mstrobel wrote: My main concerns are not about the work required but rather the impact on gameplay. My feeling is that it is more likely to hurt gameplay than improve it.
I can see where balance becomes an issue but putting an artificial limit on their expansion (i.e. they stop at this range or this many planets) would allow them to be viable opponents early game, but by the end game they should be little more then an annoyance.
I think it would greatly improve both replayability, modability, and overall game satisfaction. It's one thing to be told in a text screen "The Breen are a powerful Empire" and then see their single planet system that you storm over like all the rest.
It would be another to meet the Breen "Empire" and see 12 well defended and guarded systems.
I think there are numerous ways that they can be "crippled" so as not to overshadow the major races. Limiting their expansion is one of them. Once they hit their "limit" they stop invading and expanding, instead just shoring up their borders so that if you got into a war with the Breen and they curb stomped you, there is still a chance they will "stop" and so instead of being completely destroyed like against a major race, instead the left "side" of your map is now effectively off-limits unless you want to fight past a bunch of Breen Warships.
So unlike BotF where minor race ships just float freely around, minor race ships not classified as "explorers" or "raiders" would instead defend their home turf. So you would still get Vulcan scout ships or Yridian spies or Orion raiders floating around and causing trouble, but the "Vulcan Battlecruiser" or "Breen Warship" would stay patrolling/intercepting in Breen space.
Again, early game, if you get into a war, while a destroyer or some scouts can cause you trouble, it would take a very unlikely scenario where your entire empire crumbles at the hands of a handful of fast attack ships (note: not a swarm, a handful).
HOWEVER if you want to take the fight to the Breen or Sheliak or Kezon, THEN you'll have to bring the big guns. So a minor race won't destroy your empire, but they sure can destroy your main battle fleet.
The major concern I could see is a player getting "trapped" by hostile minor races. So say you were stuck between the Kezon, Sheliak, and Breen and they all expanded and surrounded your empire early on, were all hostile towards you... you could become isolated and stuck. So would it be possible to limit the # of expanding empires per "quadrant" of space?
There was talk about an 80x80 map, so could you subdivide that into, say, 20x20 chunks and say only one expanding minor could be in each of those 16 "sectors". If you limit their expansion to only at most, 10 squares from their homeworld, the likelihood of you getting surrounded by minors should be greatly reduced.
Instead, ideally, you might have a minor empire on one side and the other, but there were ould be large corridor of space that you could still move around and between them. 10-square empire would be the rarest one, perhaps only Breen, Ferengi, and Kezon (and ?? for gamma).
So each Quadrant (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta) would have only only "large" empire (Breen, Sheliak, Kezon, ??? (Jem'Hadar?), a couple mediums 5-square empires, and then the rest being 3-square empires, and again, limiting one per 20x20 section of space.
Someone would need to go through and just test map generations to make sure huge blobs of "minor races" don't occur, and if so, why?
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