This is my proposal which minor races should be excluded from game cause today number of cc 160 minor races is too high. I will use few criteria like; how much art is done for race, race 2d image quality, special traits and gameplay value. Probably Dafedz will be concerned about balance but game will randomize whole map at each start of the new game so it's irrelevant from which quadrant race is or what type of bonus provides. Let's start...


1.ALGOLIANS (Race 5)

2d image of race is weird (algolian is playing some kind of instrument), another isn't possible to take cause all show scenes with Algolians are fuzzy.


2.ARKONIAN (New Race #)
Structure-DEEP SPACE OBSERVATORY

+3% Scan Range, +30% Scan Strength, too many scanners IMO in the game, nothing new, I think we can without them.


3.BA'KU (Race 18)

Very bad Star Trek movie and very boring race, main disadvantage is that Ba'ku people are 100% humans... though they can stay in game imo.


4.BARKONIANS (Race 22)

Pre-industrial race, special structure is Industrial Forge which is technology of player's empire .These forges will ensure they are on the path to

productivity and a burgeoning economy. Barkonians don't have any special own trait, they add nothing to the gameplay.



5.BILANAIANS (Race 26)

2d image of race iz fuzzy better can't be achieved, Memory Alpha has no record about Bilanians.



6.BRE'ELLIANS (Race 30)

Same as for Bilanians (image).



7.BREKKIANS (Race 32)

Structure-BREKKIAN TRADING LANES

+3 Trade Routes, uninteresting, guy from 2d race image looks like friend of Flash Gordon, I propose switching this race with Eymorg (very interesting race,

excellent traits like "the controller", canon ship, full info on star system, beta quadrant too)



8.CYTHERIANS (Race 40)

Such advanced beings with immense technology I can't imagine Cytherians as members in something primitive like UFP. Cool race but they should be random event.



9.HORTA (Race 62)

Cool race and it's good for diversity of the game but can you imagine Horta people running automated farms and intel nets? It's a bit illogical imo.



10.LIGONIAN (New Race #)

Another Tos race with nothing special, structure-LIGONIAN PHARMACEUTICALS

+10% Population Health, +10% Credits



11.MALURIANS (New Race #)

pre-Tos race, nothing interesting about them, structure-MINING SYNDICATE

+15% Raw Materials



12.NECHANI (Race 91)

Delta quadrant race, for gameplay irrelevant, structure-SHRINE OF NECHANI

+4 System Morale, there are far more interesting races in Delta quadrant like Voth or Krenim.


13.ORNARANS (Race 99)
It's beta quadrant race, structure-REHAB CENTRES

+15% Industry, +1 System Morale, half of earth is on some kind of drugs, why should player help these loosers...uninteresting there are better candidates
for such place like Ariolo and one thing more Ornarans are 100% humans.



14.SKRREEANS (Race 111)

Skrreeans are ok race but we have to cut somewhere don't we?


15.TOROTHANS (New Race #)

Structure- DEFENCE PERIMETER

+20 Ground Defence, +20 Ground Combat, common bonus...


16. Vori and Kradin
Problem is that these races share same planet, this is not supported by game functions... so they are perfect candidates.


17. XEPOLITES (Race 142)
Structure-XEPOLITE TRADE FRANCHISE

+10% Raw Materials, +15% Credits, ordinary...


19.KES and PRYTT (Race 69)

Same as Kradin and Vori... I don't like this race(s).



20.KLAESTRONIANS (Race 70)

Structure-THE JUSTICE BUREAU

+5% Internal Affairs, +1 System Morale, another race in alpha quadrant... we won't miss it.

Another thing about Malurians, they true look is lizard-like. They were wearing masks in that episode. Wait, there won't be any quadrants in the game? That's one of my favorite feature. We should give the player an option to turn them on or off at least.

Discussion continues in Developers Thread... don't post here. Thank you

I don't think that's what he said. Basically, as there's less minors in the Gamma Q, that quadrant will see less diversity in games.
Anyway, I hope quadrants can be turned *off* (AFAIK they'll remain on by default). All empires always starting in the same relative positions will get predictable and boring IMO.

