[Barnacle Bill]

>More neutral AIs? I'd worry that, from a
>human perspective, they're going to mean
>precisely one thing: free tech,
>particularly colonization tech.

That could be addressed in various ways, including just not allowing transfer of colonization tech. Frankly, though, I didn't even think of it because in my own data set it is a non-issue. I have converted all the races to "rock", removed gas giant colonization tech and removed all ice planets with atmosphere other than "none". I've done this because I personally don't feel it is realistic for humans (or anything from a similar environment to ours) to live on ice planets (as I understand them, frozen atmoshere not just a terrestial type planet with an arctic climate like in Star Wars) except in domes, or on gas giants at all. With this change, gas giants are useful only via remote mining and because they sometimes have "rock" moons. You can colonize those no-atmoshere ice planets with domes, but atmosphere conVersion doesn't work on them because there is nothing to convert them to. So, you see in my data set the neutrals and players all start with the same colonization tech and this concern is a non-issue.

>If there were a penalty -- perhaps
>interfering with a helpless neutral should
>cause a LOT of unhappiness, at least for
>peaceful types then it might not be as
>tricky an issue.

I think there should be some pretty severe diplomatic penalties to genocide or other sorts of "evil" behavior. The penalties would be both in happiness within your empire and the attitude of AI empires toward you.


>As for pirates, I'd rather not have
>practically undetectable fleets wandering
>around. It's a bit bizarre (that's more
>advanced tech than anybody else can have),
>and leads to gamey aspects (because
>somebody *will* capture one eventually
>regardless of self-destruct, master
>computers and so forth -- and then arguably
>should get such advanced tech. But then, it
>can't be allowed to happen because it'd
>completely unbalance the game...).

Special pirate abilities like their stealth & repair ability are "racial traits", and humans could not play pirates, so captured pirate ships would lose these special abilities just like ships of a Priopulsion Experts race lose their movement bonus if captured by a non-Propulsion Experts race. The indetectability is admittedly cinematic, but think of it as the pirates just being very clever Errol Flynn-style rogues rather than "tech". The whole concept of pirates in cinematic to start with, "Space Opera" chrome.