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For this article, we’re going to go through some of the civilizations and the starting improvements they get that replace the Capital Mainframe and Industrial Center.
Terran Resistance
These guys are the most similar to the Terran Alliance so we tried to give them something similar but also more in line with the characteristics of a civilization that had to set up a home world with some haste.
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Similarly, the communications array makes the intelligence of the population higher and, as a result, makes the planet really do well if they are choosing to slow the colony rush.
Navigators
The Navigators are a mysterious race that has been forbidden from interacting with other civilizations to any significant degree. But they are pretty amazing at interstellar travel.
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Another recurring theme you will see is that many of the new improvements work by spawning destructible (usually) mini improvements on tiles. Many times they’ll also spawn more tiles as well. These mini improvements aren’t particular powerful but by getting them instantly the player gets a big early boost and can still transition to something more later.
Mimots
The cute fluffy Mimots win by out reproducing everyone. Now they will get some interesting improvements that lend themselves to that strategy and tries to make up for the fact that they’re…well pretty dumb.
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Xeloxi
The beautiful space criminals have one of the most powerful but more challenging improvements to use.
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This improvement is tricky too. That’s because it starts out wimpy and gets better over time. The amount of research it brings in grows as there is more tech out there to steal.
Arceans
The Arceans are fairly conventional but like the Resistance, they get some improvements that buff their citizens.
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Unlike improvements that give a % boost to the citizen stats, the Neural Link provides a raw amount of intelligence and social skills to the citizens.
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Altarians
The Altarians, being an ancient race, get access to Precursor tech.
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Yor
We had a lot of fun with the robotic Yor. We felt that the synthetic species should be pretty distinct from the fleshlings out there.
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These relics can do different things. In this case, one does influence and another research and the other manufacturing. They can be destroyed to make room later.
Torians
For the Torians, they have a really pretty water world. To that end we decided to take a different approach.
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Drath
The Drath are pretty similar to the Altarians actually but they also get an Arms Expo which helps get them well liked early on (and rich).
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Corporate Sector
The galactic capitalists and entrepreneurs of the Centauron quadrant of the milky way galaxy take the view that no one should invade their planets because they’ll be utterly ruined by the time they’re done with them anyway.
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And no entrepreneur would be complete with a patent office.
Baratak Grove
No civ made us feel more ashamed of ourselves than the Baratak. Here’s a race of tree people. Now go build a factory.
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These roots help boost the planet’s research by a great deal.
Luxar
A close second in the “Shame on Stardock!” camp are the Crystaline Luxar. Ooh, a beautiful crystal species. Go build a factory.
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It should be noted that a lot of their buildings get distributed across the tech tree.
The Korath
The Korath aren’t PG villains. The Drengin are your pretty standard PG villains. The Korath are monsters.
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The ruined Torians can be sent out. But because they’ve been castrated, they won’t really reproduce. So keep that mind. On the bright side, they are always “happy”.
Ethnologies
We hope that these changes will make games feel a lot more unique. Of course, 2.2 also adds a bunch of unique events as well (and the DLC contains a lot more).
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