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This is hardly a new topic, but I agree about minors.
Take the Capellans for example, a pre-industrial civ. Ok, they have a mineral rich system (though Dafedz database mentions Dilithium and the game doesn't have it), which is attractive. But being pre-industrial, how would they develop before being contacted by an empire? They will however use the universal production facilities (Fed), while they shouldn't get past Primitive Farms.
It's also weird that they build their Tribal Council *after* they join an empire. And their Mineral Reserve, with a +15% raw materials bonus - which the empire should already have an equivalent or better...
And Orbital Batteries...

And the Chalnoth, primitive, with 30% industry...

Etc.

As for the B'omar, since they can only build their Colonial Fleet after joining an empire, I'm not really sure of the relevance of that particular structure - since the empire will build their own ships from that moment on, not the minor race. Notice that the system will keep the B'omar as the inhabitant race, so you really shouldn't be able to build colony ships / colonise systems from there.

There are no plans to remove the Quadrants, so stop worrying, V.

I have asked Mike to add an option in the game settings to turn the Quadrants off though, so players can customise their games more.

...

With the B'Omar, we intend their Colony ships to hold double the starting population of all other colony ships AND they will be armed. Only the Klingons and the Type III Colony ships of the other Empires are armed, so there is a bonus there. Of course it remains to be seen whether the double pop can be added to the game. If it can't then we'll come up with something else.

Oh, that's better. One of my favorite features are the quadrants.

Wasn't that +50% pop?
Not really sure how that's going to work. They're an expandable race, so they should be building colony ships from the start - do they have any? These colony ships are level II AFAIK. They can only build the structure when they join an empire - and they're not very inclined to do so. Will the structure allow them to build different colony ships? Will you get all 12 when you build the structure? For the structure's cost? 12 colony ship IIs with double pop, that's a lot of pop.

It was a bonus. Couldn't remember the exact amount off the top of my head lol.

The way we intend it to work, the B'Omar "structure" IS the 12 colony ships. You build it, and you'll get 12 colony ships.

To my knowledge, Kenneth hasn't built/acquired a model of the B'Omar Colony ship yet, and there is currently only one B'Omar ship in the xml files. The colony ship itself has no stats at the moment though and there is no way of actually implementing the bonus population. The B'Omar have the same expansion ratio as the Vulcans so will expand aggressively.

For a cost of 2000, 12 colony ships is a bargain And yes, I know what you're going to say. Regardless, if you have to pay *in a single time*, the cost for 12 colony ships for a structure, you'll never get them built. In a useful timeframe I mean.



Hmm, not sure I understand. If it's the equivalent to a colony ship II, then set its Work Force value to 150% or 200% the normal value; ie, 100 -> 150/200. I don't see where the problem is. That is, with the pop bonus



That was precisely my point. If they need to join an empire to build their structure/colony ships, they'll have to wait a long time (they have little predisposition to join any empire, they're in the Delta Quadrant, they need to build the structure,...) to start expanding - by that time, they may have nowhere to expand to. 12 colony ships sucking up maintenance for nothing.
Oh, and minors structures don't have any tech reqs - yet?


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Re Cytherians, I agree they should be more like a random event than a race. Besides, they are supposed to inhabit the center of the galaxy, right? So they can't be locked to any one quadrant...

Re Quadrants, Romulus *cough*

You might know what i'm going to say, but i'll say it anyways. We can always increase the cost.

Does the work force value affect population sizes? I thought they were separate values?

These Colony ships are intended as a bonus. Remember we designed this bonus before there was a discussion over whether players could build minor race ships. But also remember that if we allow players to build minor race ships, it would be odd to allow you to build their colony ships too. Because this brings up questions about what happens if the minor then decides to revolt against your empire?

We could ultimately always change the structure to something else if it's too problematic. We gave them colony ships because they are supposed to suffer from chronic overcrowding in their system. We could just as easily give them some sort of orbital city or something to make their system bigger.

