As part of a larger effort to update races, I am planning to add race versions. Instead of just changing details, we would define separate versions of the feature as a whole, with point allotments being the most obvious variation. In this way, how races work would itself would be a galaxy setting.
For example, IC has always had 120 race points. That’s just what we know. If we wanted to change this to say, 150 points, we would define that as a new version of races. Let’s get even crazier and say that there are no standard races at all. That’s another version. There are infinite possibilities.
When Supernova had Qezians we were already doing this, but not in a way that scales. Building this properly would let us re-introduce galaxies that are limited to specific race types.
Some examples:
- v1: Standards and 120 point customs (how it is now)
- v2: Qezians only
- v3: Standards only, and all have +500% speed bonus
- v4: 150 point customs only
- v5: Standards and 150 point customs
- v6: 120 point customs only, and all have -200% income penalty
- v7: https://discourse.imperialconflict.com/t/remove-point-cap-on-custom-races/2658?u=i_like_pie
There is literally no limit. With this, we also could for example have Camaar v1 one round and Camaar v2 in another, and eventually figure out the most balanced standard races and point caps.
It would also allow for other ideas to be possible, like:
- https://discourse.imperialconflict.com/t/race-war-galaxy/1158?u=i_like_pie
- https://discourse.imperialconflict.com/t/race-resource-production-bonus-es/2679?u=i_like_pie
- Normalize standard and custom races
- Make Supernova Qezian-only again
- Ops and spells that can vary by round, including testing new ones
We wouldn’t need to go nuts with this either, and we shouldn’t. We don’t want to confuse everybody, but if we had this feature in place we could start adjusting how races impact the game without having to write game-wide code every time.
This would also be something that players could experiment with in their custom galaxies. This takes our existing Race Creator feature a step further by making race parameters themselves configurable in the Galaxy Creator.
