Matrix Games Forums

What is the maximum amount of empire/races that can be added to the game currently in Shadows?

I'm asking because I have done some changes to Haree78's DW Exteneded Mod, which is great BTW. I have modifyied it to include an additional 21 races for a total of 58. But from reading older posts, I came across some info that the game limits the amount of races to 50. The thing was that the post was referring to Legends. So I am wondering if the hard cap was raised in Shadows.

Currently my game loads all 58 races but I am experienceing some crashes when I try to zoom in some other system. I'm trying to figure out the problem and I think this could be it.

From memory there isn't a cap on amount of races, just a cap on 50 ship sets.
However....I doubt many players have had that many races and I wouldn't be surprised if there are some issues that haven't been spotted before.

Currently I have 58 shipset in the ship design folder. Would that cause problems or would the game just ignore anything above 50?

In the races folder what I had before was for each corresponding race, it had it's own ship design picture so race 57 would be...
DesignsPictureFamilyIndexPirates ;57

So according to you that would be making errors I assume? But the race I added was able to load ship design folder 57 for it's own race.

'Designs picture family index when race is Pirate: index of default ships pictures used for this race from ship pictures contained in Images\units\ships\ folder or Customization\YourTheme\shipImages\ folder
'-1 = default random pirate ship images, 0-50 = normal ship design family index
DesignsPictureFamilyIndexPirates ;-1

Would making it -1 also cause errors and choose a random number between 1-58?

50 is really the place you should cut off at adding races, anything about that will get resource intensive if not cause problems.

think of 50 as a practical limit (rather than hard cap)

50 works just fine for me (after I found all the bugs), although I usually play games with no more than 25 races in them. I expect such games would become unplayable too if I played longer than early-mid game due to the way the game handles resources.