Maybe that is the problem, and now that I reread my post, it does leave out certain things.
The mod would be for exclusive PBW play. No AI whatsoever.
Space Empires exists within a homogenous galaxy as it is. All these different races basically, apart from a few facilities struggle to unlock identical secrets of the universe, through tech. Just as in some older boardgames, certain countries or personas or roles would have benefits and advantages, so I want different races in SE4 to compliment how they are to be played. At present, when you role play in SE4, about the only way in which you approach it, is through communication and, if you choose, limitation. But in the end, a capital missle is the same to a religious race, as it is to a temporal, as it is to a group of anarchists, etc.
Let me state an example:
I'm now trying to put together a Toxic race between spurts of actual work at work; it's an idea I stole from a voyager episode, I only half remember.
The toxic race will have no population growth, so it will have to capture the pop of other worlds in order to grow. Their ships are going to be big, bulky and expensive to maintain on account of their dirty inefficient fuel. Same with engines. They will have extremely powerful planetary bombardment weapons. Strong troops to capture planets. They won't have cloaking devices because their ships leave such an exhaust trail (exhaust on starships? Believe it, baby). The same with their mines...they cloak at a lower level because they leak radiation. Going to give them a plague bomb by another name, which will kill population in droves by radiation poisoning. I plan on giving crew quarters of most races a security station ability, and the Toxic race will have a weapon which takes this out...other little stuff like this. Like a crew converter, which isn't really a crew converter, it kills everyone aboard with a bLast of radiation. And although their ships are expensive to maintain, they will be cheap to build, costing as much or more in radioactives as in minerals.
With each race I hope to come up with enough traits manifested in the components and hulls and tech that to play a certain race, feels like you are playing them, as best as it can be done.
And like I said, it would be no problem to add other races after the fact. So if someone wants to design an aquatic race, or a liliputian race, or a bug race, or a race of witches that fly around outerspace on a broom...the more the merrier. That is until we hit the limits of the data files
