Race skills

[Bluddy]

This is a thread for race skill ideas. Feel free to suggest more stuff.

- Idea: crew members give you a single random skill from their race's skill tree when they reach a certain experience level. If they're not happy enough,
they stop providing that skill. (This may be too strong and need to be adjusted)
- Skills that let you manipulate the simulation (affect planets/races) should have very long cooldown times -- on the order of minutes.
- Just to give a general overview, my approach is to think about every aspect in the game, and then think of ways we can thematically mix things up (reduce some restriction) for a particular race's lore.

== Drakk: most skilled pilots and pets ==

- Skill: This builds on the idea that turn rate is best at a certain speed (around 180) and gets worse both higher and lower than that. Drakk, as the best pilots, could have the ideal turn rate speed range widened, so they can turn just as well from 100-250.
- Skill: no slowdown from gravity fields. Allows Drakk ships to outmaneuver other ships around suns and planets, making them ideal battlegrounds for the Drakk.
- Skill: no effects from storms. Again, the Drakk are so skilled that they can maneuver well in storms and avoid their effects, thus making them ideal places for fighting enemies.
- Skill: boost to manually aimed ballistics. Drakk are great pilots, and one effect is that they can handle manual shooting better.
- Skill: planetary ace. Gives you an attack/dmg boost when attacking over/near a planet. Makes it easier to pick off defending race ships.
- Skill: boost dmg/health of pets.
- Skill: speed demon. This has to do with the fact that I think the max speed of 300 is actually *too fast* in Drox 2 (especially too fast for missiles). 200 max + boosts is more than enough, and you can keep the turn rate as it is. Drakk would then be able to reach a faster speed normally, without boosts.

== Fringe: energy race ==

- Skill: skill that lets them absorb energy weapon damage and instead of taking damage, fill their shields/energy.
- Skill: shield reflection: energy weapons reflect so long as they hit shields, causing them to bounce and hit another ship.
- Skill that allows them to temporarily phase their ship to another dimension, avoiding all damage but also disabling shooting. Can be controlled on the spot so you press a button and phase out for a second, letting most damage types fly through you.
- Skill: Planetary destruction: ability to control volcanic and energy planets to cause destruction to races.
- Skill: Terraform to volcanic: can terraform some planet types to volcanic, making them possibly unsuitable to some races.
- Skill: Planetary regeneration: regenerate energy/shields from unsettled energetic planets (including gas giants).
- Skill: mine absorption: allows explosive mines to recharge your energy, making running into mines a good strategy.
- Skill: solar flare: can cause massive damage to a planet close to the sun.
- Skill: boost to energy weapons.
- Skill: beam chain. Beam weapons chain from one ship to the next, like chain lightning in DC.
- Solar burst: gain a temporary status effect from being near the sun (extra energy, electric attack or something).

== Utopians: hacker race ==

- In general, all Utopians should be extra sensitive to EMP weapons.

- No Utopian effects can work on Talon ships.
- Skill: disable enemies using hacking.
- Skill: boost. buff ships of your choosing.
Certain planet sabotage operations should be effortless for them with the right skill choice.
- Skill: can hack a non-boss Legion ship to be your pet.
- Skill: can convince all Legions to be on your side temporarily.
- Skill: can hack certain race ships (even ones you're not at war with) to self-destruct e.g. diplomat, colony ship. Chance of being discovered is small, so unlikely to take a relation hit.
- Station hack: can hack stations to attack other races (even the planet they're next to) and protect you.
- Skill: boost to computers.
- Skill: people power. Utopian crew members generate power, which increases as they go up in level.

== Cortex: mind control ==

- Skill: AOE ability to temporarily turn all species with brains (including monsters) to their side.
- Skill to turn a non-boss monster (Talon or Overlord, but not Legion) to their side permanently as pet.
- Skill: make your ship look like another race to brain-based races (doesn't fool robotic races). Allows creating diplomatic incidents, make races hate each other etc.
- Skill: Planetary mind control: cause rebellion or sabotage for free. (Uses up a crew member?)
- Skill: anomaly lover: chance of anomalies being negative is reduced to minimum.
- Skill: Illusion: gives you illusionary ship pets. They cause no real damage, but aggro ships, causing them to be attacked instead of you. Doesn't work on robotic enemies.
- Skill: tech lover: higher chance of finding technologies.
- Skill: boss manipulator: can cause a boss in the vicinity to send an attack against a certain race/planet.
- Skill: telekinesis ships: push away ships and make them hit each other.
- Skill: telekinesis projectiles: deflect projectiles heading your way.

