Races (random thoughts, dilemmas, etc)
I'm tempted to discard all "standard" alien races and just keep the weird ones
Like Annihilators, Parasites, The Hive, Rebels, Pirates. It's harder to resist the desire each day
Still, some "blobs of civilized alien territories" seem nice...
My thinking is, the ballance is absolutely whacked by the weird races anyway (like if they warp their fleets via transdimensional rifts and have no planets in the galaxy at all (annihilators) or just one super planets from which they cyclicly launch chaos invasion (parasites) it has no connection with the way player build military, no connection at all), so the standard races won't help here (and kind of fell incompatible).
Another reason, the game is about the Empire, the single empire run by the player. Not about "several competing empires". The standard alien races inevitably give me the feeling that they are some sort of other empires (which is bad)... Sigh...
On the other hand I do love the various colours on the star map
Seeing that here live the Corrians and there Antarians (and their ambassadors visit you) is soooo cute
Also it adds the mechanic of civilized vs monster aliens (which is quite nice).
I'm starting to think, maybe make the standard (civilized) races weaker? Their primary purpose would not be to be the opponent of the player (the difficulty would come from the vicious monstrous aliens, rebels, pirates) but a bit more like a "resource" or "opportunity" you can use to your advantage? A simpliest mechanic here could be "if % of colonized planets owned by civilized races falls below 50% The Hive get a combat/expansion bonus", this alone would make the player to prefer taking territories from "bad aliens" instead of "good/neutral aliens". Or when late game Annihilators come via rifts all civilized races acould be capable of stopping them more efficiently (weapon types for example) while all primitives like insects and parasites would simply hide below the surface and provide no resistance at all (therefore being useless for the overall defence of the galaxy).
The effect would be the player would still want to preserve the "civilization" in the galaxy even if such civilization is hostile to the Empire, also it would provide both role and mechanics that supports the original premise of "you being the only Emperor in the galaxy and the sole hero who can save the galaxy from mortal dangers".
Feel free to comment or post your thoughts on the topic.