SpaceMaster: New Species?

[Girlinhat (OP)]

So I want to play a game with some RP aspects, namely include a second species on Earth and claim that they were a genetic project.  I want them to be a separate species so that I can still make derived species off of them, but I can't seem to figure out how to make a custom race.  The F9 window SM mode "make new empire" doesn't let me change the "ideal" settings.  I'd like for them to be less gravity and colder, but when I try to make a new empire or something I can't get it to work.

Am I missing something?

[metalax]

The ideal setting are determined by the world selected when you create a new empire.

You can use create a colony of whatever you current species is on a suitable gravity world and use SM to alter the atmosphere to the ideal oxygen(or methane) level then adjust gasses so you have the surface temp you want as ideal.

Then abandon that colony, select the body in the system information window and use create empire. If you are wanting them to be on earth, you then change to the new empire, select earth from the sys info screen and create a colony there. Then SM the desired population of the new species. After that you can abandon the homeworld, after SMing the atmosphere back to what it was originally if it is in a system that you are going to keep.

You now have a population of the new species on earth with their own ideal gravity/temperature/oxygen(methane) levels.

[Girlinhat (OP)]

Sounds a lot more convoluted than it needs to be...  This also hopes that there's a good gravity body in the system.  If I mod Earth to what I want the new species to be, make a new empire, and then mod Earth back, would that work?

[Vynadan]

You can manually set all values (bases and spread) in the race screen (ctrl + F12) if SM mode is enabled. There's a drop down menu if a single empire encloses several species. I've never actually tried to start with multiple races in the same faction, so I can't give you an exact walkthrough, but all the tools are there.

However, I've once (and only once) had very weird behaviour when defaul gravity would revert to 0 G and never change regardless of what I changed it to (and made sure to save). Make a backup beforehand just in case.

[Girlinhat (OP)]

If I have to I can make a new empire on Earth with no defense, so my starting troops will occupy them and they'll become my own population.  That doesn't really bother me.  I'll take a look at ctrl F12 though!

[Yonder]

You can manually set all values (bases and spread) in the race screen (ctrl + F12) if SM mode is enabled.

This has worked just fine for me in the past. I use it because I always want to colonize the moon (.17 g) but simply increasing the human g-spread to .75 seems too exploity to me (although it may be realistic, the fact that the human skeletal frame can support a 600 lb person is an indication to me that 2gs may be reasonable, albeit that is one small subset of the requirements... anyways...) so I go into SM mode and lower the ideal gravity to around .8 or .7.

I have also done something similar with a multiple population start that (sadly) never went anywhere. I was doing Dwarf Fortress, I had humans with the normal stats, I think Elves could live in .05g to 1.1 g, Dwarves could live from .8g to 2.5gs, etc, etc with different temperature tolerances. If I remember correctly some of the temperature tolerances for the species actually went outside Earth average, I had to make sure that I had Infrastructure for the (tiny) populations of Magmamen, to simulate their underground volcano-homes.

It was a very ambitious plan, initially the Empire would be ruled by the Dwarves, with the humans as second class citizens and everyone else various degrees of downtrodden. For example as fluff goblins and kobolds would only ever be crewed in numbers on fighters, and as such high fatality rates for those vessels would be completely acceptable.

I was hoping that as the game developed the colonization of certain planets that were unsuitable for dwarves (like Magmamen on Venus) would alter that power dynamic and possibly lead to revolts. Alas, hardly anything came of it after the first few years.