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[AzyWng]

You lost me at the notion of breeding cars.

That reminds me of this app, Motor World, which actually has breeding cars (Don't ask how that works. It just does) to create new designs.

[Gigalith]

You lost me at the notion of breeding cars.

There's a Gene Wolfe story about that (one of my favorites, actually.)

[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

Monster Trucks?

[Dunamisdeos]

You lost me at the notion of breeding cars.

Monster Trucks?

Welcome... to Jurassic Parking Lot.

[JamesGoblin]

Warhammer Online 2: with free form building, voxel destruction and three factions.

And please, keep EA a million miles away.

[PTTG??]

Crusader Kings II, but with a fantasy world stretching over multiple planes of existence and elements of fantastic storytelling -- i.e., your king might account for a significant fraction of your nation's military strength, and him with his retinue of closest friends might be more than half of it.

A magic system that is designed to be dramatic and narratively impressive on these scales (perhaps even designed so that it's most effective when it's turning around long odds and saving the underdog).

[JimboM12]

A Warhammer 40k Civilization type game with planet and space layers. All the major factions will be present, the Imperial factions divided into 4 major parts:

The 'Regular' Imperium of Man is represented by the Guard and plays like any normal civ but with more heretic burning. Kinda weak in the beginning of colonization but economic powerhouses at the endgame able to produce enough to drown entire cities with bodies and tanks. Pretty decent all rounders, just need the numbers.
Space Marine Fiefdoms are small but produce way more, think something like militarized versions of Venice. Extremely powerful individual units but you won't have a lot of them and support from the regular Imperium helps a ton. Much, much better all rounders.
The Church is represented by the Battle Sisters. Their forces are divided between the elite sisters and their lower fiefdom PDF rabble. A lot like Bretonnia from regular Warhammer. Plays alot like the regular Imperium but their cities are cleaner looking.
The Mechanicus is really more of an addon, as they only get 1 city like any trader civ, but that one city is enough to power their entire faction. Very few early units; in fact, only one: the Skitarii. Servators get unlocked to handle specific combat tasks later but for the majority of the game, you only get those red suited chrome boys. Then the endgame happens. Deploy all titans on a city and laugh manically through your drive thru window speaker you call a mouth.

The Tau would be the equivalent of any of the religious civs. Infect Imperium cities with the Greater Good and freedom and watch them happily convert to your side. At least until they get self nuked. Excellent ranged combat, best in the game in most unit categories, but melee ranged units murder them. Even Guardsmen that get close enough to use the bayonet move.

Orks are well, Orks. They have the ability to migrate their 'cities' closer to enemy territories in order to get closer to the fightin'. Quickly amassed, tough units. Very few early game tricks up their sleeves. Lots of cannon fodder to soak up sieges while you pound on cities.

The Eldar; in any other game with covert options, it'd be these guys. That's not to say they don't have good units, but each one is very specific to a task. While the other factions can swap heavy weapons attachments to units on the fly, with the Eldar you have to create a whole new unit to do so. Also, they can relay units from any city to any other city really quickly.

The Necrons. I really don't have any ideas for these guys, other than notoriously tough units that take forever to build.

The Tyranids, these guys are also hard to come up with civ options for. The ability to infest cities, sure, and quickly built cannon fodder that needs to be within X tiles of a leader unit to gain full combat strength.

And finally the forces of Chaos, the 'regular' Cultists and the Dark Eldar. The regular cults are represented by mass expendable cultists early on, and graduate into Chaos Space Marines mid game with Daemon support later on. The ability to weaken city defenders with cults and open up temporary warp portals to quickly get units to the front.

And the Dark Eldar. The ability to raid cities for slaves to boost output. The ability to use warp gates to quickly get units around. Same Eldar flavor with some spice thrown in.
 

[PTTG??]

Necrons cannot build cities anywhere; they must find (randomly placed, immovable) ruins and restore them. However, they are freed from normal resource demands. They gain special effects from resources by controlling those resource sites with basic units.

Tyranids don't have cities at all. Their units accumulate biomass by winning combats, destroying cities, and raising structures. They may then use that biomass to duplicate themselves or upgrade themselves. You climb the tech tree by upgrading your starting units vertically. In addition, even "uninhabited" tiles contain some biomass, and a tyranid unit that spends an entire turn in a tile unmolested "strips" that tile to barren status, which results gives that unit some biomass and permanently renders the tile unusable.

[Sirus]

Necrons and Tyranids really strike me more as computer-controlled external threats because neither are even remotely the civilization-building types. Nids are quite literally outside invaders that don't even keep the planets they conquer; they just eat all the biomass and leave behind a rocky hulk. Necrons on the other hand are lurking in ancient places, waiting to be woken up so they can kill any organic beings in sight. Being a bunch of barely-sentient automatons, they would have no need or desire to build a civilization.

