The main benefit of the "Antarean" feature of MOO II was that you could not count on being left alone if you accidently started in an isolated location. You had to build some planetary defenses and some warships just in case an Antarean raid would pop up. This was what 'space monsters' were good for, too. So it was much harder to get a "lucky start" and get way ahead of the other players in empire development because you didn't have to spend on military force until later.
Rather than duplicate MOO too literally in this case - much as I'd like some of the weapons technologies to be duplicated literally
- I think we ought to devise something in keeping with the character of SE. I've just recently posted to the beta forums about an idea that would cover this. Let me repost it here:
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Why should "ruins" always be technological candy? Maybe they should contain a nasty surprise once in a while. If you ran the risk of activating a new empire when you took a ruins planet, especially one with advanced technology, life could be much more interesting. If the 'ancient race' awakens they should take the planet from your fledgling colony of course, and revive a decent sized population on it very quickly. Since you will usually go for ruins early it's likely that this would occur in an outlying area far from your warships and the new rival would get a reasonable start. Especially, as the 'ruins' theme implies, if they start with higher technology than most of the other races.
It would be cool if MM would create a specific race/shipset for this. We could make a back story for it. This ancient race once ruled the galaxy but they faced some sort of plague that even they could not cure, so they put themselves into hibernation. It's been so long that no one remembers where all their planets were anymore and you never know when you might run across one...
It would be specially interesting if the various planets that got revived would be smart enough to automatically ally with each other rather than be seperate fragmentary empires.
Another way to possibly increase variability in the game is to have some of the 'neutrals' change their political character part way through the game and start expanding like regular empires.
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Anyway, with hidden enemies scattered around that may pop up at any time when you or any other player colonizes their 'hibernating' world we could have a 'threat factor' much like MOO II with the Antareans but in a unique style. I'd still like to see some MOO-style space monsters, though.
[ 01 December 2001: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]