Feature Series - #14 Minor Species

Happy Halloween and welcome to part 14 of our Features Series! Today we will be discussing minor species and what players can expect. Minor species in Lord of Rigel have the potential to play a pivotal role in helping the player move their ways towards military or diplomatic victory. While certainly other 4x games have minor species they are often ignorable and the player can easily compensate for not maintaining good relationships with minor races.

We have added and tuned some of the mechanics of minor races in Lord of Rigel to compensate for some short fallings we felt that prior strategy games have had. First and foremost is the fickle nature of maintaining alliances with minor species. Often players have an alliance with a minor species only to find out the next turn the another AI buy them out of that alliance. Players can expect the AI to be more reliable just like the main species in maintaining their alliances.

Additionally we have provided some incentives to interact with minor species. Strategic resources that are needed for massive ships and structures will be found on the worlds of minor species as well as the ability to have minor species have species traits that are highly desirable for the player to want to annex their territory in order to spread that population to other worlds to boost production, research, farming, etc. We have added some roadblocks so that players can't take the easy route to annexing minor species by military force. There will be large diplomatic penalties with all factions for attempting to take a minor species by force that include war with the elder species if your diplomatic status is already low enough.

Making friends with minor species won't just be about sending over roses and technology. Minor species will grow their influence if they are given the right technology such as FTL. This will allow them to start growing into the galaxy themselves and of course make controlling them to your advantage harder. So players are going to have to walk a fine line between spoiling minor species and in the end potentially hurting themselves.

Overall players should find some refreshing mechanics with the minor species in Lord of Rigel. Most importantly we have provided the rewards and consequences to the player that are necessary to grab their attention towards interacting with these species and importantly dealing with these species. But there are some caveats and players simply can't interact with these species with brutish hands. Instead they will need to be treated with as much care as the player would treat the other larger species in the game.

Join us next week and don't forget to help us Kickstart the Galaxy!