What is your favorite race and why?

[Unforeseen]

I love playing the Teekans, although starting out near one of their empires is a pain. They tend to expand pretty aggressively and start ALOT of random wars for some reason. Prefer to encounter them as independents, trade with them, assimilate migrants and ally the independent when it emerges. Unfortunately the last time i was able to do this was a sad experience. Shortly after the Teekans moved to Earth(i was humans]Earth suffered a quake and my economy was crippled instantly. Teekans became the dominant race on Earth, and i opted to send a colony ship to the now better developed Teekan homeworld and declared it the new capital. A few months later, it suffered it's own mass catastrophe..

This is the only other game that i've lost besides the one when i first went up against the Shakturi and lost ALL of my colonies to one world destroyer.

[Nanaki]

Well, the problem is that the current 'Rodent' racial group pretty much just incorporates all the miscallaneous mammals that have not been already included into the Humanoid and Ursidian racial groups, note that the Atuuk are actually Ursidine themselves (The game describes them as bears), but were moved to the Rodent racial group for likely balance reasons. Given, Mammalian is not a perfect name but it is far better than Rodent and, truth be told, wondering why Ursidine and Humanoids are seperate racial groups is a remarkable improvement over wondering why half of the races in the 'Rodent' group are not actually rodents.

[unclean]

The Dhayats are my favorite. I like their engine tech, and all they want to do is enslave every living thing, which is pretty laid back for a bug.

They're just kind of tricky at higher difficulties, since their econ is bad and all they want to do is build a million troops. Also they can't bomb that much since they really need population and don't want to piss off the hiveminds.

For gov I like to go Democracy > Despotism, since they can't afford much else. Democracy lets you bank some money early, tech up fast (armor troops, construction, missiles) and get rid of crap leaders, and despotism lets you 5 year plan out armor troops and not make every bug and lizard in the galaxy want to kill you. You just need to make things happen because the research + Dhayat growth penalties are brutal.

Naxxilians, Gizurians, Sluken and Hackinosh are cool too.

[Tcby]

This was all the way back on page 4! The board is quite active at the moment.

I've been thinking about playing around with the Dhayut for a while, for the reasons you mentioned. Their warp drives call to me.

I decided to load up a game with the Ugnari. It's going about as I expected. Being encouraged to expand as much as possible to snag the +5% High tech research per planet is cool. I'm playing with slightly lower colonization range (1.5) so that I'm faced with some more choices regarding expansion direction and planet quality.

I didn't know that their starting intelligence agent was so good. Tek Ixito is in the running for biggest bastard in the universe with his espionage and sabotage skills starting out at +70 and +28 respectively...golly. I see what the galactopedia meant when it said that they like to rip people off.

[Nanaki]

Racial techs are not really super important considering that you can grab other races' racial techs through either trade or espionage.

[Tcby]

But those techs add character, which is their most important quality.

In response to the point that you can get them from other races anyway, obtaining other racial techs is affected by several things:
Whether you can obtain the tech
a)quality of your agents
b)your diplomatic status with the target race

How long it takes before you can start obtaining the tech
a)when you meet them
b)whether they even spawned in your game

So in terms of gameplay there's definitely an advantage to knowing you will have quick (or any) access to a particular tech. Especially warp tech [:)]

But in my eyes the flavor that the techs give each race is more important that whether the game advantage is truly unique to them.