Race Selection
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I really like the races available in GalCiv (haven't tried AP yet), and the fact that they have alignments and intelligence levels that you can set. The Random feature is excellent since it preserves the sense of meeting the Yor Collective for the very first time .... are they good? Evil? brilliant or slow? You can only find out by interacting with them .... the only down side to this is that the user has no input on the size of this random pool. For example, if all the races were randomly rolled as Pure Good, this could make for a pretty lack luster game. Similarly if one or more races were randomly rolled to be genius level this could make for a pretty short game for the human player. It would be excellent if the player could say .... "Okay ... I want all the races to have random alignments, but I want 70% of them to be evil" or something like that. Similarly if the intelligence level could be random and anywhere from say "Simple to Bright" or something like that. This would preserve a real random feel to the game where you have no foreknowledge of the alien races, while maintaining enough control to make sure that the game itself remains enjoyable for the player.
Randomly Created Races
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I know that the the major races are old favourites and are important to making the GalCiv game into a recognizable brand, but I think it would be really interesting if there were an option for the computer to actually create new races on the fly. Kind of like the randomization feature, but on steroids. Here is how it would work .... When the option is turned on, rather than preselecting the Yor Collective, The Toran's etc, etc .... the computer would randomly select a name for this new race, and a random supplied picture (the game might say ship with 15 or so pictures). This combined with the suggested changes to randomization and the player really wouldn't know what they were getting into. "The Mellvars? A species of short tempered glowing gases? Are they evil, or good?". With the user able to add more pics in this directory and then randomize the whole set, well ... each game is an utterly new experience. Sure, this might cause difficulties in whether or not to use animations in diplomacy, as well as what to to about the council screens ... but if GalCiv 2 is going to let people import alien pics anyways won't these challenges already have to be addressed?
Anyway, if they DO consider this suggestion there are some pitfalls that they need to avoid.
1) Please have a data text of acceptable alien names that the computer draws for each alien race (and obviously chooses that name only once for that game). MOO3 had an algorithm that created alien species names on the fly, and although that sounds cool on paper ... the results really weren't. Rather than getting names like 'The Naxor' or something memorable like that, you got 'The Mryxxvorgotal'. Sure its an alien and could have strange names ... but for game play - if I can't pronounce it easily, I am not going to remember it. The race will become 'Those M -guys'.
2) Similarly, please disallow the selection routine from choosing the same graphic for more than one race in a single game. Sure, there could be 3 human races to battle against in a game ... but if they all have the same graphic identifying them its going to get a might confusing as to who is who. Again that is something that happened a lot in MOO3. There is nothing wrong with having three human looking races to battle in a game, but please make sure that each has its own graphic for that game.
Anyway, those are my ideas .... Comments? Suggestions?
Dano
