We are hard at work creating the next Galactic Civilizations III beta and we will have a lot of fun things for you to play with. But I wanted to talk about one of my favorites, Custom Races.
First off there are 2 ways to create custom races. First you can add them as a mod (but more about that in a future post). For this post I wanted to talk about everything you can do in the in game tool to create a wide variety of unique, interesting and weird species to populate your universes.
First off you will notice that we have a new choose civilization window. The last one did a really good job of allowing you to select 1 of the 8 base factions, but we wanted space for more, so that players would feel free to create their own and wouldn’t have to scroll to get to them. Don’t mind the brown and gold UI colors, I was playing as my custom faction, the Marauders, and those are their UI colors.
You may notice that the Iconian and the Thalan are enabled now, and I’ve created 5 new customer factions, the Cult of Cinder, the Jade Council, the Marauders, the Quantum Core and the Hive.
Creating a new faction is pretty easy, click create custom race and you have a lot of options to choose from. The above is where I set the name, picked the logo and filled in some detail. You can also see a floating “FG Image” button that appears to have escaped from the window it belongs on.
This is my favorite window. Our artists are really amazing and I love this model in particular. Creating the way he looks involves selecting a character image and a background image. These can be animated binks or still images and you can mix and match them if you want to use this guy but put in science lab, the Drengin war room or an organic chamber that looks like he’s flying around inside someone spleen.
This is where the magic happens. I want my Maurders to be restless pirates so they get an approval penalty (Content -2), but they are very effective at both invading and defending planets (Brutal +2 and Courageous +2) as well as having a high range (Adventuresome +2) and speed (Fast +2) so they can get into trouble. I also made all the other factions dislike them a bit (Likeable -1). They aren’t as bad as being a neighbor with the Yor, but they aren’t much better.
As for abilities I gave them Starfaring so they are immune to Nebula effects and they get their first Starbase module for free and Prolific so they get double the population provided by colony ships when they found a colony (they must throw a heck of a party when they land).
Personality may not mean tons when you are playing them, but it means everything when the AI is playing them. Character traits is used by the AI to evaluate a wide range of decisions, from which way to vote on a UP proposal to when and if it should trade or declare war. Priorities are used to make decisions about which Tech to research or Improvement to build.
This way even if two races have similar stats they can be played by the AI very differently.
Which brings us to one of the best reasons to create custom factions. Even if you don’t play as them it’s a great way to fill your universe with opponents to defeat and to make sure every game of Galactic Civilizations III is a new experience.
Next up: Modding https://forums.galciv3.com/461766/page/1/