whats your favorite type of race to play?

[intrigue]

I like building custom races...
Not alwyas the most effective, but I like playing what I think of as pirate races... these are races that have:
+20 ground combat
Telepath
(with various other +/- attributes, etc.)

I then research technologies like troops pods, transporters, tractor beams (these probably come before transporters)... and then troop combat techs.

I build ships with those techs, and then many copies of beam weapons, instead of stacking them in one slot... for example, instead of a stack of 12 mass drivers, I'd have 6 stacks of 2 mass drivers. This is so I can shoot small hits to try and immobilize your ship (rather than restroy it) for earlier combat - and then this good for only knocking out your shields for later combat. (So I can use a full in tact ship for the rest of combat).

In battle, I take your ships, and use them against you. If they have technology aboard, I scrap them for it, etc.
If I built a race with heavy-G, I can eventually take out the antaren ships too. Which is wonderful for a fun late game strategy.

one last thing... anyone notice that tractor beams are wonderfully effective against Antarens? If you immobilize their ship, they will almost certainly self-distruct. Its odd.

[vmxa1]

Not odd they have quantum denotators onboard. I do not have a fav race any more as I have been playing suggested ones. Custom race thread has a ton of perspectives.

[GePap]

Black hole generators are also extremely good aginst antarans. they hardly ever try to destroy the ships with the generators- they just self-destruct aftre the first turn.

I susually play creative and something else when making my own race. Creative an lithovore was my latest pick, and its very powerful. I took the population and spying cuts to make the point up.

[nato]

My favorite science fiction thing is definitely the Federation. Not that I'm a trekie type or anything, but I really love the whole diverse, good guy type of thing. I've played most of my games as them.

My main goal is to get as many different races together as possible. Thats why I love MoO2 so much; the population units are specific to each race, and you can even move pop around to have mixed colonies. I always try to get the populations spread and not segregated.

I never annihilate, bomb, or use biologicals. I'm nice, except for the whole "you will join us" thing. Thats why I'd like a chance to get peaceful joinings.

For this, I try to get picks that improve the empire, and not the population, so that there is a better chance the new races will have value that my human pop doesn't.

I always take minus ship offense and defense, minus ground combat, and minus spying because the peaceful, open, wimpy feds are bad at that stuff. This gets 19 picks.

Then I always take democracy (a must have for the Federation) and large, rich homeworld (because I can't live without it).

The rest I don't have nailed down 100%. Actually, creative is perfect because its an empire improving choice, not a population choice, and because the Federation is so strong in science. Sometimes I take that.

But I usually don't want to play as creative. So I end up getting some combination of money bonus, charismatic, or fantastic traders.

For ships I go heavy into shields and phasors. Multi phased, hard, capacitated shields, and damaged ships get run away. I even try to tack on scout labs and security stations if theres room.

Its not a powerful race, but its fun for me.

[nato]

And now that I think about it, here is my other main race, though I don't play it nearly as often. This one models the Empire from Star Wars.

For minuses, they have -.5 money (big bureuacratic imperial inefficiency), -20 ship defense (big slow ships), and -10 spying (they are big and diverse, lots of room to slip in ... ok I needed the points).

For pluses they get large rich homeworld (I have to have that), warlord (they are very militant), and the big ones, +2 industry and +2 science (they are very advanced and have a huge fleet).

Ships get a lot of fighters and a bomber squadron, and heavy plasma cannons. Actually I have been kind of disappointed with the fighters. They take up so much space, but they all seem to get killed very fast.

I like this race a lot, I think the +2 industry AND +2 science rocks.

[vmxa1]

A little RPG in Moo.

[GePap]

Fighters are a waste of space overall: Anything less than heavy fighters doesn't give you enough punch, and they are too easy to pick off. more importantly, if your big fleet of fighters happens to be next to a ship that blows up, bye bye fighters. By late game, Beams with achilles, structual annalyzers and high energy focus are just insanely powerful.

I have never found tolerant as useful as lithovore.

[Skanky Burns]

How ironic. In Rebellion (the official StarWars game similar to MoO, only unplayable), fighters are all but useless too. They cost much production to use, die quickly and do virtually no damage. Yet in the movies, fighters were basically the weapon of choice.

[GePap]

The problem is that fighter are too easy to kill- they should be harder to kill, since in theory, they should be able to manuever out of the way of pd defenses, unlike missiles. Also, fighters should be able to cause not just general damage to shields and structures, but perhaps more specific damage to weapon systems, like taking out spcific weaspons or sytems, since in theory a fighter pilot would be able to chose targets independently and go for specific targets on a huge vessel at times, not always just shoot at the thing randomly.

fighters are always the best in movues because that makes the most interesting and exciting scenes: two huge, lumbering vessels slamming each other with big guns isn't as blood-pummping.

[nato]

vmxa1- sure! The way I see it, the imaginative role playing kind of thing basically the "fifth X" they are trying to capture for MoO3. I'd rather have a star destroyer than a collection of numbers and stats.

The AI is pretty easy to beat anyway, I have more fun doing things like that.

GePap - You summed up the problems I've seen with fighters. I knew they weren't the most effective uses of ship space at all, but I was still surprised at how quickly they all died, and for so little effect.

It got to the point where I didn't want to destroy the enemy ships they were near, because they would all get blown up. Maybe fighters should have been made immune to ship explosions.

But effective or not, you couldn't play an Empire like race without them. Besides, otherwise you would never get to try out all the less than optimal features. Who wants to win EVERY game with MIRV nukes or phasors?