minor/magnate civs?

[Bastian-Bux]

Well, severall "major" nations on our good old earth tried to get rid of some minors. Didn't work that well. All former colonies are independent again, and some minors even found ways to hurt the majors badly.

A major empire might find it fairly difficult to subjugate a minor empire. Kind of Cardassian/Bajoran situation. Of course glassing the planet is always an option, but thats an incredible waste of potential ressources.

So I'd suggest the following:

Subjugating a minor nation is so costly, that the won planet is just barely worth the investment.

Re-Terraforming a glassed planet is so costly, that the won planet is just barely worth the investment.

Trading with a minor nation, maybe integrating it nto your empire in a peacefull (or at least clever) way should be the most viable, though most time intense option.

This way all majors would think twice what they do with minors.

[Ablaze]

I think it would destroy the game if destroying a planet and re-colonizing it was barely worth the effort. It would nerf the military victory which is such a central part of 4x games. Unless you want a game in which diplomacy is the only truly viable option.. if so then you are certainly not following the MOO tradition.

Fortunately there are a couple more options.

1) You could allow a minor race to build defensive ships which are not equipped with FTL drives. Perhaps the pre-FTL drive techs are not so much stone age techs as studies into quantum mechanics and the like. This way minor races would have large defensive fleets in the beginning of the game and wouldn’t be easy to take out until mid-game.

2) If you have mineral stockpiles in the game then you could allow pre-FTL races to amass huge stockpiles of minerals which get destroyed if you destroy their population. (Because minerals are explosive, don’t-cya-know.)

[Bastian-Bux]

A good example of what I'm talking about is BotF. There its expensive to peacefully incorporate a minor race into your empire. But its definitely worth the trouble. If you do this by force, you pay heavily after conquest (pacification), or loose the special benefits of the minor race (glassing).

So all three ways should be viable, but I think the greatest benefit should come from the most expensive way: peacefull incorporation.

[snakechia]

i like where this conversation is heading....

Originally I just wanted all races to be playable, in which I see no downside.

But, I like the idea of races starting out at different levels of tech...instead of the whole galaxy starting at the same tech level. However, there needs to be some major controls anytime races start out at different tech levels because less tech means annihilation, especially against a human opponent. Maybe instead of starting races at a lower tech level, races start with a different tech level....like a war hungry race starts out with neutron pellot gun, whereas an intelligent race start out with diplomatic translators to aid diplomacy, or a money hungry race starts out with higher interest rates on their reserves.

[utilae]

What if the minor races form some kind of guild, so close by minor races can stick together and hold some power, enough to talk other bigger races into letting them live.

[Ablaze]

If all FTL drives were marked in some way then a race could be given the ability to progress through the tech tree and build defensive system fleets but not the ability to expand. Their tech tree could revert to normal after a set amount of turns, after they reached a certain tech, or just until the first other superpower explored their solar system.

This would allow minor races to catch up to the major ones relatively quickly.

[Impaler]

Their could be a combination of starting tecnologies that are oriented towards your races strong points. SMAC dose this very nicely. Everyone starts with 1 level 1 tecnology which is suited to them. All the level 1 tecnologes are thus divided up among the starting factions.

We could do something similar, in each genral "level" we have a "prefered" tec for a race. So lets say that the war-mongers race has the floowing ficticius preferences. These oreferences would be part of the races design and could be modified with notepad files like the faction in SMAC. The Pre-Warp tecnologest dont realy need to do much, in general I would see them giving you the ability to do things you normaly take for granted in these types of games.

Stone Age- Spear (alows you to hunt food!)
Bronze Age -Bronze Shield (alows you to make ground troops)
Iron Age -Sword (advanced troops)
Middle Ages -Catapult (opens a Tactical option for ground Combat)
Industrial Age -Tank (first Mechanized ground unit)
Information Age- Jet (Opens another Tactical Option)
Warp Age (what we consider normal starting tec) -Lasers
Warp II Age (and so on) -Nutron Pellet Gun

What ever age these guys start in they get the apropriate tecnology for that age and all previous age tecnologies. If their are special exclusive tecnologes that only 1 race can have then thouse would logicaly be good candidits for preference tecnologes.

[utilae]

If it is made so that races can start from the min tech to the max tech, maybe we could start the ages from the 'reach the moon' age all the way up to 'advanced super elder race' age.

Timeline:
Space Age - Classic rockets
Sublight Age - Solar sales and other slow methods of travel
Warp Age - Warp engine
Hyperspace Age -Travel in another dimension
Hyperspace Gate Age - Travel through another dimension through gate ways, hyperspace highways.

Anyway, we should exclude ages such as stone age, and everything before space travel.

[krum]

Anyway, we should exclude ages such as stone age, and everything before space travel.

?? Whyzzat ??

[utilae]

Initially I was thinking of ages such as stone age as a means of 'stalling', so minor races would not be getting any techs through moving through those earlier ages, it would just be something to keep them behind.

If we wanted to make a race start at any tech there are no real techs to offer from ages such as stone age. I supose those ealier ages could still remain, though they would likely have no techs, they would just be something to research through before getting to the real techs.

[skdiw]

I like utilae's age idea. We can have most race start at warp age with a few special races that begin at different age with different bonus/penalty. i think it will be more interesting. Impaler's idea of prefered level sounds good too. We can have the interface chance its appearance to reflect new the age like in Moo1 where the scientist wears different lab coats.

One thing that I don't like is researching tech that do nothing or has little effects, but clutter things up. It's realistic to get bridges, life support for development of ships, but it gets annoying to have these text taking precious screen space.

