[Taqwus]

Check the Pictures/[race] directories -- there are text files there, which appear to deal with things like research preferences and ship designs. The Jraenor, for instance, are biased towards missiles, while the Phong are steered towards crystalline weaponry, etc. It looks like there's room for players to add in their own evil designs, for a tougher/stranger game.

Theoretically, were Malfador to be truly evil, they could have written an AI that looks at the player's designs and dynamically add templates based on them. I've not seen it, say, create a specialized Planetary Bomber ship (and I don't recall such a template in any of the race files), but it'd be interesting if it noticed my design, and then hit back with a similar one (For instance, towards the end of my Last game, my 'CA Vengeance' class Planetary Bomber resembled my 'CA Slayer' ship-killer with the same organic armor, shielding, a seeker, etc, but replaced the beam weapons w/ 4 large napalm bombs (total 4000 pts every 2 turns... good for reducing a 3-bar colony to ashes VERY quickly)).

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night