A thought,

and something i was able to do earlier today

Ok, so the first thing: I seem to recall reading somewhere that there was an event that could occur in the game that would cause a minor race to become a major race, i haven't seen that, so i was wondering if it exists. Forgive me if this has been asked before.

So, looking for just a bit more randomness to my game, today i was playing with minor races, trying to get them to come up more often, and/or in place of some majors. i am beginning to give the minors some attributes based on the descriptions given (like making the Snathi aggressive and evil), and i wanted a way to put them in my game. it seems the main major races are determined almost entirely by the order in the racconfig.xml file. i simply switched the first half of the races in the list with the second half, and the minor races (which were now on top), came up in place of the majors. this makes me wonder a few things about the possibility of adding races. i tried adding a minor, didn't see it come up, but i didn't try enough games to be sure it wouldn't. It was kinda cool to see the Torians as a Minor though

anyway, according to the campaign, each mission takes place in what is technically a different galaxy. it would be kinda cool to see some of the major races have the possibility to show up in some galaxies as a minor race instead, especially if they have the ability (or will have it), to become a major race later in the game. kinda like the I-league, which just sorta shows up sometimes, having a race added to the game mid-game can throw a bit of a monkey-wrench into any plans you had, and make the game possibly more interesting. On that note, how i envisioned this would be a slider in place of the check box for disable minor races, it would go from zero to 8, and then the end would be random, and so you could set the number of minor races in your game if you want.

I am gonna work a little more on this, since i liked switching them around, i would love to be able to make a randomize button, simply causing some major and some minor races to switch roles. it would be kinda cool to see the Drengin be crushed by the Jessuins.

yeah, so that was just my 2 cents, i dunno if anyone else is playing with the races like this, or has done something similar. i'll keep playing with this for a while.
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Reply #1 Top
No, the AI determines things, not the .xml. Minors have weak AI's, majors have their own scripts to do different things. What you're thinking of are the I-league, the Fundamentalists and the revolutions (Terran Confederacy etc). These are minors with the basic major AI, so they behave like slightly stupider majors.
Reply #2 Top
interesting.

yeah, i noticed that even switching their info, their behavior didn't change, so i had akilians acting like the humans, and the carnaroids acting like drengin (which was kinda cool i guess). i did manage to allow for ten opponents in a game though.

well, this would be a cool option, have (a small amount of)AI for the minors. i dunno, maybe not. it would also be nice to see an option to affect the chances of minors showing up, and the chances of the revolution or fundamentalist races occuring. having it occur more often could make the game a tad more interesting, and force you to stay on your toes.

it was still cool to watch the snathi devour the Torrians, even if the snathi beleived themselves to be the Drengin.