Why only 5 races

GCiv won't have races that die out in the first 20 turns AFAIK... Unless you put them on as "Brain Dead"(Dunno if thats in the new GCiv but it was in the OS/2).

Right. Those 5 will be able to kick your butt anytime unless you set difficult to easy and intelligence braindead. But then, why would you want 16+ braindead AI's? I'd prefer quality before quantity myself.

There will still be lots of minor races though, right? Like in Star Trek, there are only 7 or 8 major races and then hundreds which only control one or a few systems. I like that idea, and I think it is logical with how galactic colonization/population ends up. Just take a look at how we manage on this planet. Several major players and a bunch of minor ones which usually maintain themselves by being too expensive or valuable to dispense with.

Here's the reason:

Take a closer look at the games with lots of races. They act pretty much all the same with just a few variables.

With 5 races, we can put a lot of effort into giving each of them their own unique feel and behavior. In GalCiv, there is anthropology. Each race has a long, in depth history that can affect its behavior.

In addition, each of the 5 races has to have personalities to handle when the person has set them to good, evil, neutral or somewhere in between. So the history of the Drengin Empire becomes different when they are set to evil as opposed to when you set them up as a "good" race.

While there will be other races in the game that can show up, it'll be determined by events. The game supports up to 12 races but those races won't come up unless events warrant it and they will be part of the background story.

For example, there is a backstory about the precursors which is a race known as the Arnor. The Arnor used to control much of the galaxy but they left for mysterious reasons. They could come back to try to reunite the galaxy under their benign rule (so you'd have to decide whether to ally with your opponents to try to stop them or to let htem conquer you). That would be an event that would be extremely rare but we still have to setup an AI for them.

Another example is if a race like the Yor had a civil war, it could break them up into rival Yorian and Iconian sets (the Iconians are the actual synthetic life forms, the Yorians were actually humanoid - organic - but were eventually enslaved by their synthetic servants thousands of years ago but that's another story entirely). So that's how other races will come up. We want the game to not be some cold spread sheet game, we want it to feel like you're dealing with real creatures with their own in depth personalities.

And the only way to od that is to keep the # of them down. I'd rather have 5 opponents that you'll still be learning about after a year than 20 opponents that are identical except for a couple of variables like "aggression".

How about piracy? I'm not really all that keen on the "pirates" as a separate race, although it makes sense that when moral gets too low a system might rebel. However, I think that whenever a ship with more offense and movement meets a ship with a zero offense, one should be able to board that ship and re-flag it (or at least take it into tow and use it to speed up the production of one of your own ships or something). Lone transports, survey ships, and freighters should be easy prey for piracy.

Just a thought.

Frank