Re: Races
How much effect would some of these things actually have on gameplay from the player's perspective? Okay, a race that lived in a corrosive or caustic atmosphere might rely on ceramics rather than metals, but to the player it's still a resource cost. And varying research and construction costs by home environment is probably rather hard to balance. The idea of setting tolerances for temperature, atmosphere and gravity is definitely workable - Stars! used something like it, and it was a key part of the race design. I rather enjoyed it. Possibly having 6 environment variables is too many though... it could become too easy to end up in games where all the players had such different preferences that nobody needed to fight each other.
I didn't think much of race design in the SE games either - the MOO2 system of checkboxes for preferences and predilections allowed a whole lot of variety while still encouraging competition for resources, and the Stars! system of sliders did the same in a different way. I'd like to see something more like Stars! myself, as far as race design goes. It was fun and a little unusual.
By the way, why place humans at the low end of radiation resistance? Earth has a relatively thin atmosphere, isn't too far from our nice hot yellow sun, and for that matter we don't live underwater where our surroundings would provide a rarely handy radiation shield. I'd prefer to see humans around the mid-point of radiation tolerance.
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