[RAM]

But you don't need to build a civilisation, you just need an objective, and that means using your nigh invulnerability to loot the galaxy for the goodies that you need to build your special weapon and then ship it out to just the right spot to break the warp... Other players can't readily destroy your faction but they can stop your plans if they can focus enough resources and because of your tenacious but small-scale nature they generally have more important things to do. The Necrons could be all about precise strategic raids. Hit that one pivotal planet that providing logistics to the imperial faction. Exterminate a capital world or two to stop people spreading. Keep the other factions fighting each other so that they can't afford to bother with you. Then everyone starts picking up anomalous warp readings on a course for the galactic core or something and everyone knows that the whole Necron fleet is guarding it(Or possibly waiting in ambush near a star that most fleets would travel past to reach the weapon... Or perhaps they are willing to sacrifice this weapon and go tear up your homeworlds while you are busy with their toy and they will just build a new one after your civilisations are crippled...) and whoever DOESN'T send a fleet to stop it will be able to stomp over anyone who does... Their lose condition would pretty much be a single empire being strong enough to just sit on the Necron holdings and smoosh them whenever they wriggled.

And the Tyranids totally build an empire, it is just very concentrated and mobile and doesn't care so much for territory. I could see balance issues though. Setbacks would tend to be more permanent but they would tend to snowball if they went well. Again, their main issue is that they are small-scale. If they split up then you can pick of isolated fleets and weaken them more than you would weaken a force with more sustained construction faculties. If they all clump together than you can try to avoid them and starve them with the old scorched-earth policy. On their end they tend not to take many lasting losses if they win a fight. So it is all a matter of balancing spreading out to grow quickly or concentrating to maintain your holdings, much as it is for everyone else...

[NRDL]

I want a Crusader Kings 2 sort of game set in Conan's Hyborian Age. Playing the lowest thief to the greatest king, you get the same sort of trait based characters and interaction, random events, and obviously once you go up and up the social ladder you get command of men, religions, goods, armies.

[Sirus]

The post specifically wished for a Civilization-type game, so yes I assume civ-building would be a part of it. Anyway, if your "small-scale threat" is powerful enough to casually smash other homeworlds, it's drastically imbalanced and no one is going to ignore it.

The tyranids are not, nor have they ever been, "small-scale". They are extra-galactic invaders that have continuously poured into the galaxy for several centuries and the main bulk of them is still on the way.

[Cyroth]

Crusader Kings II, but with a fantasy world stretching over multiple planes of existence and elements of fantastic storytelling -- i.e., your king might account for a significant fraction of your nation's military strength, and him with his retinue of closest friends might be more than half of it.

A magic system that is designed to be dramatic and narratively impressive on these scales (perhaps even designed so that it's most effective when it's turning around long odds and saving the underdog).

I'm picturing a mix of Master of Magic, The Wheel of Time and Crusader Kings II, and now I want to throw money at my screen until it screams at me to stop.

[puke]

Being a bunch of barely-sentient automatons

(pushes nerd-glasses up on bridge of nose) not at all, they're actually the deathless remains of an ancient civilization that have been uploaded into robot bodies.  The're the transcended post-singularity servants of their crazy space gods, whom desire to eat all of the stars in the galaxy.

Playing Necrons and Tyranids on a strategic level would necessarily be playing out the "war in heaven" between the Old Slaan and the C'tan.  Completely asymmetric, and orthogonal to any sort of military goals that Imperium players might have.

Of course, my knowledge of this fluff is based on third ed splat books, so shit may have changed.

Hell, the only faction that wants to take and hold ground is the Imperium, maybe the Tau.  Eldar only want to hold their craft worlds and persue arcane ineffable objectives.  Orks just want to fight for fightings sake.

[RAM]

When I say small-scale I mean that they are only threatening one planet, or maybe a few planets at a time. In the setting of galactic warfare that is minuscule. They are still a galactic-scale threat but they are extremely focused and don't spread out well. The Tyranids have no long-term manufacturing, so they can't recover from losing a battle except by winning one. It makes spreading out more of a risk because it increases the odds of losing battles, and because they have no need to maintain territory they can afford to concentrate, but doing so slows down their development. With the Necrons they would be very defensive-focused, so they would never really be able to achieve much if they spread out, they would just be overwhelmed with numbers that they couldn't exterminate. But if they focus their efforts they are still a galactic power and if a significant portion of a galactic power manages to land on your homeworld then you're in trouble. Small-scale means that they don't occupy much space, so they do not threaten an entire front and stop your expansion and such, except out of fear. Wrecking one planet is small-scale, it can have large-scale consequences, which is why people have to protect their logistics and monitor enemy movements. If you just let anyone drive up to your homeworld and land troops then you are going to have a bad time...