[geoschmo]

It sounds very interesting. There have been games with independant races before. Sometimes called uber races, sometimes observers, etc.

The main thing I can see as being a problem with this is it really depends on you as game owner maintaining you interest and activity in the game. Epic SE4 games like this can go on for months easy. We've had games running on PBW literally for years with regular, or at least semi-regular turns.

It's difficult for every player to maintain a continual interest in the game for that long. What normally happens is players will occasionally "drop-out" where they keep submitting turns more or less consistantly but "mechanically", where they don't really get involved in the RP aspects. Maybe just rebuilding after a big war or doing a phase of exploration. Or maybe just because sometimes real life takes a lot of time and you lose interest.

This is ok for a player because the game can continue more or less around them as the other empires get heavy into the interaction. But hen things depend heavily on the game owner like this if the game owner goes into a low involvment phase it pretty much ruins it for everybody else. It would be awesome if SE4 had the ability to have a computer controlled race that could follow logical scripts or whatever and fulfill this purpose. But it's not possible unfortunatly.

Just my two cents though. If you are up for the task it should be quite an experience for the players.