Modding my way through...

[Puke]

im confident that both of those can be done, though the first depends on what you mean by copycat.

as im sure you know, creative modding involves taking a game feature and bending it in a way that it wasnt designed for. technically, this is copycatery.

there is a detailed list of what features are available to you, in a text file in each directory. for instance, you could have an event that:

- adds an item to your hold
- takes an item from your hold
- destroys a ship component
- adds a ship to your fleet

im sure there are more, but those are just the ones that i can think of encountering in the game, off the top of my head.

wither an event does one of those things can be contingent upon:

- wither you have a specific item in your hold
- wither you have any iterm with a specific variable
- wither you are frendily or hostile with a specific race

and a ton of other things (i peeked at the file).

so the diplomacy model could be expanded upon with racial rivalries. you could make it so that befriending one race angers another. or make it such that you need to make peace with a race before engaging on a quest, or visiting some planet. or you could need to find a key before opening the stasis cone.

I have no idea how to insert quests like Primordious or the Kawangi, but your Garthan Quest is imminently do-able. When I was dorking around with the demo, I was changing the starting ship type to various things to see what different ship hulls were like, and what their default equipment was.

Those Derilects are pretty cool, although they've got no cargo room and no speed. Heck, I think one of them is even missing engines. In fact, many of the ships have little or no cargo. But REGARDLESS of that, what you ask is simple. Change the starting ship to a Garthan Light Carrier, and write a new briefing for it. then seed a bunch of random events that are like the existing "Found lost pilot" type events, but make them Garthan pilots and Garthan fighters. Since only one event of each type can spawn, be sure to make multiple copies of the event (maybe with differently named fighters).

scoreing will be an issue, so you will want to reballance the scoreing system. Mabe use the Military Mission as a template, and increase the points for fleet size. I cant imagine Garthans hireing space mercinaries or rescuing alien pilots, so either get rid of those events, or change them to combat encounters where you fight the mercinary. That way the only points you get for fleet size, will come from the pilots you rescued.

Since you will be reducing the number of alien races by 1, you may want to mod in a randomly spawned human race, with some ships of their own scattered about. should probably upgrade the basic systems on the military and NPC ships, otherwise they might be a bit of pushovers.