Nitram - thanks for the offer - and send me your info at
WhiteHojo@hotmail.com and I'll see if I can use it... And I agree w/ya - a pirate w/o a base is just a roving nomad and not a pirate. All that looting and plundering takes alot out of a mate, and you need a home colony to return to (this ain't waterworld)-
As far as having a good reason to be colonizing - yep - cause they gotta expand like any other race or as you point out, more pragmatically they need someway to have a chance in the intell buisness. Unless you just disable the intell option as you did, you need the colonies for the intell centers if nothing else.
If the fear is that they'd be too powerfull w/colonies - sounds like they're too powerfull w/o em so the answer should be to reconfigure them to be not so unbalanced. Give em more penalties, etc.
Also, I can't understand what your objection is to colonies as a game issue (any personal bias not coming into play)? I envision pirate colonies to be on tiny or small planets (limits facilities to 6 to 12 per breathable planet and 1 to 2 fac'lts per nonbreathable) then filling em w/intell centers to use counter intel... no mining/farming/radcollection facilities...
My feeling is a race should expand at some rate, slow for the pirates in my opinion.
I haven't play tested any of these new components yet so I can't really give a informed opinion on their effect and the overall effectiveness of the pirate race as I envision it.
The larger intell output would be required if you severly limited the races expansion (and by limiting it to 1 home planet, that's pretty dang severe) - I'd have to test it out first i suppose
As far as racial traits - I've toyed around w/em but haven't really figured it out - I'll keep fidgetting w/it and let ya know - keep me posted of your findings - thanks
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Character is best defined as that which you do when you believe nobody is watching.
[This message has been edited by WhiteHojo (edited 08 March 2001).]