Advanced Neutrals, How do you handle them

[Mahdi]

This is the first one I've run into and I'm wondering about the different ways you might deal with them.

Actually I just found one of their colony worlds, haven't found the home world yet.

 

Thanks for the help,

[rfouasnon]

Hehe , a division of Imperial Heavy Armor seems like a nice solution.......

[Lord Deependra]

This is the first one I've run into and I'm wondering about the different ways you might deal with them.

Actually I just found one of their colony worlds, haven't found the home world yet.

 

Thanks for the help,

 

 

Each Neutral is an isolated colony with random installations (mostly broken) and items. There is no home world. You can either use diplomacy to convince them to join you or to conquer them.

[Mahdi]

How would they feel about an alien fleet doing and EXPL on the planet?

[cestvel]

They wil just ignore the fleet

[ali-t-akua]

They are passives. You can pretty much do what you want and they will only react in limited ways.

[Paradigm]

Neutrals were never finished in the game and the ones that exist have little value. A young empire might get lucky and acquire an item that they can use or ANZ, so it is worth the time for young empires to look for neutrals. If you have a division nearby, it is the quickest way to acquire a neutral and has no down side.

 

I used to search for neutrals and used diplomacy to acquire most of the ones I found early. Eventually it became evident that they weren't worth the effort. If I need a handful of population somewhere I can just send my own colonists.

 

It is a shame there are no larger neutrals that would be worthwhile. My guess is that RTG didn't want the game to come down to who got lucky and found the best neutrals in their area. If you make neutrals weak militarily, they'll just get steam rollered by players. If you make them too strong, you have the problem that a player could be defeated and/or conquered by a neutral (not much fun for the player and isn't conducive to RTG making money). Plus major neutrals have to be ran in a semi-intelligent way to be a challenge/threat. That requires either man hours which RTG doesn't have or elaborate AI software that RTG can't afford to develop.

 

Considering the problems major neutrals can cause in games like this, perhaps it is for the best that RTG didn't try to include them. I did think that they could have included some with a handful of ground divisions so you had to at least make some effort. And that had a few 10's of millions of tons worth of stuff to capture, so they would be worthwhile. Maybe a few thousand pop so you could do something with them, like at least run resource mines on their world.