But would the other AI's be able exploit that?

I really like the idea of making the species design include disadvantages as options for getting a boost in other areas, like Jeff Graws Breed Slowly But Carry a Big Stick notion.

The general idea of doing something like lowering basic factory output for Super Hive or forbidding power plants sounds interesting, but I haven't managed to get to the power plant techs yet and I know the balancing is all at rough draft stage.

Might be that most of us have fairly different ideas for disadvantages by the time DA nears RTM.

I like a lot of these but they will obviously need value-balancing. The one I don't like is the super-spy one. Unlike all the others it actually removes a strategic option from the player, at least for that opponent. I think a good compromise value would be to make it so agents are less effective, cheaper to remove, have X% chance of being discovered each turn, etc... That way I can still spy on them, and hamper their production, but it makes it much more difficult, and still adds a strategic element to combating a player with this super-power, (i.e. it's going to cost a fortune to spy on them, so maybe you'd better come up with a plan

The spore ship for Super-Anihillator sounds really cool, but wouldn't it be better as an invasion tech that everyone could have? (a really, really expensive late-game tech, mind you) It just reminds me too much of the doomstar ships in the MoO series. Once you get death-ray plus doomstar you just had to build ONE ship and then go around committing genocide, blowing up planet after planet. It got boring, but eventually everyone did it because it was tedious doing the "clean-up" of invading every last world. GalCiv2 solved this with the intelligent surrendering of opponents, but I'd hate to see it backslide into a lazy genocide strategy.

Will super-dominator get a fleet of ships EVERY time they declare war? Will it just happen once? Will the ships automatically have my best tech? Can I declare war on every civ at once, get 10 fleets of ships, buy them all off for peace treaties and then keep the ships, rinse and repeat? This could work, it's just prone to exploits.

I think what a lot of people have said is correct, some superpowers might need drawbacks associated with them to balance with the others, but I don't think all of them will (diplomacy for example).

Yes Agreed. As stated in another post I think the spore ships are way too powerfull to have at the begining. They need to be researched, be able to be stolen, and have other races be given the time to counteract when they get them. or at least have a large force to hunt them down before they do too much damage.

Yes Agreed. As stated in another post I think the spore ships are way too powerfull to have at the begining. They need to be researched, be able to be stolen, and have other races be given the time to counteract when they get them. or at least have a large force to hunt them down before they do too much damage.

Don't agree here. They're essentially transports that always work. Nothing more or nothing less.

I agree with Draginol here. Most of the other Super Abilities are far more useful than the spore ships. The spore ships are more of a gimmick than anything else. Perhaps a (very slight) diplomatic disadvantage is in order though. I suspect that most leaders would be somewhat untrusting of a race with the natural ability to destroy planets

Some concerns with Super Abilities:

1. How the AI will handle these seems both difficult and time-consuming.

2. How can I easily tell what Super Ability my opponents have? That could make a big strategic decision on how I deal with them.

3. Many of these just seem like bigger multipliers. Some are unique, but it seems like just giving more Ability points would accomplish the same thing.

Some other examples of ways things could be special that might not cause such a strain on the AI:

1. Have special buildings only that race could build.
2. Super cheap buildings. IE Iconian research labs are cheaper for them, whereas Drengin could build cheap Starbases
3. Have special types of ships/troops/spies that are better than the average

This again seems like a feature like EG- good intention, but perhaps a bear to deal with the AI...

Yes you are right Draginol! But they are slightly more than transport ships that always work. Fist off you only need 1 and you could conquer the galaxcy. I've played x5 games with them now and if you beef up your research to 100% get a spore ship (or two) out quickly, you can wipe the floor, because the other races arn't even building defenders. It can give you a great start even if the other races do catch on to whats happening, and they do. They usually all declare war on me!

Not trying to be confrontational here. It's just what I have experienced.   

Hey Draginol, what about some 'extra' super abilities that we can assign to custom races?

