Just a thought. Instead of having the borg as a random event, make them and 8472 as the heavy hitters of the delta quadrant.

Give them both empire level expansion abilities, comparable super-powered ships and have them duke it out. If they're balanced enough, they could keep each other in check until the player reaches the delta quadrant, and then all hell breaks lose when they stumble upon this war between the titans.

Yeah, it's not canon, but it would still make things interesting

Interesting idea

*envisions hell breaking loose* ummm..... I'm just having a random thought here. If you are a lower level empire, and you stumble upon a massive super-war that destroys everything in it's path... well, there goes your empire. Even if your empire is high leveled, I suspect you would need alliances with all of the other empires just to survive against the impending dooming invasion. Just thinking out loud here....

*NOTE* also consider the resources needed to render all of these ships fighting against each other across the galaxy....

/nod on the resource part. The thought isn't that they'd start as super-empires, but they would get beefy quickly and start duking it out.

The forums have been going for nearly six years now. In that time, we've discussed many game aspects, often many times over, and we discussed many of the topics even before Supremacy existed. In fact, this is the second incarnation of the forums, due to dying servers and the like. Anyways, the idea of having the Borg or 8472 as an empire is not a new one. It has been discussed before, and people quickly came to realise that the Borg, or 8472, could be a game-breaking addition that would adversely affect playability.

Think about it; you've got two super-hyper-mega powers that practically have a whole Quadrant to themselves, vs the much smaller, technologically inferior, five empires and the hundreds of minor races that are crammed tightly together into the remaining three Quadrants. The Borg would easily swamp the Galaxy and 8472 to obliterate every single star system. The war would spill over into the empires and there would be nothing they could do.

So then we would have to tone down the Borg and 8472. But this would mean they wouldn't be as tough or evil as in the shows and films, and we would be flooded with complaints about this exact fact. Then what happens if they are playable? Players would fight over who gets to play as them. What happens if people want to play games without the Borg and 8472? How do we cater for them?

Then you have to think about how you would play as them. We know next to nothing about 8472, so we would have to develop all of their technologies, structures, ships, stations, stats, descriptions, and abilities from scratch. Straight away this means our mostly canon game has an entire empire that is non-canon. Same goes for the Borg. People will complain about that.

The galaxy generation would also have to be completely rebuilt. Currently, the game is designed to spread the empires out in a way that they are close without stepping on each others toes. But this is extremely difficult and people have already complained of games where the Klingons or Cardassians have been kicked out of a game because the galaxy generator couldn't create a map that follows the rules. Adding two empires will further squeeze the empires in.

Then there is the interface, which has always been designed with five empires in mind. Admittedly, we only have a Federation-specific interface at the moment, but that would still need to be redone. The other interfaces are built off the Federation one so that would need to be finalised before the others could be done. And you're talking about adding icons and buttons and so on to an interface that is already pretty crowded, especially since the interface is scalable and needs to be able to comfortably fit on a variety of resolutions.

The AI would also need to be designed to handle 7 empires instead of 5. Luckily the AI is only early in development, but that's still a 40% increase in the requirements. Same goes with the addition of all of those ships and structures and so on. More data means more processing power is needed, or slower games result.

I could probably go on for a lot longer about why people have generally decided against the idea. Yes, it would be cool, but there are so many negatives against it that it just isn't worth it.

Well, I agree with the host of technological problems that come with making the two empires playable.... but I have a suggestion that I've been tinkering with in my mind for 2-3 weeks now:

First of all, I think that both of these races could possibly become playable in a later update (after completion). Trek fans would likely wait the while if they had the chance to play their favourite super-power races...

On the topic of the lack of technological knowledge:

The Borg: The Collective's technological capabilities were explored deeply in Star Trek: Voyager. There were several episodes in which the Voyager crew came in contact with and explored Borg technology. Even some Borg Implant Enhancements were explored. Some things explained:

- Borg Drones are linked to the collective through the Vinculum aboard their vessel
- Borg Power Systems are regulated by Distribution Nodes located throughout the vessel
- Borg Shields are regulated and maintained by the Primary Shield Matrix
- The Borg gain new drones by assimilating others
- Borg Cubes are outfitted with special conduits that provide additional hull integrity when undergoing great temporal stress

And a few other things I can't remember at this time..... so making a canon Borg race could be plausible, except for the whole "I wanna play them; No I wanna play them" thing.

