[Taqwus]

No manual is going to tell you how a race design plays, methinks. It's going to be heavily affected by the quadrant setup and your neighbors, and by your personal playing style (going for the quick conquest, building up first, etc). The same goes for many other questions, like Master Computers versus crew (in a Finite Resources game in an Ancient quadrant, for instance, you might want to be very, very miserly -- those MCs are expensive. But in a more normal setting, but surrounded by the Psychic Enemies Network, you'll probably want them. And so forth).

However, certain things *could* be extrapolated from the data files, and...

Perhaps a race trait's description should also include the names of the tech areas that require it? This could be automatically generated by the engine -- no need for hardcoding.

A certain amount of documentation could probably be auto-generated from data files, like a tech tree, complete with costs based on the game settings. This can also, of course, be studied by a user reading the files.

What can't be, are the details "under the hood", like --

- how do Ministers make their decisions

- what specific abilities mean (Some aren't that clear. For instance, looking at face value, it's unclear to me why the Economic Disruption op is more costly than the Resource Theft; presumably the Resource Destruction ability applies some multiplicative factor, or has some other hidden advantage, because otherwise it looks like it destroys no more than the Theft op steals).

- what occurs in a turn, and in what order

- how do the strategies work; e.g. what does "optimal range" optimize, when multiple weapon types are present?

and so forth.



------------------
-- The thing that goes bump in the night