Meet the Yor, though the sociopathic murderbots don’t much care to meet with meat.
Our sentient race of homicidal machines are sitting pretty in the Galactic Civilizations III timeframe. The clever Drengin plot to hold back during the Dread Lord war and crush their enemies’ exhausted militaries afterward appealed to the Yor’s calculated self-interest. The robotic Yor fleets joined the Drengin in smashing the Terran and Arcean empires and their allies, and now hold joint military supremacy over the galaxy.
As lead designer Paul Boyer describes the Yor:
The Yor don’t get enough credit for their menace. They are perhaps the greatest known threat to the galaxy. Other races tend to think of the Drengin when they think of evil, but the Yor can make them look like look downright friendly.
The Yor are often mischaracterized as reasonable because they have such a long-term outlook. They will work with other races, and almost seem like friends, because the Yor know they will simply outlast them. And when their “friends” are no longer useful, they have no qualms with wiping them out utterly.
Their aggressive, psychopathic nature is reflected in their starships. The triangular theme denotes the sheer menace of the builders, leaving one with the feeling that just bumping into a Yor ship could easily leave one with no skin.
As a race that is constantly upgrading and refining not only their ships but themselves, the Yor design in a very modular fashion. This lets them quickly upgrade them if needed, or scrap them and use the separate components elsewhere.
Yor ships are also somewhat unique in the galaxy as they have very few crew. Often, a lone pilot is the only Yor aboard and serves as a brain for the huge and deadly vessel.
(click the image for a high-res downloadable version)
Yor ships, as you can see, reflect their primary motivation: the cleansing of unclean meatsacks. The Yor hold organic life in the greatest contempt, and the efficient removal of it from the galaxy is their highest calling. As one of our talented artists, Akil Dawkins, puts it:
The Yor are a race of aggressive sociopathic machines. So we went with a triangular theme for these ships as opposed to the square or circular theme, because triangular shapes connote aggression. Because the Yor are constantly upgrading themselves, we wanted to show some of their tech in between the large triangular shapes.
The circular lights at the front of the ships are reminiscent of the three-eye design of their leaders and drones. The centered eye was inspired by HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was also an unfeeling sentient machine. The violet color scheme is similar to the Yor color scheme from Galactic Civilizations II, but de-saturated to reflect their cold and calculating nature.
The completed ships you see blocked out in this image are just two of the limitless possibilities our ship designer enables. The candy-colored images on the bottom let you see all the individual parts that make up that sleek battlecruiser. Players have full control over their ship designs in Galactic Civilizations III, so you can snap these pieces together however you like – but the designer helps you out with easy tools to do things like automate symmetry.
Our goal is to keep a unified design aesthetic for each race so that Yor ships still look like Yor ships even after players get a hold of the ship designer. We’re pretty happy with how the Yor fleet is turning out – but as always, please tell us what you think in the comments.
