New idea: scavenger race

[Arantor]

Yeah, I'm in variant territory again

So, I was wondering about new races; we already talked about MoO 2's races in an MoO framework, but it occurred to me how difficult it would be to add a new race because the existing races cover every game mechanic.

So I got thinking... how could a new and distinctive race be applied? And then I thought of ID4... aliens that come to visit for the purpose of scavenging and strip-mining a world.

I haven't got a name for the race, and I'm not *entirely* sure it's a good idea yet but here goes: what about a race that, whenever it colonises a world, if the world is mineral normal or above, the race can treat it as one seam richer (mineral normal = effective mineral rich, mineral rich = effective ultra rich, mineral ultra rich = mineral crazy rich, which amounts to 4x instead of the 2x and 3x for R and UR)

But here's the catch: after a number of years, the planet degrades - permanently. You'd play this race somewhat differently; it would be all about rapid expansion, locust style - they come, they plunder, they move on. I don't know the timeframe yet for how long a planet would last, but once they've had a number of years of UR being worth CR, or R being worth UR, or normal being worth R, it would degrade for both them and everyone else, they wouldn't get any production bonuses at poor or ultra poor, but they would end up with a potential empire of ultra poor.

Thoughts?

[RefSteel]

Sounds like an interesting concept! (One of the Sword of the Stars games has something like this, right?) It could be tricky to balance, of course.

Should it be a straight turn countdown, or based on something like total production from the planet? If it's just the number of turns, the race would constantly need massive rafts of transports and infusions from the planetary reserve to each of its new worlds to get the most value out of them before they started devolving. If it were based on straight-up total production without excluding reserve funding, it would create some interesting trade-offs, where on the one hand the mechanics would encourage reserve spending only for emergencies outside of research and pop growth on Ultra-Poors, but on the other hand the race's continuing desperate need for expansion might qualify every point in the game as a de-facto emergency.

Things to bear in mind:

1) The hard cut-off between different mineral classifications (UR -> R -> normal -> P -> UP are each enormous steps, and with your proposed system, the normal -> P dropoff is even more so since it's effectively R -> P) together with the diminishing future returns and the urgency of expansion would have weird effects on the payback horizon for building factories.

2) In the original game's save files, Artifacts worlds (and Orion) have their own mineral classifications. Thus, a planet can never be rich, poor, or ultra-poor and also have Artifacts. Would this race change Orion to an Art world and Art worlds (to ... I dunno, Poor worlds?) the way they change other planets? Or would you assume a different recording system where a planet could be Art/Poor or Art/UP?

3) Playing against them would also provoke some interesting decisions, so that's a good thing.

[Dp101]

Sounds like the cravers from endless space.

[Arantor]

@Dp101 - I hadn't thought of the Cravers (Endless Space is not my favourite game, it seems to pick up the worst influences from MoO 2 and miss the broad strengths of MoO 1, I've played a few games but not played against all the races yet)

@RefSteel - the hard cut off are enormous steps, but the fact that the minute you colonise you start out with a major boost over the other races, but going mineral poor is supposed to be a major motivator to move on. But I did wonder if the hard cutoff would be a bit much. Speculative rather than anything else right now.

Perhaps it should be that the planet is treated as one level higher than it currently is for the purposes of this race, but still go down to UP eventually and the changes would affect everyone.

I was thinking of keeping artifacts separate too, but I'm not sure how that should really be treated... I don't see them doing anything different in terms of their race's vibe - they'd still be strip mining the planet to the point of reducing it to a slag heap, but I'm not sure what their benefits should be regarding arti planets. I want to say that, game mechanically, they shouldn't trash arti planets, but thematically they definitely should. I can actually imagine them even stripping Orion down to a slag heap, thinking about it, so yeah, for the purposes of degradation it should be as if an arti planet was effectively rich - they would reduce it to normal and then to poor and then to UP.

I'm sure I've had cases of arti planets receiving the mineral poor event but I haven't reviewed the save game files to see how that was dealt with. Technically speaking, I'm not trying to modify this into MoO itself, so I can save the data how I like, so I can have a different recording system if I want

And yes, playing against them would have some interesting decisions; you want to glass them as soon as it becomes possible to do so, if you have a sense of galactic preservation in mind. They are naturally strongest in the early game where their production bonuses give them a major growth advantage, because as time goes on, their empire's production decreases, meaning that their need to grow becomes greater than the other empires', and by the mid-game, unless they've been able to produce a fleet capable of glassing other empires and staging takeovers, they're going to find their own desire to reap the rewards will haunt them.

But if you can keep them back through the expansion phase, they are naturally prone to shooting themselves in the foot the way the AI Mrrshan tends to do - a sizeable fleet whose maintenance becomes crippling but in this case crippling because of an imploding economy rather than strangling a fledgling one.

Speaking of which, their bonuses probably should be production based rather than time based, related to the size of the planet they're consuming. That's both mechanically and thematically more sound, makes sense that a larger planet would have more resources and the ability to reap those resources is limited to how much production the planet can produce at a time. I would imagine that reserve spending would have to be capped since reserve funding doesn't really help strip mining. It might even counter balance their extreme production bonuses in the short term by cutting the benefit of growth - perhaps instead of spending being able to double production, it might only boost it by 50%.