Race Mod Reviews - Archonon's Race Mod

This mod is one of the more distinctive. Its goal is to make MoO3 races as much like MoO2 races as possible. To that end, Archonon removes ALL hard-wired bonuses and penalites. The only thing that makes the races inherently different from each other are the graphics and their hab preferences. To make up for that, he offers lots of picks on the race screen that resemble MoO2 Advantages.

Major Additions:

• Representative and Collectivist Governments both cost 40 points. Apparently, he thought that the first was underpriced at 30, and the second overpriced at 60. Note: his mod does not touch the default governments.
  
• Citizenship picks were changed to 30 each. Why? Did anyone think they were underpriced? It's 10 more points for those who like Liberty.
  
• Following Bard of Prey, Creativity was raised to 30 points per pick.
  
• Tolerant is raised to 30 points--but it essentially eliminates pollution. This is not documented in the description, you have to read the spreadsheet. This makes me wonder if there are other huge, undocumented changes I missed.
  
• New pick, Chauvinism, which costs 0/30/60/80. 80 points gives you massive diplomacy bonuses, +80% relations, +30% cb, +3 to Means War counter, etc. 60 points gives you a bit less than half these bonuses. 30 points gives you some negatives: -33% relations, -8% cb. For 0 points you get huge negatives: -50% relations, -50% cb, -2 Means War. Most races default to the 30 or 60 point level. Interestingly, there's no way to be neutral. In this game, you're either very nice, or very nasty.
  
• New pick, Militancy, which costs 20 per pick. The best setting gives you -10% Opressometer costs, -2 Means War, +2 Ground Combat. The worst setting gives you +20% Oppressometer costs, +3 Means War, and -2 Ground Combat.
  
• 1 Screen of new specials, most adapted from MoO2. They include: Adaptable, which increases terraform rings and bioharvest rings. As far as I can tell, no one has ever verified that it's possible to improve terraform rings. It's hard to measure, because the graphic stays the same regardless, so to prove it works you'd have to do some heavy testing of galaxy compositions. There's also Subterranean, which increases Max Pop by 33%. Note this is a different Subterranean than what's already in the game, that the Robots and Bugs have inherently and which Archonon did not remove. In an Archonon game, there would be two competing forms of Subterranean. The Warlord special chops fleet maintenance in half and gives big boosts to Military and Gov DEA efficiency. The High Gravity special decreases gravity penalties by 33% and gives +1 to Ground Combat. There is listed a Transdimensional special--but sadly, no one has figured out how to make ship speed a racial trait, so this special is broken.
  

The race table for this mod will be pretty simple:

The races do retain all their hab. Subterranean races are still subterranean.

Evaluation of Race Balance: With no hard-wired bonuses, it's pretty easy to spot that balance wasn't uppermost on Archonon's mind when he made this mod. To balance, all races within the same species would need the same number of points, and that's clearly not the case. From version 001 to version 002 he added 360 points to every race to play with--maybe he forgot the Raas and Grendarl? Otherwise there's not much need to comment. For balance, this one gets a single thumb:

Evaluation of Race Differentiation and Creativity: Archonon's mod is nothing if not bold and different. The Chauvinism pick alone would change the game, and that's one of the smaller changes. Personally, I LIKE the way MoO3 mingles hard-wired bonuses with race picks, to give each race distinctive character while also allowing us to customize, and so it's hard for me to sympathize with Archonon's goals. Naturally Archonon's races aren't differentiated: that was his point. But I have to be impressed with his flair. I'll give it two thumbs, with the addition that if you love MoO2, you might rate it much higher.

Would I play this one? I'd rather just play MoO2.