transforming the percentage bonus from eyes into a flat sensor-increase. as you can see in the example this has the advantage that you will receive a tremendous boost if you are weak in that area. that's when you need eyes the most.

but how much it ultimately should be is a question of personal preference. maybe other players would like to get always caped after they build it (IIRC that was the situation in vanilla)

hmm I have no trouble with them. on battle of the gods soil enh/habitat/terraf aren't given but that's all I could notice by having a short look

Is that the right file? It's identical to mine. 

<PoliticalParty InternalName="Mercantile">
<ID>5</ID>
<DisplayName>Mercantile</DisplayName>
<Description>The Mercantilists understand the true power of hyperdrive - trade. Exporting goods and culture to other civilizations will make them more dependent on our prosperity for their own success. Mercantilists receive a 50% boost to trade and they enjoy a 10% discount when buying ships or improvements.</Description>
<Model>gfx/Government/Mercantile.png</Model>
<OpposingParty>Federalists</OpposingParty>
<Bonus>10:50 17:10</Bonus>
<Penalty>0:-20</Penalty>
<ColorRed>219</ColorRed>
<ColorGreen>136</ColorGreen>
<ColorBlue>28</ColorBlue>
</PoliticalParty>

<Penalty>0:-20</Penalty> isn't this a 20 penalty to economy?

This part should be different:

<PoliticalParty InternalName="Federalists">
<ID>0</ID>
<DisplayName>Federalists</DisplayName>
<Description>The Federalists are big believers in having the government be somewhat distributed. They tend to be fairly expert in internal financial matters. Selecting this party will give your civilization a 20% boost to your economy.</Description>
<Model>gfx/Government/Federalists.png</Model>
<OpposingParty>Mercantile</OpposingParty>
<Bonus>0:20</Bonus>
<Penalty>10:-50 17:-10</Penalty>
<ColorRed>59</ColorRed>
<ColorGreen>133</ColorGreen>
<ColorBlue>202</ColorBlue>
</PoliticalParty>

and this one:

<PoliticalParty InternalName="Industrialist">
<ID>6</ID>
<DisplayName>Industrialist</DisplayName>
<Description>The Industrialists are the antithesis of Technologists. Industrialists receive a bonus to production capacity.</Description>
<Model>gfx/Government/Industrialist.png</Model>
<OpposingParty>Technologists</OpposingParty>
<Bonus>6:20 7:20</Bonus>
<Penalty>8:-20</Penalty>
<ColorRed>210</ColorRed>
<ColorGreen>210</ColorGreen>
<ColorBlue>210</ColorBlue>
</PoliticalParty>

when you loose a vote the game works in some way like this:

- your own bonus is scrapped

- the penalty of your own political party tag is applied 

- the penalty of your opposing party is applied (*)

you get 3 total penalties.

the Federalists still had -50 espionage as penalty.

(*) that's why you can go negative in sensors easily. perhaps making the penalty only -1 sensors like it is in vanilla.

Implemented.

Thanks

1. New technologies were introduced and a few new structures. Other than that, no.

2. All mods conflict. You can't combine two.

3. That won't work. Each mod stands on it's own and was designed to run on it's own. Don't copy one mod over the other it will break the mod and lead to a very unsatisfying experience.

Maiden, Hyperion is what people know from galciv, its still that way in galciv3 for all the improvements, its dumb to change it. Eyes are great, they allow you to see like the AI after a certain point in the game.

seems like my initial post got eaten by the forum trolls   so, in short

I don't know if this would goof up the diplomacy part of the game which is responsible for the civs declaring war on one another.

There are inter-ethical diplo-penalties installed whose function is to create resentment even if alot of mind-aliked civs have been created at a random map.
For example Terrans are dis-trusted by Thalans. Now if you move Terrans into good then Thalans will act very aggressively because they now have an additional negative factor.

