Uhh - I never said I wanted to do it without taking up a race slot
. When I mentioned "Population ruins" I was just trying to describe what I thought the primitives could add to the game - I wasn't suggesting a means of implementing them.
I was thinking of adding a fourth type? "normal", "pirate", "nomad" and "pre- industrial". Give the pre-industrials no access at all to any techs except the farming / mining / storage / resupply / troop techs specifically designed for them.
With no expansion possibilities, no fleets to build and nothing to research all they would do is build huge armies and wait for the spacefarers to arrive. Hopefully after a few dozen turns they would have a formidable ground army waiting to repel invaders and a big store of minerals / organics to trade with. I also think giving them resupply facilities could give them significant diplomatic value in certain situations.
As far as I can see the only really difficult bit (apart from altering pages and pages of txt files=-) would be forcing the game to start primitive planets with the right mix of facility types.
Anyway it sounds like Phoenix-D (Like Enterprise-D?
) may be working on this mod now so I won't duplicate his efforts. I think his vision is different to mine but that's the price I pay for laziness - It's your baby now Phoenix.
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"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
"Uh, I think so Brain, but how are we gonna teach a goat to dance with flippers on? "