[Impaler]

I liked your Original idea Utilae, the age of empires like levels were clever, they alow you to play any kind of first contact senario you can imagine. I think my idea of the pre-warp tecs giving you things you normaly take for granted is a good solution. It solves the "this tec dose nothing" problem whicn I admit would suck majorly, every tec should have a tangible benifit. And it means we dont have to come up with lots of extra stuff that will be useless later on.

When the player starts a game they could select their own starting tec and how many alien race will start at each of paticular levels. For Example

Me (the INSERT RACE HERE) Pre Warp
3 Warp Civalizations
2 Advanced Warp Civalizations
5 Middle Age Civalizations
7 Stone Age Civalizations

The player can have a lot of control over how channenging and of what style the game is (lots of minors or no minors) with this option. Their might also be a way to select a particular tec level for a particular NPC race (for Example I feel like avenging my self of the Defeat I suffered at the hands of the Klackons in my last game so I put the Klackons at stone Age level )

[utilae]

Though what techs could stone age races use. I only see any techs fro msuch times as being useful in the very early game. You could have things that affect the 'local planet', like farming, etc.

Also any races that start at a higher tech level would have to already have all techs obtainable from the previous ages. We could say that what techs a race has could also be determined by their traits. Maybe if they are good at farming, they have done more research on the farming branch of the tech tree. Or we could just start everyone with all techs from previous ages and no techs in the current age and beyond (have to be researched).

[khormin]

Hmm, no. Bad idea all-round, IMHO.

For starters; having pre-space techs in a space game. AFAIK this is FreeOrion, not FreeCiv. Nothing wrong with that game at all - just it's not this one.

Next; No-one said that your magnates had to be "primitive". If they're a species bombed into oblivion, or that recently met the giant planet-eating spaghetti monster, they won't be tech-primitive. They'll just be cloistered in one planet and hostile as anything.

Next; Maybe the race is not space-faring because of disaster (natural or wartime), or religion (space is EVIL!), or technology (travel to the stars instead of back in time? Never thought of that!), or cultural differences (why would we WANT to leave our delicious methane swamp?), or environmental (But we TRIED to leave. The next star is at least eight times what we could possibly hope to reach away!). By these measures, I could see a human colony turning into a "magnate" race over time.

Next; As intriguing as it sounds, with this idea you're basically starting your 'magnates' with a significant tech penalty for no benefit. Better still to have them as a system/planet resource.

Next; No-one said you can't play "magnate" races - the idea is that a "magnate" race is one that has been neglected so far for light speed. Want to play it? Make it as a playable race choice. Boom da boosh.

In between times, magnates should give you a different set of options; and those options could have ramifications depending on your cultural settings & preferences.

Option 1) Glass/conquer them. If they're openly hostile to you, might not be such a bad idea. No-one said they had to be a nice pre-space civilisation. In exchange for a very minor diplo/unrest penalty ("They shot first! You all saw that, right? Doesn't matter that it didn't hurt me...") you get an otherwise viable planet possibly with lots of resources. Certain species might do well choosing this one directly - xenophobia or exceptionally bad diplomacy + high military = KoS policy for all foreigns, and might net you a small unrest reduction for ridding your empire of this potential menace.
Option 2) Trade, interact, barter with them as though they were a separate empire. Choosing this option (say with specialised "first contact" ships) allows them to form as an independent empire, a vassal empire for you, or if you're lucky, join your empire peacefully. Best case scenario - you get a 'free' planet for your personal use. Worst case scenario - they become an enemy empire and join your (/a) current enemy. Middle ground, they're a separate empire that remembers your helping them into the space age. Yay.
Option 3) Closet it off a la "prime directive" of Star Trek. You could choose to mark the system as a 'preservation zone', having it give a passive +research/+recreation buff as long as you continue the cordon, as the natives provide your people insight into new ways of doing things ("they cook with plasma?"), and entertainment ("It's time for those wacky D'th'roog'ians!"). Of course, this doesn't mean that other empires have to see it in the same fashion; and if your cordon ships are taken care of it's a simple matter to then invade/interact with said species. I think that's something the Klingons kept doing in Star Trek's original series, right?
Option 4) Ignore them. No reason you need to do anything with those primitives.

Then problem solvered. And it's been kept simple.

[Aussie Mick]

well, it's like in medieval total war, there are a couple civs you cannot control, and I wonder why...I want to be able to play as anyone in the game. It doesn't make sense to me that I can't.

And like in Moo3 where you have some of the old races, but you can't play as them...why bother puting them in the game if I can't control them...even if they start out with huge penalties and have no chance of winning, I want the opportunity to lose as them.

Also in Moo3, one of the first things people wanted to do was to control the New Orions, but you can't.

Depending on the scenario controlling some races would be wildly unbalancing, such as if you have a "Massive, decaying empire being devoured by barbarians" scenario then initially you could cripple any other race easily. Additionally the "decaying" part of the description would make it unwinnable in the long run because the empire has insoluble problems. I don't see anything wrong with races being unplayable provided there's a reason and they add to the challenges and interest for playable races.

Magnate or minor races are unplayable because they're just too weak. Particularly if they're the "natives who haven't got spaceflight yet" they can be conquered in 5-10 turns no problem. Their function is to increase the challenges of a new planet. You have to either fight for it or negotiate to incorporate them into your empire. Or leave them alone and trade with them. You can also try to make them "Client kingdoms" who run their own system but follow you in interstellar affairs. Having different races in your empire can be beneficial.