Neutral alignment might be internally too homogenous. Ususally Drath can stay out of trouble and make others weak with their SA while they profit from it. However, one thing that actually counters Draths is SuperOrganizer, because it drags Drath into wars, sometimes even into some they have created by themself. That throttle would be missing as well.

besides, I wonder if this will be approved at all by SD?

I'm done with the first draft of the Drath.

Link : https://www.dropbox.com/s/z9bfosvfquahju0/Community%20Update%20-%20Drath%20Redone.zip?dl=0

This is merely an experiment. If you folks don't like it I'll roll back to the previous version.

Changes include:

Alignment set to 45 from 75.

Removed:
Xeno Mystesism and it's follow up techs.

Added:

Saurian Cunning. +25 diplo

Saurion Intimidation. +20 influence

Minor Hatchling Mount. +15 morale. Unlocked by way of the drath

Hatchling Mount. +25 morale structure, +10% morale civ wide. Similar to Temples.

And made a few changes to their Journey Begins opening.

Terran:

Alightment from 50 to 75.

Changes here to stay:

PI unlocked by Space Weapons

Military Starbases unlocked by Space Weapons. Set to Defense Tag but I might switch it to Industry. The tech cost becomes outrageous when it's tagged as Weapons.

Planetary Defense unlocked by Space Defeneses.

Basically you get a weapon before any side tech like invasion, planetary defense, etc.

<Culture ID="InterGov">
<DisplayName>Administrative Slavelings Theory</DisplayName>
<Description>Research into mentaly capable slavelings.</Description>
<Details>[YOURSHORTCIVNAME] for hundreds of years were perfecting genetic engineering to improve their workforce. One of our scientists made a recent proposal in this area. He has already been sent to the Arena along with his team, for not coming up with this terrific idea sooner.||His theory suggests that by improving cognitive capabilities of certain slave specie, we can breed slaves that will tirelessly work day and night in our economy sector, looking for possible savings and ways to maximize our intra-planetary trade and logistics.||It works by implementing them with parts of our own modified genome. Our people can sense suffering and anguish in others, but new slave specie would sense happiness instead. That way they will be motivated by any improvements they make and won't cause changes that can anger their supervisors.||By the way, here are tickets for tonight's fight in the Arena!</Details>

<Culture ID="StarRep">
<DisplayName>Administrative Slavelings</DisplayName>
<Description>We did it! First breed of new slaves is already working on our budget. Someone in genetics lab thought it will be good if we produce more distinctive batches of the new species, to bring more variety and increase income they can provide. To mock other races of the Galaxy, we segregated and named our creation after prominent political parties of their governments. As an unexpected result, they come to think you, [YOURLEADERNAME], are having a change of heart and want to bring more equality to [YOUREMPIRENAME]. Stupid weaklings, don't know a slave will always be a slave!||
We also discovered that if those slaves are around unhappy population, they are prone to make costly mistakes and wreck havock in our administration logs. So keeping people happy will make them more reliable.</Description>
<Details></Details>

<Culture ID="StarDem">
<DisplayName>Enhanced Ambassadors</DisplayName>
<Description>Send better representatives to other races.</Description>
<Details>We love to enslave and use other races. But our tendencies to conquer them can put us in disadvantage, as no one can battle on too many fronts. That's where diplomacy comes into play. But because of our history and clearly aggressive nature, it's not our strong side. That's where our belief in predisposition comes into play.||We select individuals among our people that are cursed with milder appearance. After that, it is only a matter of time spent in torture room to break their spirit, so not only they appear harmless, they are also more docile. Those "lucky" citizens are later sent to replace our current ambassadors. Galaxy has never seen smooth talkers like this.||Also, our experience in slicing, dicing, combining and replicating DNA let us refine breeding of administrative slavelings, boosting their productivity and our economy further.</Details>

