I love the Superabilities, but there are only 9 of them (I think), and these lead to some repetition when it comes to creating Custom Opponents (eg. This Super Breeder has tech bonuses, this Super Breeder has Build Bonuses etc). The race bonuses are good, but you are limited to 15 points and some of the upper limits are too small IMHO.

Then it hit me ... you could make ANY kind of race you wanted by editing the raceconfig.xml files and directly editing the values (of course after making a backup of the original).

So you could make a Super Researcher. Suppose you determined that not having a Super Ability for your race of Einsteinians was worth a double research rate (whether or not that is a balance is moot for purposes here). However the Race Ability pics only go up to +30 or so (I can't remember which). You can get around this by creating the custom opponent without a Super ability, then you could edit the XML and where it says Research, just plug in 100.

Similarly, you could create a race that has no super abilities or Race bonuses, but give it a whole bunch of advanced tech - thus creating a decadant race who was once very powerful.

The only thing I am not sure about is NEGATIVE bonuses. For example lets suppose those Einsteinians are terrible Engineers and we want to give them a penalty to Social and Military Manufacturing. Suppose we thought that a -20 penalty would make for a more interesting and balanced race. Would the game engine handle the -20 penalty properly (i.e. BuildPoints + (-0.2)BuildPoints), or would something undefined happen like getting negative build points, or just a game crash, or would the game engine simply ignore values less than zero? My gut tells me the game engine would handle the penalty correctly, but I guess the only way to be sure is to try it.

Dano