What you (as the leader of your race) know about races you met? Right now, I've got two possible answers:



1. You know everything about races you met. Immediately! In the same turn you both contacted. Why? Because you don't spend even a single research point to discover something about that race.



2. You don't know anything about races you met. And you don't want to know. Why? Again, because you don't spend even a single research point to discover something about that race.



That's strange.



So, suggestion: let's add some race specific research.



Technically, a player will get new race specific research tree - for every race that player met. If there are three races in current game - every player will get two additional trees to research.



Race research trees can be the same or different for every race. I think they can be relatively small (comparable to main 4 trees).



And what things are there in that tree? After first contact you have access to one research topic - "General Information". After that, you get access to culture, history, military etc. subtrees. In every subtree there are some tiers: "Mil 1", "Mil 2", "Mil 3", ... for example. So, the further you research military side of the race - the better you act in battles with that race. The further you research culture side of the race - the better you trade with that race. Etc. And, of course, some deep knowledge about a race can give you advantage in diplomatic negotiations.

Eh...I'm not sure I see your reasoning here. It's already difficult enough for non-science focuses races to make much of a dent in research trees. Once I start hitting the middle/upper-middle tiers of the trees (as the UE/Sheredyn) new tech starts taking a while to research. I want to get through those, however, and not have to expend turns going through seven other trees (as I only play with a full game of eight).



That's just very clutter-some in my opinion. Plus it changes how other mechanics of the game would have to work. Trade is meant to just be a static, constant bonus. You never get more/less from trade routes unless you make more/lose them--the Science and Dust you get from a route never changes, only the amount of routes you have. Now, though, a way for them to change would have to be implemented, and a new series of balancing testing to make sure it can't be exploited. The same with the military idea. If someone is focused on trying to get more diplomacy tech, and an enemy just bulldozes through their race-military tree...How much of a bonus do you get in those battles? Are they not at an unfair disadvantage, unable to fight back against an enemy that apparently knows everything about how their military works?



I don't know, I just don't see adding more trees like this as helping the game that much.

i would honestly like to see existing tech in the trees changed to a more race specific version for better or for worse depending on the races preferance,



for example, i could see for the UE/Sheridan faction them having above avarage kinetic and missile tech and having more buildings and tech specific bonuses towards industry and dust generation kinda corporate or slavary based. This could also extend to ship hull, having bonuses to either tonnage or general effectiveness of some modules like a slight bonus towards kinetic weaponry effectiveness on specific hulls or less space needed for the higher teirs of kinetic defences or what have you, essentualy something to pull the existing races more apart from each other not just in the way of looks and racial affinitys and so on.

Yeah, I really agree with FinalStrigon, here.



So far, you a) haven't told us specifically what this would mean in game terms, and b) you've just made it more difficult to obtain game-crucial things by providing additional things that may also be game-crucial that players will have to expend a limited non-refundable resource to obtain, when, as Strigon said, there's already races that have a specific disadvantage to even getting through the base four trees that already exist.



It'd be like saying "well imagine if you could just pay money to be permanently better with a specific race". It would totally advantage the UE or any custom economy-strong faction over others in terms of allowing them to leverage their specialty in a way that couldn't be reciprocated to the same degree.



Without more development you may just be setting up the Sophons, for example, to have a specialised advantage against whomever they meet first, because they'll have an impetus to plough some RP into that race's tech tree early on, certainly more RP than that other race will be able to muster in the same amount of time.



There'd have to be a lot of consideration put into balancing this because you could get some complex emergent gameplay happening depending on who meets who first, especially if the new Race Trees are as extensive as you seem to be suggesting.



What if, for instance, the Sophons run into the United Empire, and decide they want to trade. So they plough some RP into the "trade with UE" tree, and the result is... the UE don't want to trade, and just slammed a smaller but considerable amount of research into the "kill the Sophons" tree, which means that the Sophons have just permanently blown a lot of non-refundable RP. Now, being the Sophons, they can probably pull it out of the fire in terms of making up the lost RPs, depending on how far they went in their "UE trade" tree, but the point stands.



Basically, asking players to dump considerable resources into unique, potentially useless investments is a very iffy proposition. I don't want to trash your whole idea right off the bat here, because I'm a big fan of thematics and fluff being tied into gameplay and it could be sort of neat to have a "first contact" experience that is more than just "oh, here's the [whatever]s".



However, as it stands this idea needs a lot more explanation and development in terms of exactly how it changes and improves gameplay, and exactly how it won't screw up balance, at the very least in terms of how it may give players things to shoot for that might turn out to be worthless.

Reworded the title.