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Writer's pictureCaleb Teal

Legacy of the Firstborne Empire: Dev Diary 4: Races


Welcome to another Development Diary for Legacy of the Firstborne Empire® game. Today I will be talking about Races, how they evolve, how they function, and how they generally work.

Every new game in the default mode of the game starts the universe with only one sapient race, the Firstborne Race. This race varies in what it is with each start, however it generally is humanoid of some sort. The Firstborne race (and all descendant races) is one that will rapidly evolve on other star systems, turning into new evolved races. Each evolved race will generally not evolve further while living under the star they evolved under, however with travel between star systems being all the rage, new evolutions are bound to happen rapidly.

Races are defined by a number of traits that explain what they are. These traits such as ‘Humanoid’ or ‘Many Eyed’ define not only the appearance of the race, but also abilities that members of the race may or may not have. Each time a race evolves, either a new trait is added, a trait is removed, or a trait is replaced. The minimum number of traits is one, and the maximum is only defined by the amounts of traits minus any mutually exclusive ones.

As for what some traits do, traits such as ‘Many Armed’ allow for combat proficiency for those that have it. Whereas traits such as ‘Giant’ makes them take up more natural population of a system. Some traits like ‘Insectoid’ simply make them less (or in some cases more) liked by races with other traits such as ‘Mammalian’. Likewise, Traits such as ‘Humanoid’ make them more liked by other with the ‘Humanoid’ trait.

All races also have three special hidden alignment traits matching the various empire types. These alignment traits will make them happier in empires of those types, an unhappy in the opposite empires. When forming a new empire with their race as one of the official races, they will be more likely to form an empire with one of these traits. They will also be more likely to rebel against empires with the opposite traits. And of course, they will like, or dislike other races based on their hidden alignment traits as well.

As time passes, all members of a race may eventually evolve, leaving the parent race extinct. When this happens, the only way for that race to make a comeback is to be resurrected by high tech Xenophilic Empires. These races then are given the ‘Reborn’ trait, which makes some races like them more, and other races dislike them more.

Other races come about from technologies such as a Trans-Dimensional Gateway. One from tech like this are completely alien and have various traits that add weird and wacky and sometimes dangerous features. Such as the ‘Shape Shifter’ which makes a member of the race be able to gain bonuses from any other trait for one turn. They also all have the trait ‘Trans-Dimensional’ which marks them as coming from another dimension, lowering opinion of all other races. When these races evolve, they may lose the ‘Trans-Dimensional’ Trait but due to a permanent trait called ‘Trans-Dimensional Descendant’ their descendant races will always be able to evolve weird and wacky traits.

Other races can come about due to cross breeding of two races. These races have half non mutual traits for each parent race, with any permanent traits passing down automatically. However, certain traits limit crossbreeding between races who don’t have that trait or who have certain other traits, such as ‘Reptilian’ being unable to crossbreed with races that don’t have ‘Reptilian’. This allows the family tree of races to become quite complicated.

That’s all for this week’s Dev Diary. Join me two weeks from now to read about the VIP system for the game. And join me next week to read about further updates to the Avala Series and the publishing process. Thanks for reading and have a good day!

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