Will there be an expansion in the future with more races?

I mean say 10 races with an option to select 5 of them
for the game.

10 total races i mean..so just 5 new ones..etc?

curious.

Would prefer a Hotseat mode, so can play more than one race in the same game. Easier to implement too.

~SDC~

You can rename the races...switch their alignments...change their intelligence...the only thing you can't do is change their icons and graphics.

I doubt there will be new major races as each race has its very own AI routine. That would be a bit much to ask for.

Still, with a whole year ahead of us... hey! I'm like a kid in a candy store (that just won a shopping spree). It's a bit dizzying to think what Stardock could do in a year - although I'm sure they will move on to other projects as well.

Right now I'm happy with addressing balance issues, minor bugs, and what is up next on my list of things to be fixed: typos and grammatical errors.

Well i meant..you know how the Sid Meier Alpha Centauri
expansion added those factions ..you still could only play with a certain number of factions in a game, but you could choose which ones...

so you would still be able to play with 5 diff races
but instead of a choice of 5 out of 5..perhaps 5 out
of 9 or 10?


That would be fun.

but if not, that's fine!

Doug

What if you could also set the other races political party and advantages. So the drengin to +50 research That would be kinda cool; especially if the AI would use that information to base its strategy on.

I'd be surprised if the expansion didn't include more races. Given the rest of the strong design of the game, it's probably relatively trivial to do so.

With even more varied goals/parameters than we have now, you would have the great situation you had with the SMAC expansion: never knowing exactly what the flavor of any particular game was going to be.

For instance: picture a race of hydrogen breathers, can only colonise worlds <= 5 and are inimically aggressive to all oxygen breathing races...

There's a lot of room for shaking stuff up with an expansion.

I like the idea of more alien races. To be more precise, I would love to play with up to 10 MAJOR alien races at once. Yes, players should have the option as they do now, to choose the # of races.

Playing with 10 races in a gigantic galaxy should be something.

Set one of the other races to +15% planetary quality bonus. Watch your ass get kicked six ways to sunday

At the highest intellegence they already get around a 25% PQ bonus... so you can see that already if you want.

It's 30% PQ bonus at Maso to be exact

I would actually like to see different PQ for each race. I'm sure the Terran and Altarian would have the current PQ, but the Yor might like to have a more metal rich planet (with or without atmophere). What might be considered PQ20 for them might be PQ5 for us, or our PQ25 world with lush environments would only be PQ10 for them (rust hazard).

I hope I'm getting my point across, but I'm sure this would not make it into any expansion as it would require quite a bit of rewrite. Maybe for GC2?

Has anyone played Imperium Galactica 3? I love that game too...

~SDC~

Yeah, most of the wishes here are more realistic for galciv2 than for the expansion...

Actually it might be pretty easy to add a feature where a race prefers a planet with low PQ. Add a switch (just as in setting the race alignment) which sets the race to value planets that are less then 15, with 1 being the best.

Then in all the calculations, the code will see that this race is "reversed" in it's planet preference. and so it will perform all necessary calculations treating a PQ of 1 as a 30, and a PQ of 2 as a 29, and so on.

Any planetary improvments for that race will then act to lower the PQ of that planet by some amount, rather than raising it. Likewise any events that would normally lower it would raise it.

No need for a major A.I. rewrite. And the game could get a lot of new stratigic life. Hey, you could even let the humans choose to be PQ "reversed" if you want. The only problem is I don't know how this would effect the metaverse score balancing.

[Message Edited]

I think the AI routine for each race is hand coded, so no I don't think this is a trivial request. If they could just add *one* race that would be cool. I think 5 is a nice balanace. Maybe they can use the same AI routines but different faces for 2 races, thus expanding to ten in total. Probably not what frogboy and co want though.

why would an alien race perfer a lower quality planet, with 1 being a diamond?

Actually I could've sworn Brad mentioned somewhere that there would be one major race being added in at some point....and I thought for some reason that might've been the expansion, but I know there was talk that there would be another raced added at some point

Wow, can a dev confirm this ???

Because they are aliens, and sometimes alien races breath gasses and such that are toxic to humans, like to take long hot baths in boiling lava, or enjoy getting caught in a metor shower before relaxing and eating a mixture of squished up bug parts and gravel.

There's too many things in the the game dependent on PQ, I don't think it would be a good idea to change it for the Yor, etc.

Sometimes you see a really tempting planet you want to invade... why bother with a PQ 1?

Or why not use mass drivers every time, it's not like you want to keep the PQ.

speaking of new races, we do need some development on the current ones. One of the problems though i find is that there isn't enough races, 5 races are kinda boring.

but as i mean by work on the current, what about the altarians? I was really disapointed that you never really found out how your race is similar.

Yes, things are dependent on PQ, that is exactly why it would be interesting to be able to change a races ideal PQ.

There are a lot of things dependant on race alignment, yet we can change this.

There are a lot of things dependent on race intellegence, yet we can change this.

You wouldn't have to use the option to change a race's ideal PQ, but it would add a new twist for those who did.

i am not sure why we need more races... u can already change how they think and how they behave. additional races will most likely have same number of difficulty settings and morallity settings as we have for the existing ones anywayz.

i do have one question tho... when the dev. team claims that all the races have a unique AI, do they mean one AI for each race or one for each morallity setting?

if there is one unique AI for each race, meaning # of races * # of morallity settings * # of difficulty settings = total # of variations, adding a new race will require too much work for the developers because that will mean they need to create an algorithm that can handle all the different morality settings and the difficulty settings.
and if there is only one unique AI for each morality then the dev's might as well just add new graphics but that's not going to change how the gameplay works so why even bother with it?

~SDC~

I'm pretty happy with 5 races. It's really more than 5, if you think about the minors.

When I left godawful moo3 to buy Galciv, one thought that crossed my mind before buying it was "it's only five races.. moo has like 16 or something."

One Galciv AI race is worth more than all 16.