I noticed that custom races were added recently, and while the ingame editor does a pretty decent job I found it impossible to tweak "the little things". In GC2 I had created some races that were inherently unbalanced but fun to play (as or against), and much of this was done via XML editing the race files directly (.raceconfigxml, GC2types.xml, etc). Sometimes this involved changing tech available at the start of the game or planet quality etc, fairly delicate but straightforward once you got the hang of it.
With GC3 I can't find any such files for custom factions; the only thing I can find is a .faction file under My Games/GC3. This post seems to indicate that it isn't a binary file, nor an xml file, but a compressed archive of some kind. Like that post states too, I wonder why it is in such a format when the compression saves almost nothing space-wise.
Anyways, I'm hoping for someone (maybe even a dev?) to shed some light on how we can fine-tune edit custom races without being forced to classify them as a Mod, or affecting global variables such as the thread linked above leads to. Right now if I want a specific custom race to start with only 500 credits instead of 5000, editing variables seems to affect either all other races, or all custom races. Is it possible to edit custom races outside of the ingame editor? If so, how? If not, can some tool or method by made available before/after release?