FreeOrion

I’m starting this thread in case there is anything that anyone wants to discuss here not relating to a specific race. If you have any questions or suggestions this is the place for them.

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Time flies like the wind, fruit flies like bananas.

Are all races functionally identical in terms of having a large "population" of generic, equivalent entities, and constructing large mechanical ships that all function essentially the same way? Are all races equivalent in terms on industry and research and such?

For example, consider the Zerg from Starcraft.

There are no general Zerg citizens, other than perhaps drones, but there are many different breeds.

Zerg-like "research" in FO would probably function significantly differently than standard science-based research of human-like races... I belive the backstory of the Zerg involves them finding various species around the galaxy and mutating them to fit a niche in the swarm. This could provide an interesting alternate game mechanic for Zerg research. Pehraps biodiversity on a planet would be much more important to a Zerg-like race's research than just population and planetary focus.

Zerg-like "ships" are living things, which could be set up with different "growth" mechanics in game than other races that "build" ships. Zerg-like ships would presumably also have different characteristics / advantages / disadvantages compared to mechanical ships. Maybe grow over time, so you don't need to keep replacing your hulls with newer bigger models. Maybe they self repair.

I'm sure there are lots of other issues that different types of races would have that would be horrible to balance, but would be great for game variety and new play styles and mechanics.

Edit: I guess you nixed that sort of thing here:
http://www.freeorion.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=205

Sorry for the moot post. A shame thought. Variety = Fun (usually)

Yes, all races will be functionally equivalent up the release of v1.0. After that point if there is enough interest it is certainly possible to modify the game to handle different game mechanics, but that is a long way off.

It's a function of effort, adding extra game mechanics takes a lot of effort and right now we would much rather spend our effort on building the essential parts of the game.

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Time flies like the wind, fruit flies like bananas.

About races in general, early thoughts.

Graphilly are some archtypes that I would like to use. Important: stone-biologic-mechanical-insect and then fish/flying-lizard?-energy-cyborg .. or combinations of thoselike stone-energy, or mechanical-insect races.

We have at least shiptypes: low-tech metal, high-tech metal, insectoid, carved out asteroid, enegy, biological or combinations of those.

behaviour archtypes:
proud, peaceful, agressive, spy, trader, researcher, telepathic, ...

weapon and shield types:
corrosive, energy, kinetic, others?

Different worlds to live in:
Toxic, Radiated, Tundra, Desert, Swamp, Ocean etc..

It would make a good start to link those to build race-profiles.

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Difference between a man and a gentleman is that a man does what he wants, a gentleman does what he should. - Albert Camus

- Would be interesting to implement the gas giant race Aquitaine was pondering about in the early 0.1 releases. I could pull the thread in the brainstorming forum, but I'm lazy.

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There are three kinds of people in this world - those who can count, and those who can't.

My quess is that when we'll do races, we will make gas giants and astroid fields colonizable acordingly. There has been some discussion about the issue earlier

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Difference between a man and a gentleman is that a man does what he wants, a gentleman does what he should. - Albert Camus

If there are gas giant races, they better have some big drawbacks. In MOO3 the gas giant races were really powerful because the gas giants were, well, gant, so that got them some good bonuses.

iambrok only in v1.0 of MoO3 . They got nerfed heavily later on.

Even so, they were too powerful, and we need to make sure that if we do include them, they aren't too powerful.

How about starting race relations and behaviors? I assume it will be customizable.

i.e.
Race1 hates Race2
Race2 is neutral with Race3 etc...

However in personalities...if there is a 'noble' race or an enlightened race, as apart of their background story, they shouldn't be erratic xenaphobes.

or is this an A.I. topic?

I liked in MOO1 when you could hit Alt-P to adjust the personalites/behavoirs...

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"The mighty warships of the Vl'Hurg Empire dived screaming upon the unknowing Earth, where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog." -Hitchhikers Guide

MOO3 had a problem that freeorion won't have: All planets of any type were set on a continuum so that gas giant planets were just like a rocky planet with a larger size. What MOO3 needed to do was either charge extra for the heaver g races in the racial pics or decrease the density of races proportionally to their ideal planet size. All in all it wouldn't have been extremely hard to balance if they had planned for it, but it was MOO3.. and they didn't.

Freeorion would (if we include gas giants) have them as a separate class of planets. This makes it almost trivial to balance. For instance, your standard rocky planet might have 260 units of space, whereas your standard gas giant might have 2,600 of space.. but the population (and everything else) takes up 10 times the normal amount of space, due to it’s necessity to have to fly or float.

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Time flies like the wind, fruit flies like bananas.

Could an uninhabited gas giant be terraformable to meet the living requirements of some of the standard races?

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Zans, I'm thinking that would be unlikely, however, it would be cool if a Terran race could somehow extract minerals or energy from a gas giant. Say you could park a "cloudscoop" in low orbit and generate X minerals per turn (kinda like the space stations in Gal Civ). Or a Gas giant race could put a research station in orbit around a medium artifact world to get the research bonus. Just thinkin....

Aquitaine mentioned a while back that Gas giant dwellers (should they exist) , and their gas giant counterparts, would be outside the terraforming wheel completely. There are some threads that discuss some of the differences ( such as the colour of the gas giant detemines it's primary or secondary value ) and possible conflict ( that gas giant dwellers and all other races would live in relative peace together, until perhaps the advent or discovery of gas giant modification.

I think there was a provision for gas giant mines and asteroid mines. You'd have to dig them up in the threads. It's all on the back burner for now - more important things to focus on.

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There are three kinds of people in this world - those who can count, and those who can't.

Even though a large bunch of races have been posted, an editable race (like in MoO 2) should remain. There´s only one thing, that should be different: In FreeOrion we should have a 'pick an image that resembles your race'-option.
This should be possible for any picture on the harddrive that matches distinct criteria.