BOTF never had tech requirements. Giving them tech requirements is something we've only recently started discussing, but yes, it can be done.

I don´t like reducing the number of minors.

Even if they don´t bring any benefits i love the diversity. I know there is still 10 times more then in botf but why reducing when they are already in there.

Thanks for posting. I also have mixed feelings about taking away from variety. If the issue is too many buildings and pictures to do right now, we could release a limited amount of very good stuff and add on equally good races with graphics in a systematic way as we develop the write-ups, ships and artwork. The beauty of the program is the ability to modify it. Captain

Yeah, and that's why I specifically added the comment about paying it in a single time. That is, construction time goes up. Kind of logical.



Hmm, how exactly do you think colony ships II and III have more pop?!?!



And how does this solve the problem? Even though it's the player building the "ships", they're still B'omar ships, with B'omar pop. Unless colonies started with these ships get the empire's pop, which would be at least odd.



Well, there's already the moon habitation projects for that. Unless they would get double PopMoonSize or something.

Why should a Bo´mar Colony Ship make a only a Bo´mar colony when it joined your empire. I mean in fact it´s just ships doesn´t matter which species built it important is who is on bord. Okay if it takes the pop from the Bo´mar system its most likely them but theoretically it could be anybody on bord.
Furthermore the colony ships are more a symbolic thing of the colonization which is discussed in another thread ... more or less you could see the colony ship providing the raw material to built the first settlement.

Uhmmm, because they're the ones (the B'omar) who're suffering the overcrowding in their system, which is what the structure is supposed to address?! Duh!

As for the colony ship argument, it doesn't make any sense, but whatever. People believe what they want. If it were so (private transportation and all), then how exactly would you explain the Work Capacity setting? Why can't *any* number of pop be transported at *any* time to the system? Why does it depend on colony ship level? Why don't *all* systems start with full pop then? Or a variable number?

Oh c'mon. It's a game. It has it's own set of rules.

Why can you respawn after death multiple times while playing SW Battlefront?

Why can you be hit multiple times by an weapon in ST Elite Force while some of your enemies can be killed by a single shot?

How can an army of 1000 soldiers fit into 2 by 2 meter Townhall in Celtic Kings?

None of those game features are realistic, but are necessary for a simpler and fun gameplay. Our rule is that you have three levels of colony ships. You need only one to colonize a system, and more population can be transported by higher level colony ships. Only thing I would change is that the population that colonizes a system has to be subtracted from a system that builds the colony ship or perhaps it should be subtracted from all systems controlled by the empire that colonizes the system.

That's funny, you've just said that pop is tranported by colony ships...
Consistency check?

I was never a supporter of civilan transport theory. I'm satisfied with colony ships transporting population.

So you were not disagreeing with me, you were just getting to use the "It's a game" argument again, because it's cool? I find it to be the last resort type of argument, when nothing else can be used, by that's just me. I prefer to actually make an effort to work around this type of constraint instead of hiding behind such arguments.
In this case, for example, colony ships could cost extra raw materials, and have a higher build cost. The latter would work well with them costing pop from the system, which would slow down expansion, and most likely increase expansion planning/strategy. I guess it would be easy for Mike to add a pop cost to colony ships, default zero, which we could mod and see how it works.
Yes, it's a game. A 4X strategy game, though. Even though they've been "dumbified" as of late, a 4X strategy game implies some realism because it deals with things like economy and resource management. It simulates those aspects of the real world, and stuff that comes out of nowhere doesn't really fit.
Anyways, back to the regular transmission.

I agree on the part of costing population, and perhaps bigger material costs. I'm just against colony ship fleets.

I don't like the idea of colony ships having a population cost, because then the colony ships become a much greater liability. If you lose one to an attack, you lose a chunk of population too. I think an acceptable compromise would be for a new colony to draw its initial population from other (nearby) colonies at the moment of colonization. That way colony ships can still logically be considered as nothing more than a bunch of infrastructure/habitat modules, and the initial population is no longer free.

