Independent Races

[Unforeseen]

Why can't we do anything with them? We can't limit them to zero in the game creation screen, we can't decide which races can be independent. The only we CAN do is spoil the game by going into the editor and removing them. Why force them on us? And why not allow us to predetermine what races can be independent?

[Nanaki]

The galaxy generation is actually fairly brilliant when it comes to independant races. It spawns the race's traditional homeworld systems, Sol, Zenox, etc. etc. etc. and populates it with the native race. If the 'Independant races' setting is set to 'rare', the galaxy generator stops there. However, any setting other than 'rare' will populate systems surrounding the capital with the independant race.

As for which races are spawned, I imagine that only races flagged as playable are spawned.

[Unforeseen]

Yeah but occasionally and by that i mean rather often the generator places them in the wrong area, sometimes all the way across the galaxy from their empire race. This is why i want to turn them off. It doesn't make sense from a story persective and causes to much racial diversity in empires during the early game from colonizing independents.

[Foxxy211]

I second this. Option to turn off independents would be nice. I like independents yes, but I think it would prove an interesting challenge to a game, since you don't have that advantage to get developed colonies, but more rely on actual colonization. Expanding in the galaxy would definitely be slower. The only concern is whether the pirate AI can handle the situation. I imagine they rely heavily on raiding independent colonies.

[Nanaki]

As a pirate, im not even sure if I could survive without independants, considering my only source of income at that point would be smuggling missions and protection money, and im not even sure that would be enough to pay the maintenance costs.

[Unforeseen]

I recently played a game as a smuggler where intentionally did not raid any planets, and instead relied entirely on smuggling contracts and protection fees to pay the bills. My income was in the positive by several thousand within a year. Granted i started out with contact to two different empires, quickly met with a third and three independent colonies. All of whom i did business with. I also resolved to using cheaper ships since i was not raiding, despite that i was able to keep the other pirate factions at bay with military size fleets.

Don't get me wrong i like having independents in the game, i just don't like the fact that they are not guaranteed to generate near the race's empire that they are related to. Causing odd race combination empires from the get go. Like Sluken/Human empires.

What i want to be able to do with independents is select a number of races that WILL NOT be empires, but instead just be independent races. While preventing all the races that WILL BE empires from being independent races. This would in theory allow me to exceed the empire cap[i understand it's 5O]and vastly improve the galaxies diversity. Given that i'm playing Prewarp with research maxed it's likely that all of the independents will be empires by the time the other races get warp tech. Making for a very interesting political situation with varying levels of development all over the galaxy.