Natives
I've seen a lot of stuff in another post, I believe it was the wish list, about native civilizations but all the suggestions either made the races pushovers, or told why other suggestions wouldn't work. So I'm starting this post to propose a system I think would work and still provide a challenge. It may have a few bugs, but I think it can be done. Please tell me what you think.
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Native races consist of species which are still confined to their home planet, but are not necessarilly stupid, merely undeveloped. At the beginning of the game you may start out with many of these tiny races each developing in their planetary womb, blissfully unaware of the aliens who have begun to travel from star to star. These races would come in four varieties:
(1) The most basic native race is of course the pushover race with no technology at all, it's civilization hasn't yet reached the industrial age and you can probably take it over really easilly, at the cost of gaining an unhappy population and no new technology at all.
(2) After that comes a race that has reached at least the level of technology we had during the two world wars, they may still be fighting amongst themselves and can build most facilities, small troops, even espionage centers. Destroying them might be easy, conquest would be much harder especially as the game goes on.
(3) Going up on the scale you reach the level where the natives are putting up defensive satelites around their world, they may also be able to build fighters to explore and defend their system. A race with very basic space travel like us in 1985-1990.
(4) Finally you reach a level of technology where the first space stations are going up, this is a race that has just begun reaching for the stars but hasn't yet developed the technology to colonize any other planets or build ships capable of traversing warp the points.
One advantage of this system is that the "Native races" could build up over time as other races died off or were conquered. If a class two race was destroyed suddenly a class one native civilization somewhere in the galaxy might enter the industrial age, and if a class three civilization was destroyed later on that class two might suddenly begin lofting it's first satellites. Eventually class four natives would be elegable to become minor races, and minor races could graduate to becoming full players when I eventually destroy the vile Turlog Empire! LOL
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