MAKING MINOR CIV'S MORE POWERFUL

The best place to start is here: StarDock's Primer

Firstly as suggested above read the Modding guide!

Having been thinking about this myself a couple of days back you are kind of limited to what you can do... Minor races can not colonize planets so they can only grow throght invasion... you also need to note that minor races will only have 1 planet for quite some while... this means they rapidly fall behind on research/economy/production/etc...

I think the best that you can do to help them is to mod there abilities (found in the Raceconfig.xml, remember to backup you origional!)... +500% economics, +200% Military, +200% Soldiering and +500% Research would more than certainly make them interesting... Really its about having a play around with the setup of the minors and playtesting what you change... Given the paramiters that can currently be changed thro modding you are not at the moment going to get a minor that acts like a major Civ... but you can certainly make the minors thougher

They are aggresive. But colonisation is something they are programmed not to do, and you can't mod the AI.

Give them state of the art ships. They certainly won't go quietly into the night then.

Or a transport...

They can't invade either. Hard coded.

wellt hey cant colin and they cant invade thats kinda silly

theres no reason why a minor civ cant turn into a major civ

heres question when if your people revolt nad half your star systems go aginst you is that consider your othere half consdier a minor race or a major race.

I believe that is a minor race. I didn't realize that they couldn't colonize or invade. That kind of takes the fun out of it. I made a whole bunch of minor races thinking that if I upped their stats enough they would be formidable. Oh well its still fun to see the planet of the apes as a race next to the zerg. I up their stats enough though it would make it hard for any invading civ to wipe them out.

They should have the reflex to ally together, like a TRUE powerful I-League, able to challenge 1 superpower. (Maybe not SUPERPOWER, but at least middle-rated power)

It would give a new spin to diplomacy with the minor races. Or off course, they could ally with you.

I remember, Birth of the Federation. When you allied or conquered minor races, you could get cool advantages... It would certainly redefine the landscape..

One way you could do this is to build a influence starbase near several enemy or your own systems, then give them control of the base. I had one game where the I-league was the 3rd most powerful civ after taking planets from everyone through influence.

The problem is, you *make* the I-League more powerful. I want the I-League to stand up to me, and be able to challenge my galaxy-domination agenda through its own power.

The way I saw it, minor powers are races with no troop transports and no colonizers. Fine with me, but if they ally, they should share shipbuildings, technologies, etc...

I know a lot of people were very disappointed to find that the minor civs in GCII are no more than cannon fodder for the AI's. A lot of us would like to see the return of the colonizing minors and let them develop fully.

At the moment all they can do is use up resource bonuses and this does nothing as they cant expand to utilize them fully.

I for one am hoping that Cari and team allow the Minors to grow once again in one of the forthcoming expansions.

JJ

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I don’t know if it’s just me but I am in the middle of a game at the moment and one of the major players is a minor race. They will colonise but seldom get the opportunity to do so they will also conquer planets. In the game I mention the Akkadians? Have just crushed the Terans mostly because I gave them a Terran colony in their star system and some one else let off a precursor planetary upgrading device

The main issue with minor races seems to be that they come late and get stuck with one planet in a system. Give them the opportunity and they or at least some of them will take it

heres question when if your people revolt nad half your star systems go aginst you is that consider your othere half consdier a minor race or a major race.

Both. They don't get the UP or anything, but they use the "basic" AI of a major. Thus they can colonise, invade, and do anything a major can, except vote in the UP.

The I-league count as a major. They can REALLY ruin my day.

I think that if you go into the RaceConfig all minor races have a tech called "root" which might make them only have 1 planet.

Are minors really not supposed to be able to invade?

The last game I played the Dark Yor got all uppitty, declared war on me, then took one of my colonies (I had colonized a planet in thier same star system).

It took my by surprise I had been basically ignoring them up till then I thought they would be a non threat deep behind my lines.

True, but in my game I didnt give them anything, they just got that way, in a game I'm playing now, I am utilizing my said strategy to build up OTHER minors since they seem not to be able to do anything.

Also another nice thing that I would like (maybe in the expansion or sequel) would be a dynamic system of figuring out who the major powers are. For instance in a majority of my games I never build a fleet untill midway through a tech tree. I never get into a war anyway and the rest of the galaxy is usually too busy with each other to worry about me. The civilization games have always had a thing that tells you who the top nations are, this would be a great part of Galciv, to have the ai determine who the top powers are and then make them be the ones who can take part in the U.P.. That way even a minor power has a chance to be a major power, or a major power can lose a war, be utterly defeated, then rise in power and become a major power again.

This would add very intresting dynamics as your playing, one minute the drengin are your biggest rivals, the next the Arcean have replaced them and now you need to worry about them. But perhaps the biggest thing would be the actual minor races, now they would be able to do something other then sit on one world with their thumbs up their.....whatever they have. Also, might be nice to have a specific building for EACH type of race (thinking BOTF here) as well as being able to "liberate" worlds i.e. a drengin planet that was colonized by drengin is close to revolt, you show up, invade the world, then get the choice of conquest or liberation. You choose liberation and bam alakazam, new minor race ready to take on everyone else.

a while back, i spent alot of time working on the minor races - unfortunately what i found was that..

1) the minor invade and minor colonize switches (0,1)in the scenerio xml were disabled, and do nothing. This is perhaps because of the hard coded changes made during beta to the minors.

2) The minor races are currently further inhibited by the fact they have no ship range in and of themselves, they acctually use a major races homeworld as thier range of operation. To see this for yourself, simply create a game making sure you have universal translator as a starting tech, give a ship to a minor race, then hotseat game to that minor. This is i beleive what causes some minors to often create loads of influence starbases in wierd areas, and answers the question of why some minors do nothing at all,(thier corresponding major races isnt in the game) or end up with ships with zero move sitting around in the middle of space after thier corresponding major race gets killed off. (for instance, the snathi currently use the draths' sphere of range for thier ships, if the drath are killed off.. the snathi cannot move thier ships)

would love to see the minor play more of a role, especially in gigantic galaxies.

I also noticed that even though I added more minor races to the raceconfig.xml file the game never chooses the extras I added for a game it stays with the 10 or so original minor races. How Can I change this?