Alien Races

Str8_Gain · #11 February 17th, 2001, 06:45 AM

quote:
Originally posted by DirectorTsaarx:
Another trick would be to "close off" certain tech areas based on use of racial techs. For instance, if you use temporal techs, you don't get to research the standard beam weapons. Organic races don't get either beam weapons or seekers (since they have their own seekers). Granted, the AI's usually focus on available racial techs, but they still eventually spend research points on other areas. Why waste the research points? Of course, I'm not certain how to balance this yet, but it should be doable...

Heeheehee, look what happens when you use the search functions to find out stuff

I've been considering doing this for races totally mechanical in nature (ie. Artificial Intelligences). I was considering adding a Racial Trait for this, that would require Emotionless and Mechanoid as secondary traits (yes, this would cost big in terms of racial points).

One thing I'd like to be able to block off, as an example, from being available is the conventional Industry-to-Computers tree (since a mech race would have this to begin with, there's no need to research Industry first). So far, I've come up with ideas for a few components/facilities that have close analogues in the regular (non-race specific) tree, but it simply wouldn't make sense for a mech race to start with, for example, the bridge/lifesupport/crewquarters combo when they should rightfully start with Master Computers or some equivalent, to reflect the nature of that species.

If I can't block off a tree entirely, I'd like to find a way to block availability of specific components that are normally there in the regular tree (like the B/LS/CQ combo mentioned above), and replace them with the components I'd like there for that specific race (all the other races would have tech trees that are unaffected unless they were also mechanicals).

Adding in new tech trees and racial traits to use them looks easy enough, but so far I'm drawing a blank on how to block off certain components/trees, given the current structure of the text files.