== Hive: Borg-like ==

- Skill: planetary assimilation. deposit some members on a planet, which will gradually cause rebellions and sabotage, at the cost of a continuous relationship hit with every caused incident.
- If you have enough planets under control, you basically take over the race, but all other races will dislike you because they'll fear assimilation.
- Skill: convert an Overlord ship into a pet.
- Skill: temporarily convert Overlord ships to your side.
- Skill: sabotage a biological enemy ship. Debuff to maneuverability and fire rate.
- Skill: ship boost. Send your people to a biologically-manned ship, buffing it.
- Skill: faster fire rate. High coordination among crew means they can manage to fire weapons faster.
- Skill: boost virus. Makes virus effects chain from one ship to the next, jumping over small gaps in space.
- Skill: kamikaze. Your pets suicide, causing massive destruction based on their level. Reduce cooldown (and energy) for pet skills as you're not making the ships very carefully anyway.
- Skill: assimilate crew. Convert crew member to crew points. Kills crew member.

== Brunt: barbarians ==

- Skill: cause fear among ships in the area. Ships run away, at heavily reduced movement rate.
- Skill: cause panic on planets, leading to chaos and rebellions.
- Skill: panic debuff: lower movement rate, chance of attacking wrong ship (including their own race).
- Passive skill: hated race: the game tracks how many you've killed of each race. You get significant buffs against one race based on the ships you've killed the most of recently.
- Skills: boost explosive and ramming weapons.
- Skill: planetary destruction: planet attacks are reduced far less by any defending ship, due to the awesome fierceness of the Brunt. Makes going straight for planets and ignoring the ships a viable strategy.
- Skill: combo rage: enable the combo system from DL that gives a boost for repeated application of various skills, but *only apply it to Brunt*.

== Human: diplomats ==

- Skill: friends. AOE skill to convert enemy ships to your side temporarily.
- Skill: beg for mercy. Passive. If low on health, enemy ships may switch side and protect you.
- Passive skill: if idea that crew members can give you random skills from their skill tree is used, the adaptability of humans means crew can now give them 2 random skills instead of 1.
- Alternatively, humans can just select skills from other races' skill tree in some way.
- Skill: cheaper relationships. Paying for treaties is cheaper due to diplomacy.
- Skill: cosmopolitan. Having a crew member of a race gives you better relations with that race.

== Dryad ==

- Dryad should have extra sensitivity to radiation (anti-life)

- Skill: planetary destruction. Control fauna and flora on a non-dead planet to cause sabotage with low chance for reputation hit. Strongest on planets that have high vegetation.
- Skill: convert non-boss Talon into pet.
- Skill: temporarily convert Talon in area to your side.
- Skill: planetary regeneration: moving to a planet with vegetation gives you health regeneration, even if unsettled.
- Skill: terraform: make a planet more fertile. Should have very long cooldown. Doesn't work on completely dead planets.
- Skills: mutation: cause non-robotic ships to become debuffed/buffed.
- Skill: planetary food boost. Make planets produce more food.
- Skill: Talon consumption. Dryad ships are alive, like Talon, and can feed off of a non-boss Talon ship when it is low enough in health to restore their own health.

== Lithosoid ==

- All Lithosoid should be more sensitive to energy weapons, but stronger resistance to all other types of damage.

- Skill: planetary regeneration. Rocky planets (even unsettled) give you regeneration.
- Skill: rocky camouflage. Makes races temporarily think your ship is an asteroid, ignoring it. Ideally, flying towards a planet would freak them out and they'd attack you.
- Skill: rock armor. Boosts your ramming ability and armor.
- Skill: asteroid control. Can fling asteroids at a planet, causing an asteroid quest chain. Chance of being discovered for a reputation hit.
- Skill: Moon attack. Can fling rocks out of a neighboring moon, causing massive damage to ships and some damage/reputation hit if the moon is occupied.
- Skill: moon crash. Can fling a moon at its neighboring planet, causing a new quest chain (doesn't currently exist). Causes massive damage, near extinction for that planet. Chance of being discovered.
- Skill: terraform: make a planet more dead. *Very* long cooldown.

== Shadow ==

- While stealthed, can cause ships to think they were attacked by each other (skill from DC).
- Skill: Can temporarily disguise as other races to cause diplomatic incidents, avoid being attacked, etc. Small chance of being discovered.
- Skill: infiltrate spies. Protect a planet/race from spy attacks for a certain amount of time. (would work even better if spy network ideas is adopted -- then you'd help flush out spies).
- Skill: Hide in shadows. Get automatic stealth when in the dark side of moons and planets.
- Suggested by Eris Shrugged: Skill: know of race actions like declaring war before they happen. This would require changing the way things are happening in the simulation to happen with a little bit of delay so you can be notified of them before they happen. I also incorporated this into my spy network idea. If the spy networks are realized, this skill could just give you better use of those networks.
- Skill: buff bombs. Buffs bombs/mines.

