FreeOrion

Well, of course the goal is to be interesting. The length of the delay and cost of uplift can be adjusted to make it worthwhile, but not so advantageous that keeping them is the only valid strategy. Xenophobic, or "Evil" empires should be able to exterminate the natives without ruining their chances to win.


I'm only vaguely familiar with that game, perhaps you can explain more fully?

Allow me

In HoMM oracles were basically treasure maps, each one you visited would give you more peaces of the map until you knew where to dig, this would give you a powerful artefact, in later games you got the holy grail that would give a major bonus to the city you placed it in.

Yes, that was what I was referring to. In HOMM, getting the Oracle treasure gave the city to which it was applied to a HUGE bonus.

There's a 4X space game out there that uses Artifacts, but I can't remember which one. One of the win conditions was in fact gathering 5 Artifacts.

I was thinking that if there are game events which could be 'discovered' and which give the player very good or very bad things (similar to finding derelict ships in MOO2), one of those special events could sometimes be generated by 'studying' natives.

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Professor Hernandez, Human ambassador to Silica:
"Hey, rocks are people too!"
Black Dawn

I think you could win MoO3 by finding 5 artifacts.

Not much has been implemented yet, but we are strongly leaning towards a galaxy which has a lot of interesting, useful, and sometimes dangerous stuff scattered around in it, much of it left by advanced civilizations.

I don't expect we need to give the player an arbitrary award for being nice and studying indigenous species, but it could be interesting to have certain kinds of random events occur or items discovered when dealing with a species.

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