buggish?

[MetalKing]

I've encountered a problem with the diplomacy.

I've played the game 4 times now with different races. Once i was playing with the trilarians and i got a message that I encountered another race. The race i met were the trilarians!? How can this be is this a bug?

The third time i played(i think) i chose the cyonids and i was a starting member of the orion senate. And again i noticed that another member of the senate was cynoid?!?

I hope they fix this.

[darcy]

Works as designed.

I don't like the design, though.

[Epistax]

umm excuse the other commenter, I'm sure what he/she meant to say is that there can be duplicates of races. In my latest game I was trapped in an arm of a 3 arm galaxy by two harvesters. It was amusing because they both did the exact same things diplomatically on each turn, probably because I encountered them both at exactly the same time.

I think if you encounter another race the same as yours, you have a good chance of maintaining good relations, even if you're both xenophobic.

[smellymummy]

there can be two civs of the same race in the game??

is this true?

[vmxa1]

Yes have you not run into it? Ikicools will often be there, when I play them.

[MetalKing]

If this is the design well it doesn't seem realistic. Imagine there would be two americans in civ 3?? Come on...

[Arnelos]

Yes, there can be more than one of each race.

Later in the game, if any planets declare independence from various empires, you can even have upwards of 4 or more of a single race running around (though most of them will be one-planet colonies that declared independence).

The total number of possible players in a game is 32, even though you can only START a game with 18 (including the New Orions).

So yeah, it's both entirely normal to start a game with duplicates and it's entirely normal for the number of players to sometimes EXPAND rather than shrink later in a game.

Gives you another incentive to watch out for unrest

As for why STARTING with duplicates of the same race is not "unrealistic":

Read the backstory, folks... the idea behind the dublicates for each race is that the New Orions didn't necessarily make sure each race was entirely confined to its homeworld over the period of the "Dark Age". In some cases, stray colonies of one race might have escaped the Antarans' notice and others they just didn't bother with, etc, etc, etc.

Since the starting conditions of the game are that each of the player races are essentially the refugee leftovers after a dark age that reduced all of their civilizations to collective rubble and those ORIGINAL civilizations had colonies all over the place, it shouldn't be surprising that in the dark age they got seperated and formed their own independent civilizations when the dark age ended

From a GAMEPLAY standpoint... this provides an interesting means of preventing players from griping and playing rock-paper-scissors with each other to see who gets to play the Psilons in MP