The RTSC Guide to Startopia
Part 3: What's in a Peep?

The Station provides the venue, but the Peeps are where all the heart, soul and action is. Peeps lead their own simple lives. They all have a name, a simple history, a few hobbies for laughs, some spare e to spend, three performance ratings and nine character attributes that affect their behaviour, employee performance and whether or not they want to stay on board and make you rich.

Peeps have nine character attributes and several employment ratings. Interestingly enough, these are crudely paralleled in the Station itself. Each of the decks corresponds with Body, Mind and Soul, and many of the Station's essential services are expressly designed to service each of the Peep's character stats. Each of the alien species also has a theme that moreorless represents one of these attributes. The Grays represent all things medical and with health; the Sirens Love; Karmaramans Sleep; Turrakken Mind; Targ Fun; and so on.

Visitors and Residents

All aliens are Visitors until you hire them, whereupon they become permanent Residents. Everyone else just hangs around until they run out of money or find the Station so unappealing they leave in disgust. Residents from all players are marked by a symbol representing their employer floating above their heads. Your Residents need to be looked after with appropriate sleeping, eating, amusements, sanitary requirements and career promotions otherwise they'll resign and leave you, too.

While most peeps will jump for joy at the prospect of scoring a job, don't get too upset if a few turn you down. You may have insufficient finances, they may have personal problems or they simply think the Station's just not up to scratch. Employee ratings ultimately affect how efficiently your Station runs. The higher the number of stars, the better the employee - and the more expensive they become to hire. Apart from the initial payment up front and subsequent promotions, Peeps don't receive any wages. This was originally intended for the game, but never implemented. Once employed, they will slowly start to improve their skills and gain rating stars - but they will need to be promoted lest they get upset and resign. Promotions are easy: just click on the flashing stars next to their name in the Peep Menu.

Right clicking on a Peep brings up the Alien Interface (above right). This allows you to converse (albeit primitively) with them one on one. By conversing with individuals you can find out their names, hobbies, or their criminal record; hire or fire them and ask them what their pressing needs are. Straight off the bat you'll see three obvious attributes that will decide whether you want to hire a Peep or not: Skill, Dedication and Loyalty. Each of these are shown as five star ratings.

Peep Personality

Okay - now for a bit of an in-depth exposé of what makes a Peep tick: the character stats. Some of you will almost certainly find this next tedious and anal (and probably unnecessary, given Startopia's freewheeling approach) and want to jump on to the next page. Much of the following has been gleaned from the text data files found in the Mission subfolder inside your Startopia install on your hard disk.

Peeps have nine character ratings much like an role played character, but they live in a live, simulated environment and not a dice rolled sheet of statistics made for turn based play. The game engine uses these stats to simulate a crude little personality, like nine different fuel gauges inside their heads, instead of static ratings to show how well they can smack goblins. Stats don't differentiate between characters or to show if one is superior or inferior to another: Startopian Peeps are all fundamentally identical on the "inside". All Peeps are born equals. These character stats are simply tracking how everything on the Station affects them. The nine "health" bars record everything from actual health through to how drunk they get down at the local. If a certain stat gets too low then it triggers a response in the Peep to try an restore those lost points. The only clues to a Peep's current state of well being come from the cute little animations they do, the floating "emoticons" that come and go above their heads, or... or you find a corpse.

Each Peep's character stat has a maximum capacity of 10,000 points. The actual behaviour of a Peep depends on how "full" a particular stat is. Any stat sitting between 6000 and 10,000 points is considered optimal, and the Peep is perfectly satisfied in this area. That is, it might be happily well fed, feeling loved, fit as a fiddle, enjoying the perks of a perfectly relaxed bladder, and so on.

At less than 6000 points, the Peep's mood changes; they start to feel the first pangs of hunger, feel a bit off colour, experience tiredness, etc. and the need to replenish those missing points starts to concern them. Whether or not they immediately act on these needs tends to be influenced by their employment ratings. They will head off to seek the nearest Station facility that can address this need, and you'll be informed by a small greeny white "emoticon" materialising above their heads to let you know what's on their minds.

Below 3000 points, the attribute is considered minimal and the Peep's need becomes really pressing. Emoticons turn an urgent shade of red. The Peep will drop everything and try to get those points fulfilled as soon as it can. At this point in time, the depleted stat will start affecting other characters stats - invariably for the worse - so trying to keep Peeps out of the red, so to speak, is a smart move. At under 10 points, the attribute has effectively zeroed. This is usually when you see a Peep experience death, deep depression, psychosis or they decide there and then to resign and leave the Station.

A lot of things influence a Peep. Just by standing around doing nothing, a Peep slowly loses all their points; they get progressively bored, hungry, tired, and eventually need to got to the toilet. On top of that, if they've caught a disease, or they feel under-promoted, or the Station has too much litter, or they're standing in a patch of Bio-Deck they really like, or there's a queue at the Lavatron, or whatever - then all these effects will stack up on their little psyches too. Some species will lose more of one stat than another, e.g. Gem Slugs are "fussy" because they bore quicker than everyone else; Karmaramans are "lazier" because they lose Sleep points faster, Kasvagorians get hungrier faster, and so on. (Grekka Targ by comparison, don't have any specific racial bonuses - apart from being rather boring to the other species - they're sort of Startopia's Platonic ideal of a Peep).

If a Peep eats a Dine-O-Mat meal, receives a Sick Bay cure, gets smacked around the ears by an rampaging Skrasher or struck by a laser beam then their various stats change in a big lump sum. Again, racial types, the Peep's current situation or the state of the facility they are in will affect how these events change the final outcome. So, what are all these influences? And how does a good Station Administrator minimise the yucky ones and encourage good ones? As mentioned before, Startopia is fairly easy going. Its a sim management game, not StarCraft; its not a sudden death contest where split second decisions make or break you. Things are indirect and take a little time to show. Kick back and take it easy. Enjoy the view. Get yourself a nice big hot chocolate or something. Works wonders for me!