I know in supremacy it will be possible for minor races to colonize other star systems, but will it be possible for them to conquer the systems of other races, minor or major?

Welcome to the forums and a hearty congratulations on your first post. Every question is a good question. I'm pretty sure the answer to that is no. Captain B

AI limitations would probably lean towards no for this. But we won't know for sure until the AI is actually in development.

As for how Bashir knows, Zeleni, Mike recently posted about some of the likely problems the AI will have to overcome somewhere in the workshop, which is also why I'm leaning towards no on this. But again, we won't know for sure until the AI is actually in development.

Anyways, welcome to the forums, twiggy!

In last talk with Mike he assured me that "minor's confined to one system" is last option, maybe something is changed I don't know

Yes I was thinking of the same post as Matress. It wasn't too long ago. See 0069twiggy? A good question! Bashir

Can you post me link to that thread?

Minors will (hopefully) be able to expand through colonization, and they'll be able to go to war (and assault systems). Minor race conquest through invasion is on the table, but I wouldn't get your hopes up. Minors aren't competing for victory in the game, so they don't have as much motivation to conquer. Removing conquest from the list of goals for minor races would also help prevent situations where aggressive minor races overpower empires.

Well the option of aggressive minor races overpowering a major empire isn't a minus, it adds to the realism and makes the game more interesting. But as .Iceman pointed out, that chanced of that happening are small. Still it would be fun if you had to worry about strong minor races. I see them attacking an empire after some sort of major battle against either the Borg or some other major race.

In any case, it's your call.

thanks for the welcome everyone,

I would love to see minors able to conquer because I think it would add to the challenge of the game. Instead of just having the 4 other empires to worry about you would have to be on your guard against the Gorn or the Breen as well.

Beside minors conquering CPU Empires they should try to conquer Human player too. It's game over for player and there is no difference are you beaten by Klingons or Breen, Kazon.... Actually there is only few minor races which could be able to fight effectively against majors (devore, gorn, kazon, andorians, breen maybe few more)

Well, minor races would attack human players and CPU players without distinction. That wasn't my point. Regardless of which empire a minor race conquers, it amounts to free aid to the other empires because it wears down one of their competitors without strengthening another. A minor race conquering an empire would have a more significant impact on the direction of the game than the conquest of one empire by another.

I may not be doing a very good job of explaining this. .Iceman, get your ass over here and help me .

Well, all that effects that minor empires would have are positive in my point of view.

Do you remember the DS9 episode "The Adversary", where the Dominion wanted to start a war between the Federation and the Tzenkethi? Why the Tzenkethi, why not the Romulans, or the Cardassians? It obvious that in Star Trek universe there are races outside our five major empires that are strong enough to shift the balance of power within a quadrant.

As Zeleni said, those would be the Breen Confederacy, the Gorn Hegemony, the Tzenkethi Autocracy, the Tholian Assembly, the Devore Imperium, the Kazon Collective, the Drai, the Trogorans and perhaps one or two more.

I'm not saying that they should be strong enough to compete in galactic domination, but they should pose the biggest threat to the major empires out of the other minor races. They should expand, build more ships, subjugate weaker races and from time to time try to take a major race planet. Also making them allies in the war against other major races could mean the difference between victory and defeat.

It could depend on the game difficulty. In the most difficult setting, they would attack and be a danger. In the medium setting they should only attack minor races and in the easiest setting they should only rarely attack some weak minor race.

I have SOME concern about this idea only in that the processing time for each turn in the game could become astronomical. I guess Mike is the best to speak to this although I am not sure that he has ever programmed an AI like this before. I would at least assume that major race players won't have to wait while we visually watch every battle (in the combat engine) between two minors (there are other problems with this like potentially giving major races clues as to WHO is near WHO on the galactic map long before that area of space is explored).

Of course in the old game, we only saw ship to ship combat between two human players.

The reason the major empires would have risen (in the Star Trek Universe) is because for some reason they had a developmental jump or lead on technology, conquest and/or diplomacy. Some races were more primitive, some passive, some xenophobic / isolationist and perhaps some simply too isolated. There were more aggressive races too. This was handled in the old game in that a major race could have a ship to ship battle with a minor race.

I guess the conquest wars between minor races would have to be number crunched wars that we don't see or know about until the system is discovered. I'm not sure we would like the game if this was given as much capability as a major empire (i.e. all aggressive or highly advanced races are major races). This latter would have to be considered a possibility since everyone starts with unexplored space and just their system. It was the "Birth" of the Federation. Why would we believe that at this early level the Chalnoth couldn't do as well as the Klingons unless their technology wasn't up to it (the Chalnoth not as bright or science minded)? Hence the processing time. So many factors to account for, for so many minor races (I guess you would also have to add that there were some races so advanced that their philosophy did not allow for conquest).

But if it is quick (at each turn) and doable. I'm in.

I like that idea, so we will be able to change the minor races we want to fully equal opponents? Ok, lets call it a compromise and make this feature a part of an expansion/mod/sequel

I was thinking the same thing. The only question is, will the difficulty settings be implemented, or will there be only one setting?

The difficulty of the game will basically depend on what values are loaded into certain tables. In terms of implementation, supporting multiple difficulty levels would be as simple as loading different sets of values into those tables. In terms of development, testing and balancing those value sets will be very time consuming. The good news is that those efforts can be mostly decoupled from the rest of the game development. People like .Iceman and dafedz could volunteer to spend countless hours of their time tweaking the difficulty levels so that I don't have to .