argument. Buy walls and keep the agreement.

Maketh Assembly

They break ground and feel nothing about it; you put it back and will not say why it matters. You will be following each other across the galaxy for the rest of the game.

All six peoples →