For example, one could be Super Starbases. Starbases would have %50 greater output, but each upgrade would cost 250bc above and beyond the what they normally would - even for evil races.

Extra abilities would be pretty easy to slap in (easy enough that you could put in one or two extra with each patch) and would add so much to replayability.

Some comments:

Super Isolationist: Balance-wise, I'm not sure if it's necessary, but it seems
natural for me that a Super Isolationist race should get a influence penalty.

Super Spy: Is it possible to gather any intelligence at all (ie: techs, ships, etc) on the Super Spy race? If not, sounds a bit overpowered. Perhaps this ability should give a diplomacy penalty since the race becomes known for its sneakiness.

Super Dominator: This might be overpowered or weak, depending on how it works: Does having a big fleet mean the race gets more ships or less ships? Do they get the ships every time they go to war, for each race they are at war with? Can they make peace and then declare war again next turn and get another set of ships?

Super Manipulator: Seems a bit weak. Wouldn't the Super Diplomat also have some extra ability along these lines?

Super Annihilator: Seems overpowered to me. They are more than just "transports that always work": 1) The 20 bil population enemy homeworld? No prob - there's no risk of losing billions and billions of your population, compared for ground invasion. 2) further, you can wipe out worlds as fast as you can build the ships without the economic costs of losing all that population or the logistics effort of shuttling populations around to get invasion forces from populous worlds. 3) The targetted world potentially becomes useless to the victimized race unless they have the proper colonization tech, so "scorched earth" tactics become feasible. 4) Can you get to spore ships without researching the invasion tech tree? If so, that's a huge savings in research you can postpone. Using this ability should have immense diplomatic consequences.

Overall, I dislike this idea due to the exploitation factor. This will be the first thing banned should the future expansion have MP as well (not that it should be a consideration for this, but still). There's just too much potential to make the game easy with this- I'd suggest at least make super abilities toggle default to OFF.

1. How the AI will handle these seems both difficult and time-consuming.

For me, the only point of the game is AI. That's why I write these games. I need features like super abilities to motivate me to write the AI.

It also gives the game the opportunity to stand out because most hard core strategy gamers already know that things like this are so exploitable that the typical AI would just be crushed. Therefore, if I can write AI that really uses this stuff, people will be able to see the value of good AI and how much of a difference in making a game fun it can be.

Lord Reliant:

I like what you are saying there.

For instance, Super Spy might get a building that nobody else has that lets them keep spies off a given planet. And the building could double as something that improves morale so that it's not a wasted tile.

Immediate changes id make...

Super Isolationist: Increase min movement to 6 spaces.

Super Hive: Factorys are 25% cheap than normal instead of 1 turn production.

Then do lots more testing. The super abilities will never all be equal but the innate abilities and starting planet sizes can be used to balance races for metaverse purposes so everyone doesn't just pick the same race.

Super Doninator for the Drengin sounds rather boring for me. The Drengin are the iconic race of Gal Civ and deserve a more exciting super ability imo.


Lenius.

These sound really cool. I do agree that some of them sound unbalanced (though I think playtesting is the only way to really find out).

Specifically, super breeders sound underpowered - 4x population growth is great, but maintaining 100 approval rating is pretty difficult early in the game (at least to a mediocre player like me) so this power will only kick in in the late game, when population growth is less important. Maybe stagger the bonus (i.e. 80% approval gets 2x growth, 90% gets 3x, 100% gets 4x)?

Also, since I'm suffering from freezing bugs I didn't get an opportunity to playtest much yet, and I haven't seen spore ships - are they available from turn 1? Having a transport that always works isn't unbalancing on its own. Being able to build a transport early in the game is - it'd be pretty easy to just capture 2/3 of your neighbors' home planets before they have a chance to build defenders. I'd say that either the spore ship should only be buildable once transports are, or they should cost so much you can't rush build them with the starting $5000 (if this is already the case, nevermind).