Unfortunately, species 8472 was less than cooperative with Voyager and the rest of the galaxy that encountered them. Therefore, we don't have any knowledge of their technology, except for that it is mainly organic. That's all I can say for that..... well I'm tired now after writing all that .

Problem with this idea is that empires will expand based on the desirability of star systems, border proximity to other empires, etc. We could try this out, but without writing specific code to keep them focused in the Delta quadrant, the results wouldn't be very consistent. And I'm very much against writing any code for "special cases" like this.

/nod. I can understand that.

In no way did I suggest that either species be playable as an Empire. I apologize for any confusion.

I guess the scenario that I envisioned would be that the Delta Quadrant would be one big war zone. I'm thinking that the Borg and 8472 would ignore the minor races and just expand and pound on each other. The "theory" is that they'd be evenly matched and would keep each other in check from spilling over into the other quadrants, with maybe an occasional ship here or there.

I realize there are numerous issues, but from a star trek side (like how 8472 never really had an "empire" in the delta quadrant) and from a technical side (both minor races would have to be heavily tested, tweaked, balanced, and scripted to keep them in check and prevent a cascading failure where one blows through the other and them stomps the rest of the galaxy.

This isn't a critical suggestion, just a thought. The benefit would be that when the player finally expands to the delta quadrant, they'd be caught in the middle between a clash of the titans. Do you try and form an alliance with one side or the other? Do you just try and ignore them and go around? Do you decide to engage a 2-front war and battle it out with both sides?

I feel this would be an epic gameplay experience and would create a drastic shift of gameplay from the "early alpha/beta quadrant" phases to the end game galaxy wide phases.

Again, I totally understand if it's not feasible or practical, but it is an idea that would have tremendous value to the game. Is the value worth the cost of spending so much time just to include two races that might not need to be included in the first place... meh, can't say without looking at the code.

ANyway, in conclusion I'd say that IF the borg are in the game as a "minor" race they'd need to be heavily scripted anyway to keep them from mudstomping the rest of hte galaxy. This was my proposal would be to give them an equally powerful enemy to focus their attention on to give the player time to develop and get his quadrant in order before the Borg are unleashed.

I kinda like this idea.The borg have a transwarp gate with a base there with incoming ships that go to attack species gate that also has a base.They are both intent on killing the each others base that they dont go anywhere else and they cant kill each others base as its to powerful.When you come in contact they recognize you and send small scout fleets and small random attack ships at you so that you dont get rolled but have a heck time defeating.Then the ultimate is going to destroy boths uber bases and their gates from which they come from.Not much more would need to be coded but the few warships and bases.

Just like to make to quick points. First Species 8472 is not from our space so they would have to be a event in the delta quadrant once the Borg get to a high tech level. Second Species 8472 has a name, the Uhlan if I remember correctly its in the STO game. Oh third point, Species 8472 (Uhlan) should also have a second event where they declare war on all of the Galaxy. Also the Borg should be able to make a temporary alliance to stop them.

Hey Tyberian, I said that 8472 are in response to your question yesterday. The reply is Here.

If you've been playing STO, then you'll also know that they can access any part of our Galaxy via Singularities. The Enterprise-E detected the singularities that 8472 use in the McAllister C-5 Nebula, which is in the Alpha Quadrant. We also know that they have infiltrators on Earth, so making them Delta Quadrant only would be canonically incorrect. It would also be technically challenging to implement, and put their purpose at a disadvantage since they're supposed to attack the Borg.

I also just replied to your other post about the Borg Here. In the randoms, i've specfied that empires would be able to create an anti-Borg alliance; this is now extremely unlikely to take place due to technical issues and complexity. I need to update the Borg random and remove this reference. The 8472 event is newer, which is why I haven't specified such an alliance for them.

I'd much rather that our main effort be expended upon the five main races. This sounds like material that can be added later, once we have the main thing up and running, so to speak.

Neat idea, wonder if it would be a massive AI hog? CB

I know this is off-topic, but are at least 25% of minor race/minor empire ships Cannon?

Thank you

Most of them are temporary.

WelL I hope so

Don't worry, we will be doing a new series of models after we finish the work needed for the August update. Models are not a priority right now.

There will be only canon ships in game, non canon ships will be used rarely when it's needed for the sake of game.

We will at least try to use semi canon ship models, non canon models will be only where they are necessary,