There's still issues with this proposal, though. The population needs to be taken from somewhere, and that would often mean pulling allocated labor units from other systems. I'm not a fan of involuntary changes to labor allocation. Such changes can have cascading effects.

Hmm, I forgot about that, maybe we shouldn't change anything in that area.

Correct. That would not be a good solution. While taking all pop from one system would mean only unallocating pop from that one system, this would be a pain to deal with.
We could have the system that built the colony ship not get the next 50 pop (though it would have its growth as normal, but that pop would "disappear"). That could be a bit of work though.

TBH, currently they're not much of a liability. They cost ~1000 (colony ship I) construction, and they give you 50 free pop. You only lose a few raw materials, and dilithium and deuterium. And you have to build another one.

Right, but they would become a liability. And they would be a greater liability earlier in the game, which is the period during which expansion is already the hardest/slowest. If you're building a construction ship at a colony with a relatively low population, it will take much longer for your population level to recover (lower populations = slower growth due to smaller gains from growth rate).

I had a similar thought: rather than stealing current population from other systems, we could steal future population. In other words, you incur a population "debt" that gets repaid by population growth throughout your empire. Until the debt is paid, your systems would not see any population growth. This doesn't sound too bad in theory, but I suspect it would end up being a real pain for the player. Even with the simplest implementation, where you have a single 'population debt' figure for your entire empire and display it to the player, he/she still doesn't have a solid grasp of how long it will take for that debt to be repaid. The player would have to do a good bit of mental math and pay close attention to the population debt, or else he/she would end up with a bunch of useless colonies for a few dozen turns. New colonies are particularly dependent on early growth; they're really not good for anything until the population has grown for a while, and further slowing/delaying that process would be detrimental to gameplay. Since it would be impractical (for many reasons) to make new colonies exempt from repaying the population debt, I don't see any way to make this idea work.

There's also subtler issues to consider. Even if the player maintains a reasonable level of "population debt", he/she would only have to lose one critical colony to throw the "repayment plan" out of whack. The decision to colonize a system should not have the potential to bring the growth of an entire empire grinding to a halt, which is exactly what would happen if the player suffers an unexpected drop in population (population drop -> drop in population growth rate -> drop in debt "repayment" rate -> halted growth empire wide -> etc.). Also, what happens if an enemy comes along and wipes out your new colony? Do you keep paying down the population debt incurred for that colony? If so, this seemingly innocuous feature would have an enormous impact on strategy in the game. If not, then population debts would need to be tracked individually, which complicates the system and still doesn't completely solve the "free population" problem.

Yeah. The only "solution" I can think of is to have the homesystem fully populated (instead of less than half), and decreasing WC of colony ships (say to 20 or 30). That would put less of a strain on colony ship building systems - notice that it would also prevent new colonies from building colony ships, colony hopping, which would be desirable IMO - but it would also make colony growth a lot slower - not that that would be a bad thing for certain. Slower growing colonies put more emphasis on minors joining your empire, and decrease credit income which in turn would keep fleets smaller.
But it would have to be tested of course.

Exsisting system is fine, i never ever heard that somebody had and compliant about system. Colonists were always outlaws, religious fanatics, hungry people looking for better future. Why should be any decrease in system pop? After-all colonists don't have origins from one system, they come from various sectors and various races and actually nobody would care if they went gone. I think potential of this game is in diplomacy, intel, battles....that are the fields which sucked in old Botf.

Agreed, we should improve the thing that were bad in the old BOTF, and not the ones that were good.

Hehe, story of my life in here, nobody *ever* "complained" about anything...
I must be wrong then. Then again, some people may agree with me privately.

Oh, and if colonists are outlaws and whatnot and were not part of the original system's pop, howcome *they* will be the new working force of the new system?!
You know, using your head before posting is useful.

If anyone agrees he should feel free to speak. If you want a fight, I will give you one, but you will not insult someone who gave so much to the project.