Races

NGC 6543, the Cat's Eye Nebula. Image by NASA/ESA

Non-Player Races

Non-player races (or "NPR" for short) are your computer controlled Empires. They have the same tools available to them as the player.

Depending on your NPR generation rates, any system can potentially contain alien life. These randomly-generated races require roughly earth-like conditions to arise, though their racial tolerances can stray into relative extremes of gravity, temperature and including oxygen or methane breathers.

Research strategies and ship design also procedural (i.e. random), meaning that no two NPRs will be the same.

Sometimes two NPRs will fight or do actions where you can not see them. This leads to turns getting cut short, possibly down to 5 seconds. Typically, these periods of shortened turns will only last a short while. See Game Slowdown.

Because NPRs don't manage their resources as well as a human player, NPRs use different rules in regard to research cost. fuel costs and maintenance.

Aliens

There are 3 unique Aliens species. You turn on\off all alien incursions during game creation or

Precursors

The robotic Precursors are an ancient species that dominated the galaxy until they were defeated by the Invaders. Since then, they have fallen into decay and all that remains are few isolated groups of robotic ships that guard the ruins of defeated foes waiting for new instructions that never arrive. Their mission is simply to eliminate all non-Precursor life.

Precursors robotic ships guard some of the alien ruins and occasionally random encounters with small Precursor ships maybe created in non-ruin system. They have no real populations, although they may have small listening posts and weapon caches in the system. Although few in number and they don't have any survey ships for exploration, they are likely to be higher tech than your own Empire at game start and any starting NPRs. You will need to overwhelm, outsmart or simply avoid them until you are ready. Leave this selected as Precursors provide valuable combat experience. Rather than a complete Empire similar to your own (which is what NPRs will be).

Invaders

The menacing extra-galactic Invaders, which threaten to bring their extremely advanced technology to bear in a massive galactic purge, and already defeated the Precursors civilization during their last invasion.

They are always hostile, very high tech and extremely dangerous. For a starting game, its best to disable them so leave that box unchecked. Also beware Invaders tend to explore a lot, causing the game to become slower.

Star Swarm

The biological Star Swarm species of living ships that reproduce in space. Individually they are weak, but can be very dangerous in numbers infest any system in their way.