== Scavengers ==

- Skill: play dead. Pretend that your ship is dead. Causes nearby enemies to stop firing and come investigate. You can't move, or the pretense will be broken. Once you move/attack, you get a big boost status effect. If you wait too long, enemies will figure out you're not really dead.

[Verdusk]

Information Trading

- Planet information
Maybe you can offer the races to offer you planet information, and I don't mean individual planets, but all the planets in a system, where the planets are and what race they belong to. If the trade form is a pact, the information updates as they revisit these planets. Maybe a two-way Free Info Pact where they'll just share vision and exploration of all their planets and ships.

And well, it's kind of weird when they ask you to protect a planet, but don't tell where the planet is, apart from which system it's in. Maybe if your relation is high enough, they'll tell where the planets are that need help.

- Quest details from system
When you hover over a system's name on top of the minimap, it tells you all the quests for that system, but unfortunately you can't see their details from this. It'd be helpful if you can, for example, click the name to bring up a list of these quests where you can browse the details also.

- Exploration
I don't know whether individual races have their own map exploration, but it'd be great if we can buy (and maybe sell too) map exploration. It's the space age, after all, informational transaction should be commonplace.

- A new spy service (from race) that reveals where all the planets of a race is.
- A new service that provides temporary buffs your ship. Buff varies according to the race.
- Maybe you can loan or borrow money to/from races?
- Transaction to have one of their ship become your party member, maybe temporarily, can be cancelled and lose relation if it dies
- A way to see how much credits your tributary have contributed.
- A summary on the galaxy on some information that carry over, like what races are already extinct (especially non-random ones), and maybe their power ranking and relation to you
- A traveling vendor may sell you a beacon to call them?
- Portal/wormhole making usable item, use them on 2 places to link them with portals
- "Monster factions", when a monster type have had too many uprisings, bosses that are not acted upon, they become a full-fledged race, but works differently from the usual races. They're much more aggressive to races and the player and strong and can quickly become a serious threat to all the races, and practically impossible to do diplomacy with (extremely hard to get on the good side of).

When a monster group is about to become a monster faction, there'll be a notification and a quest as one final chance to prevent it. The quest can be a boss or fleet of their monsters on a planet, which they will make their base if the quest is not done.

Once a monster faction is formed, there will be similar quests every so often as they are aggressively expansionist, they will often attack race planets and they may also make the race planets they destroy as new bases. Their ships can be elite tiers of the monster type. One boss will guard each of their base planets, and one or more superbosses who wander and lead attacks are in charge of their faction in general; the more there are of them the more often they spawn more ships, attack race planets and expand, if you defeat all of them they will not do those things until a new superboss is eventually promoted from one of the guard bosses (and a new guard boss is spawned).

[Bluddy]

Posted a bunch of new ideas for various races, particularly drakk.

[Verdusk]

I disagree with 300 being too much, I always cap my speed on 300 and still frequently use the thrust boosts, otherwise exploring would take too long making the game boring. And I already play in Settled with 6 races sectors + very fast pace so that I don't have to explore for too long before running into something.

Of course, an alternate solution to this is to make the systems smaller or something. Although it's still neat to be able to speed around quickly if you choose to invest enough to it.

[Bluddy]

Originally Posted by Verdusk

I disagree with 300 being too much, I always cap my speed on 300 and still frequently use the thrust boosts, otherwise exploring would take too long making the game boring. And I already play in Settled with 6 races sectors + very fast pace so that I don't have to explore for too long before running into something.

Sounds like you're really allergic to exploration. I think if we can buy planet locations from friendly races, that takes care of that problem.

In general, I don't think the entire speed aspect of the game should be planned around reducing exploration time -- that means the combat and everything else that matters has to suffer just because some people don't like the time it takes to find stuff. According to that logic, we should cap speed at 500 and just let you cruise across the map in seconds. I think 300 is already a very frantic speed that doesn't let you do much in terms of planning, not to mention the fact that missiles can't possibly hit you already.
If my other suggestion of reducing turn rate at higher speeds is implemented, then 300 can be kept, and the Drakk would just be able to turn well at high speeds.

[planetnik6]

I would like to be able to buy decent selection of chips from 1 race, human maybe , because gamble is quite useles. Also you should be able to hire crew from race you are playing, it is especialy dificult to get any crew for subraces and you are often doomed to play with default crew member if u pick subrace.

[Bluddy]

Added telekinesis for Cortex.