Bigjoe5 wrote:Well, essentially you have to take into account how racial picks will affect gameplay. The ultimate spy master's racial picks would be almost entirely, if not entirely focused on increasing their stealth, detection and espionage.
Sounds like overspecialisation to me, then again that's just a hold over from previous 4x games (all of them), free orion might make
Bigjoe5 wrote:The real question is how to incorporate that personality into the racial picks so that the race will have personality even when being controlled by a player, not a character. I've been thinking of ways that personality can be customized via a special type of citizen racial pick which affects the morale and perhaps the allegiance of the empire's citizens.
Actually that's been thought about before with the same conclusion. Eaxaw citizens get unhappy with you if your being diplomatic or not committing enough genocide, AEIOU citizens get unhappy if your not looking hard enough etc.
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Bigjoe5 wrote:"]So really, their "god" doesn't need to actually exist outside of the campaign mode. Even so, I think the race description as a whole is also going to need a workover, because i can't figure out for the life of me how a few of their people fused together to gain massive power and why others cant.
Actually they can, easily. However the more people who fuse together the more likely they are to go insane, even two people is risky and it takes a few hundred to produce a god.
They pulled it of once through military discipline and sheer desperation, they were on the verge of extinction. And your right, that is somewhat contrived that it can only happen once, I mentioned that they never speak of the second attempt so perhaps they simply don't try any more... your right, I should come up with a better reason that it only happened once.
Bigjoe5 wrote:How would they fit into the standard mode? Perhaps they could be a campaign-only NPC?
NPCs AKA minor races, are planned for standard mode.
Bigjoe5 wrote:I think most races should really be defined by their abilities and personalities. having more than one race as (approximately) the average in terms of abilities and personality just seems like a waste of a slot that we could put a better race in.
Firstly I never talked about abilities, just personality, and as I said in my last post average was the wrong word. Since I'm including races like George and the Abbadonians I don't think they count as "average" personality.
Take the Abbadonians (well Mother). I can easily see her trying to conquer the galaxy, peacefully sharing the galaxy with her neighbours, joining a "lynch mob" of races against the Eaxaw or sabotaging that mob depending on what she thinks is the best plan to keep her people safe.
The Abbadonians are hardly "average" but because their quirk allows them to fit a verity of roles, that really helps when it comes to writing a plot. If at some point we want a "Grand Alliance" or "European Union" then we'd need level headed races to dilute the more
eccentric races. If the Gyiashce are scared of their allies, the Stonecarvers are spying on their allies, the AEIOU are in one of their phases where they ignore day to day matters and the Egassem can't talk without insulting everyone with casual arrogance, how long will the alliance last?
That's why I refered to the niche as the Straight Man (you have heard the term before right? I assumed it was pretty much common knowledge). If the "punchline" is a large alliance that joins against the Eaxaw we need level headed races to make the alliance work.
That dosn't mean they arn't good for anything else though, take George. A pretty level headed guy with interesting game-play effects, but you can get some interesting plot ideas regardless. Like what happens if an artificial hive mind tries to assimilate one of his bodies?
Bigjoe5 wrote:By making the story around specific races, we're essentially defining what races will be in, unless the higher ups want to remake the whole story themselves when we're done. The thing is, that if we go against reasonable balancing rules, they'll be forced to balance the races we've included themselves. Which means that we should think about balancing standard mode if we're defining the races that will be included in FO.
Basically I just don't think we have any real chance of predicting who's in and who isn't. So rather than wasting time trying and failing we should just pick the races we want.
Also I'm not too sure if the 18 races includes minor races or just playable races but I suspect the second, so that gives us a bit more room to work anyway.