Races

Races or Empires are the various competing forces that are vying for control of the galaxy], divided in two groups Player driven and Computer controlled.

Overview

Each Empire has Title, Species Name and Homeworld Name (default:'Terran Federation', 'Human' and 'Earth') these are flavour settings that let you customize your Empire. Each Empire is defined by its racial traits and species tolerance. Additionally, you set your government type, Empire and Commander Theme.

You create a race manually on the F9 window as either player-controlled or an NPR. You can view Race details from the Races window Ctrl+F2.

Racial Characteristics

Racial traits give various bonuses and penalties to the Empire and its starting conditions. This can be affected by the Empires government type.

• Xenophobia (1-100): Represent your race fear of others not of your race or government. Xenophobia is an annual penalty to your diplomatic relations with all other races.
• Diplomacy (1-100): Represent your Race ability to persuade other races. This is used to offset the Xenophobia of another race.
• Militancy (1-100): Represent the likelihood this race will choose military force to achieve its goals.
• Expansionism (1-100): Represent the desire of this race to increase its territory.
• Determination (1-100): showing the determination of this race to proceed with a chosen course of action despite setbacks.
• Trade (1-100): A rating from 1-100 showing the willingness to trade with other races and to establish/allow trading posts
• Translation Skill (-25 to +25): A modifier to attempt to establish communications with another race.

Player Races

During any campaign the player may choose to start as Human on Earth, create a custom race(advanced) or create multiple-races(advanced). Beware, all player-driven Races are run entirely by players.

Non-Player Races

Non-player races (or "NPR" for short) are your computer controlled Empires. NPRs are randomly-generated races that can be discovered while exploring the galaxy. That have the same tools available to them as the player Empires, and are not visible to the SpaceMaster.

If you have the Generate New Empires as NPRs option set, any system can potentially contain alien life, based on your NPR generation rate. 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.

NPRs will respect a zone of ten million kilometers around the capital planets of alien races who are non-hostile when they decide whether to investigate new non-hostile sensor contacts. 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.

The precursors did have a Jump Gate network and some of those jump gates remain. 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.