Designing your own Race in New Game.... ???

[Akurgan]

When you select a new game.. you have the choice of picking and tweaking out a race... and I have some questions regarding that.

Culture:What choices are the best and reasons why for Cultures?

Characteristics: what are the best choices to increase or decrease in characteristics?

Advanced Traits: what are some traits that are good to choose or must haves?
and of the additional research trees one may choose which are best?


Happiness Type: Peaceful Bloodthirsty and neutral.. Opinions on whats best to use?

thanx.. hope to hear some good replies from all you SE vets.

I'm a total n00by to this game

[Phoenix-D]

Culture: depends on your style. Always at least pick one of the +5 cultures- free bonus, no disadvantage.

Characteristics: depends on your style. Swarm attacks? Increase maintaince and shipyard rate. Sabatoge them to death? Increase cunning. Damn the torpedos, CHARGE!, increase aggressiveness and defensiveness.

Racial traits: yet again, style. Organic lets you turn out more ships, faster, and has good seeker and armor.

Temporal has better shipyards and some 4x to shield weapons.

Religious has the Almighty Talisman, which makes your direct-fire weapons hit ALL the time. Litterally. It also has the Alligence Subverter, the borg in a box. Bring computer viruses. Also some decent facilities- the Shrines.

Crystalline has good armor and some armor-skipping weapons.

The other advanced traits- emotionless is IMO overpriced, even considering you can drop the happyness attribute to 50% with it. Enhanced Storage Techniques is very valuable, as is Propulsion Experts. The rest depend on your style.

Happyness- I haven't played Bloodthirsty, but don't play neutral unless you mean it. Neutral races are a PAIN to keep happy.

Phoenix-D

[TerranC]

I Don't consider Myself a vet.
But I do play a lot so...

Culture...
It really depends on what kind of race you envision it to b, but strategically, Neutral is the best as it has no ups and downs.

But If you did want a culture, Politicians are my first choice as they have +5 to happiness, +2 to Space Combat, and +5 to trade that makes up the Lost -5 to production.

Actually you can kind of save time by saying what cultures you don't want to pick.

Engineers are one.
They have -2 to intel, -5 to trade, -5 to space and ground combat. Even though you can make lots and lots of stuff, eventually they will drain you sooner or later.

Zealots are probably the worst to pick. -2 in production, -5 to research and intel. Even though you have significant combat bonuses, you really don't have a use for an undersupplied, obsolete navy.

(Even though you can equal it out with Racial points, it's better to pick a nice culture and save those points for racial abilities)

If you want to, you should put a plus 5 to every part of the characteristics but seriously,

Research should be put in 5-10 Plus.

Tolerance really doesnt upset the balance of power same with reproduction and happiness as you go up the tech ladder.

Ground Combat can be afforded to be cut. Same with trade. Not drastically though.

Cunning is so-so, really based on what YOU want, and Aggresiveness and Defensiveness add to your ship's hit-to modifiers.

Add Points to Ag if you want to outshot and kill.
Add Points to Df if you want an another day to live and fight. (This should be considered more than AG since some races will be able to outshoot you better and Building ships after ships are numbing on the mind and resources.)

Vocational Aptitudes are always a welcome to add bonuses.

Production marks will make your mines chug out more, decreasing the number of planets that you have to have. (although it's probably 1-5...)

Repair Aptitude isn't really something that you have to consider as with technology develops, either your ship is dead or it's alive unscathed. And Space Yard Tech will be always better.

Construction Aptitude is a Must but you need to have more than 10%+ to see its affects really IMHO.

Maintenence Aps are really saying do you want to save money or not? Take your pick.

For Advanced Traits,

I would recommend Propulsion Experts as it gives you 1 extra movement. It's more crucial than you think.

Natural Merchants help save that one extra facil space and fast expansion by eliminating the need for spaceports.

Hardy Industrialists are something you want to skip the whole Construction Aptitude altogether. Even though a nice addition, it's really unnecessary compared to other uses that racial points have.

Emotionless is COMPLETE WASTE. Let's just leave it at that.

Racial techs are unique and all give advantages that can't be topped really. But Crystaline tech gives the most decisive advantage because of Crystaline Armour and Shard Cannons.

Money makes the world go round.
Happiness type should be peaceful. You can spend less to keep your people happy and actually get expansion and lots of extra stuff.

Bloodthirsty likes blood. To get blood, you need to research weapons then you need to build the ship with weapons and send it away and away till you ice many, many ships, worlds and races... and by the time you do that, someone else is getting richer by the minute and more advanced than you. And when you meet that race, well your people's happiness isn't the first thing on your mind.

And You'd be lucky if your navy didnt start abandoning ships because of money shortage.

I Hope that helps.

Edit: For Home Planet Preferrences, even though it doesnt make a different which atmosphere you pick, pick Gas Giants as home planet type.

