No, you don't have to be the hero...

Harsh, but most likely necessary.

What a strange set of criteria...

"In Proxima Centauri we found some refugees called the Norast. They kind of smelled funny and I didn't like their shade of purple. So we blew them up." <--- that's how it's done!

If you're the bad guys, won't everyone else just gang up and take you down? Certain real life bad guys were taken out in such a manner.

They can try.   

Ehhh, I'm not sure the blow them up part is very in-line with Starcon IMO. Asides from selling people as slaves to the Druuge (which you eventually get heavily penalized for), you generally don't do anything like that on a whim. Honestly, I'd change that to be a little more light-hearted than implying genocide for entertainment.

You could attack aliens indiscriminately, Spathi, Melnorme and Arilou come to mind. You could manipulate the Ilwrath and Thraddash into eliminating each other. And annoy the Spathi by telling them you cleared their homeworld of Evil Ones, when in fact you didn't. 

With SCO's "living universe", though, it sounds as if you can go off-script and engage in wanton destruction...and that will change empires' attitudes toward you.

...but I still wonder what you can do to them. I mean, besides just kabooming their ships. How much--if at all--can you change the map in ways that aren't pre-scripted?

We don't tell you how to play.  We simply give you the option.

Effectively, everything is "scripted" in the sense that if you do X, it will affect variable Y and if variable Y is less than threshold Z then consequence A will occur.

There is no randomness so it's ultimately "Scripted" in that sense.  If player Q does the same things as player M then the same things will result.  

Okay...but...that's not the sense I meant at all. I was really asking about, like, how much we can go off-script story-wise. Not code-scripting but scripting in more of a screenplay sense. Like, how much we can affect the face of the galaxy without having to have chats with aliens to do it?

And if variable Y is more than threshold Z, then consequence B will occur, I assume.

But my question is how far-reaching A or B might end up being, even if only that A or B ends helping C and/or D, and suddenly we've got a whole butterfly effect happening where, because of action X, planet Alpha will be conquered by empire Epsilon, where that would not have happened if action X hadn't been taken.

How much can action X--or repeated action X, or action X plus other actions--affect the map without it being part of the written, must-interact-with-specific-characters-to-make-it-happen, screenplay script?

Oh I see, that's one of the options you can select. That makes more sense. I thought that was the only option, my bad. Yeah I agree with that.

True true, out of curiosity, will there be some sort of faction loyalty/sentiment meter that tells you how much a race likes you? So if you go indiscriminately blowing up their ships and infrastructure, are they eventually going to "declare war" on you? Can you go all WoW-esque and go "farm reputation" to make them like you again?

If you go around and destroy ships it can affect how things go.  However, again, only to a limited extent because you are, one ship.  

We don't spawn random ships (for example) so you destroy a bunch of Scryve ships (and this is typical) it has some other results which I won't go into.

Ah! No spoilers. Got it.

Good enough for me. Can't wait for September 20, now.