oppp7 said:
I would hope that advanced races wouldn't want vengence.
So would I, but one can never know. Here you are implicitly assuming that cultural and technological development are tied together. This might not necessarily be true, we certainly have examples to the contrary here on Earth and are yet to meet any real life aliens. Wanting vengeance is an emotional reaction, and expecting aliens to not have emotions is somewhat convoluted.
Example of this type of alien (culturally backwater, technologically advanced): Thraddash, from Star Control 2. Their entire culture is based upon the concept of strenght. So they fight eachother all the time. During the game one can find out that they have nuke-bombed themselves into stone-age at least twelve times, always somehow managing to crawl their way out back into the stars.
And what would aliens be fighting amongst themselves for?
Who knows, why are we fighting ourselves for? Why is there not peace on Earth? Power, resources, for the heck of it, to test weaponry, political reasons... All these have acted as reasons for us humans to do war.
Why should we assume things to be different if we simply imagine things on a different scale?
And taking DNA samples from creatures that attack them in retaliation seems harder than asking us for it (or taking our hair samples).
Consider this: You would wish for a DNA sample of a cat and are somewhat amoral. So you go, you take those samples and study them. Curiosity takes over. What does such a creature look like from the inside? Are they all identical? What DNA-bit does what? So you take cats, you cut them open. You study their insides. In the course of this, you find out that cats taste better than a
filet mignon prepared by a 5-star Michelin chef.
Other cats have begun to see what you do to them, or at least suspect. So you get a few scratches the next time you get one. And the next one, and the next one. The scratches are beginning to hurt, so you wear protective clothing.
Suddenly the cats have done something strange. They are sharpening their claws against rocks. Again, curiosity gets the better of you. Why are they doing it? How did they come up with doing this? They are just cats, after all, primitive animals that happen to taste good and have a funny DNA.
To your dismay, the next time you got get a few cats, they swarm you and overwhelm you, biting and scrathing you badly. You decide that's it, next time you are bringing a rifle with you, to shoot those that attack you so that you can continue in peace. And for a while it works. But then comes the day when they swarm you again, this time wearing scraps of clothing you've left behind, swarming you from all directions. Before you can shoot the gun, it is forced out of your hands. And as you throw the cats away from you with your hands, the cats do something entirely unexpected. They aim the rifle at you with group effort and pull the trigger. Then they swarm the house you live in, in search of others like you.
Your last thoughts are: Wait a second, are these cats actually
intelligent? How could they shoot me back, they are just cats! The only rights they have is what you decided to give them. They are supposed to be primitive animals incapable of being a threat, not a sapient species... -dies-
This is pretty much UFO:enemy unknown plot-line. From the aliens perspective, there is no reason to ask for permission, there is no reason to care of what happens to humans. So they don't.
Races wanting their own civilization don't have to destroy others to get it.
Just like Romans did not have to conquer the Greek and the Spanish? Stricly speaking, no they didn't have to. But they just wanted a big empire, so they went to war to get the lands of others. If the planets an alien race wants are already inhabited by a xenophobic race hellbent on the doom of anyone not like them, war is just a matter of gathering an army, going there and contesting their claim.
And in the case of X-COM:Apocalypse, when the alien race is microscopic and unable to live long times in the new atmosphere (and the old world is about to be destroyed), the only remaining option is to take over the existing civilization: humans. Asking permission is pretty much out, because... well... what would you do if people suddenly were mind-controlled drones subservient to the will of microscopic organisms inhabiting them like parasites, with billions more of them on the way?
In that situation, it really is one or the other. For the aliens to survive, humanity must become mindless dronesfor them to inhabit. For humans to win and keep their minds and bodies intacts, the aliens must either be destroyed or kept from attacking (which results in their destruction as the world they inhabit will go boom).
I've already talked about races doing it for fun (as a side note, when I thought that up I was thinking of the Eldar). Demons and such... ya those probably don't exist.
Of course not, but I'm thinking this all in the terms of 'in-game' justifications so to speak. Since the setting determines the races and their behaviour, you must consider the reasons within the confines of the setting as well. And as I've shown, there are several logical in-setting reasons for warfare all over the games.
And if they're so advanced then they shouldn't need to fight us to help make our society better (many of us humans even realize that and we're far from space travel).
And yet again you assume aliens would think like us. You assume that a space-faring cilivization is by necessity culturally more developed than us.
In addition, you assume that the Culture would have done so to
us. I never said that, I said they have started wars. You really have no idea on the situation at hand. Perhaps the equivivalent of Hitler and Stalin are the only two leaders on a planet they went to, and they saw that a war would get rid of the unwanted elements.
You assume far too much. You would be better served by getting rid of those assumptions.