Even though the starting home planet size would all be same for all races in the Gold, you still have an advantange in early game expansion as there are NO SMALL GAS GIANTS. You always get Medium to Huge, which means more room for facilities and more room for mines or research in Early Games.

[ 15 March 2002: Message edited by: TerranC ]

[Urendi Maleldil]

Emotionless is so expensive because you can then reduce the regular happiness modifier all the way down and so get more points.

[Phoenix-D]

Which happens to be be only 800 points. So emotionless effectively costs 2200 points. It also makes your planets perpetually "happy", NOT jublient. There's a 20% difference in production there IIRC. IMO emotionless should cost more like 2000 or 2300.

Look at it this way. You can take emotionless, and get that benifit- or take Advanced Storage Techniques and use PART of the extra facility/cargo space for troops, getting a higher overall bonus and protection against invasion. Requires some research, but that can be partially offset with the remaining racial points.

Phoenix-D

[LGM]

quote:

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Originally posted by TerranC:
I Don't consider Myself a vet.
But I do play a lot so...

Culture...
It really depends on what kind of race you envision it to b, but strategically, Neutral is the best as it has no ups and downs.

But If you did want a culture, Politicians are my first choice as they have +5 to happiness, +2 to Space Combat, and +5 to trade that makes up the Lost -5 to production.

Actually you can kind of save time by saying what cultures you don't want to pick.

Engineers are one.
They have -2 to intel, -5 to trade, -5 to space and ground combat. Even though you can make lots and lots of stuff, eventually they will drain you sooner or later.

Zealots are probably the worst to pick. -2 in production, -5 to research and intel. Even though you have significant combat bonuses, you really don't have a use for an undersupplied, obsolete navy.

[ 15 March 2002: Message edited by: TerranC ]

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When you pick culture, you should look at the value of points it gains for you and that varies depending on your racial allocations due to plateua points in buying racial traits. For example, After you get past 110, Maintenance goes way up in point cost. If you want 115% Maintenance, consider taking Merchant with 110 instead of paying for 115%. If you want Attack and Defense of 130, take Beserker, do not buy you way to 130. If you want 125 in attack and defense consider Warrior. If you want high Intelligence, take schemer. If you want high research, take Scientist. If you are playing with average traits pick the one with the highest point value, I forget which.

What you should do is pick what attributes you want to have Extreme values and use Culture to help you get the Extreme values more cheaply. I like low maintenance races myself (I used to play no maintenance before they capped it at 5%), so I go for 115 to 120. Because of that, I usually play a Merchant race. The difference between 120 and 115, is 120 can support a fleet twice as costly as 115 or 5 times as big as a 100% race.

Never pick neutral as it gains you nothing, and some cultures give +5% in one area with no negatives.

[LGM]

For Happiness type I advocate Peaceful, even if that is not your style. Here are the reasons:

1. You can happiness from building ships, signing treatings, and winning battles.

2. You lose happiness from broken treatings and declarations of war.

3. You have a smaller penalty than bloodthirsty races do for lost battles and no decision battles.

4. You can gain happiness for incrementally increasing your alliance levels one level at a time.

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Other tips:

Offer a Non Agression treaty to races first. Bloodthirsty races want to go directly to war or jump to as high of a treaty level in one shot to minimize the negative effect on their empire. Bloodthirsty races do not like incremental treaty improvements.

When you identify a bloodthirsty race, fight lots of small battles that you can win or acheive no decision. Lost battles hurt bloodthirsty races more than others.

Never break a treaty with a bloodthirsty race. Go straight to war, otherwise, they can declare war the following turn and gain another benefit and give you another negative (assuming you are not bloodthirsty.

Neutral races are even more prone to lots of small actions as every battle hurts them. They want big decisive battles. Make them fight lots of little ones. You can even sacrifice ships just to keep the pressure on them. Look at Happiness.txt to see the details of the modifiers. Neutrals do get the biggest automatic positive per turn, but there is little else they can do to improve happiness apart from troops and facilities.

Peaceful is best as building ships and winning battles reward you. Bloodthirsty must stay consistently victorious to reap benefits.

[Gryphin]

Akurgan ,
I think what they are all saying is it really is up to you. Play several Small Maps with a Few AI. Then move to Medium maps with a Few AI.
Track your expansion in all of the areas on the "Scors" list. Then decide how you like to play.

[dumbluck]

quote:

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Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
Religious has the Almighty Talisman, which makes your direct-fire weapons hit ALL the time. Litterally. It also has the Alligence Subverter, the borg in a box. Bring computer viruses. Also some decent facilities- the Shrines.

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Err... hate to break this to you, man, but the AS is in the Psychic tech tree, not the religious tree...

[Phoenix-D]

Oooops. Yeah, sorry

Phoenix-D