<Culture ID="StarFed">
<DisplayName>Hyper Incubation</DisplayName>
<Description>Multiply new workforce by advancements in incubation procedures.</Description>
<Details>Disadvantage of recombining such complex DNA is that you cannot cover for everything. Our new slavelings don't live long, and because they were not designed to be sentient, they do not reproduce. To counter that, we developed new ways of accelerating incubaction periods. At this point, further upgrades in their intelligence can result in them becoming self-aware, so it is safer to just increase their numbers.||At the same time, some of the extra money they generated was spent on more sophisticated torture chambers. As you can guess, our ambassadors are now more efficient in convincing the enemy of how good we are.</Details>

I just finished writing this and I haven't proof read it, but most likely someone else needs to correct grammar anyway. I couldn't think of other way to keep influence and diplo bonuses, as well as inherent economy from new gov type, and keeping Drengin/Korath as dictatorships. I borrowed heavily from their techtrees, ability to sense pain, genetic manipulations etc., so it shouldn't be against the lore.

Drath are better on neutral, it bothered me as well, I'll download that and see how the new tech tree looks like.

Back to Terran, I'm not certain they should be considered a "good" race. Thalans mention in their tech tree:

You don't need to be Good to fight Evil. In DnD, theres even more conflict between Lawful Evil and Chaotic Evil then between Lawful Good and Lawful Evil. Just my 2 cents

I'll give the new Drath a shot this evening.

Stay,  but bring back a moderate Hyperion attack.  Hear me out:

IMHO we need to fall somewhere between the vanilla Thalan (which,  recall,  is "only" 24/24/24 def) and Guanathor's god-tier modules.

The crux of the matter is that Thalan Hyperion starbases att/def modules were so good that their SBs became hideous MMR sinks.

I think the easiest (?) way to rectify this is to give them the a nice *attack* boost with Hyperion Starbases,  but not defense.  That is,  put SingularityWeapon back in,   but with vastly reduced numbers.   That way they are nowhere near as much an MMR sink but they're still pretty scary.

Number-wise,  I'm thinking maybe a bit more than BS4,  which doesn't even appear for other races for another 8000 TP;    ie  20,32,24.   Since this is an "extra" module that will eventually give them a non-trivial endgame bonus on their SBs,   I think making it fairly expensive (300 bc?) would be reasonable.

There's my nickel.  Take it or leave it. 

edit:  I take too long to write my posts.  OShee,  love the Drengin stuff, will run it through my native-english-filter asap. 

double edit:  I think putting Humans on good is quite reasonable.

I didn't play GC1 much either but I do love game lore

As to the Iconians. All I know is that their current form of government is a dictatorship but not in the way we think of it. The reason they're behind in commerce is because the idea of selling, owning or making profit is alien to them. They litteraly have no economy on New Iconia.

They have everything they need so why want more?

As to the Thalans. Fun fact. In Dark Avatar (and maybe Dread Lords?) the Thalans were refered to as having a hive mind but not in Twilight of the Arnor. In Twilight where it's stated that the Thalan are not drones and each Thalan is an individual. No one has any idea how they communicate with each other or even how they operate the Universal Translator.

Personally, I always imagined them to rather tiny. Say, one meter high but no more than that. Details on them are sketchy though and if I had to take a wild guess how they communicate I'd say pheromonal. Come to think of it, I may have written that for the APT2.0 history techs. Hmmm now that I think of it, yes, I did.

My idea was Thalans communicate solely using pheromones. That's what ants do but in the Thalans it has evolved over time to a very effective form of communication. The way I imagied it a Thalans just needs one whiff of these pheromones and it knows exactly what the other Thalan tried to tell it. It's instant. There are no errors or mispronounciations. None. Best of all, no one can eaves drop on them. Worst of all, no one can understand them. Hence the diplo penalty.

Mind you this is just something I came up with to flesh them out a little bit for APT2. I hope it's useful to you.

It is actually possible to use, for example, the High Resolution Grpahics mod with the community update, if you're selective.  I typically only use the improved stars, nebulae, tech grid and terrain query textures.

Also, you could use the weapon sounds from Space Weapons Fix Mod since most of them use the vanilla filenames.

Overwriting or merging XML files from one mod with another is not recommended, though.