Multiplayer - which nations are being chosen?

[rdonj]

Reverse thetis' blessing is really unlikely to ever happen, partly because it doesn't really make sense. The problem is, conceptually there are only two ways it would work. 1) by flooding the surface world with water while simultaneously causing all creatures on the map to be capable of breathing water, or 2) by physically altering all aquatic-only creatures so that they can breathe air and actually move on land. Now, option 1 almost sounds viable until you realize that for it to be true, it makes no sense that there wouldn't be a version of the spell that doesn't cause air-breathers to breathe underwater.... Option 2 would require too much dev-work, creating new sprites and forms for the aquatics to take, so that's pretty unlikely.

That's part of why I suggested a quasi-domelike flood spell in another thread, you could imagine raising the water level enough that an aquatic creature with no means to get around on dry land could at least be there, and without drowning and killing everyone in the province.

[Omnirizon]

I don't know how you'd possibly have enough water to allow aquatic creatures to get around on land without killing everyone there.

Just a little bit of water goes along way to killing things. And just a little bit of water ain't near enough to let aquatic creatures survive.

I don't know why reverse thetis makes any less sense then normal thetis. The only reason we can't breath water is because our bodies use more oxygen than gills can possibly draw in through water. So thetis must magically enhance lungs to allow them to draw in massive amounts of oxygen from water. Now you face the problem of the fact that water probably doesn't hold enough oxygen for that to even happen. So Thetis has to make the water magically hold more oxygen. Now oxygenated water has different bouyancy, and nothing could float or swim in it. So thetis magically makes water retain its same bouyancy despite all the extra oxygen. Let's not get into the matter of magically creating oxygen and how that relates to conservation of mass and energy.

Given all that magical finagling. I think a reverse thetis is quite imaginable. It would actually take far fewer broken laws of nature to accomplish. In fact, all you need to do is magically keep gills from every drying out, and they would pull oxygen out of air just fine. You also need to give the fishy people legs.

EDIT: this also gets into the fact why no underwater species with higher thought functions than an octopus ever evolved, despite that fact that life has been present in water far longer than on dry land. Also why mammalian aquatic creatures, like dolphins, are the most intelligent; since they actually breath air. Basically, the amount of oxygen in water is not enough to support higher brain functions. Thinking, it appears, requires a lot of air.

[rdonj]

Giving the fishy people legs is all well and good until you have to start making 4-legged shark knights and fungi.

[Omnirizon]

maybe it could give them hover powers and cause the air around their bodies to be the same viscosity as water.

[Wrana]

To Omnirizon:
Yes, making gills work in air is actually relatively simple. As for lungs underwater - well, they have enough area to emulate gills - the main problem (besides lung surface is adapted in different way than gills' ) is that breathing muscles are too weak to regularly move water back and forth... but this can be fixed in a number of ways.
As for carbon sink - swamps can do this work quite well... and actually they did it in some eras. I don't want to go into calculations now, but there are possibilities to have human-like creatures on a planet with less active water surface than Earth has - even without making universe with slightly different physical laws... and fantasy worlds are such by definition. And as for Lucas - iirc he actually placed some marks in the film which say that SW universe is also slightly different from our own...