Overall, the DMO's biggest difference from the other races, will be their lack of true shielding, their unique type of defensive focus over offensive, and tech tree.
oop, excuse me *swaps back to Sins to boot a band of pirates from his planet*
*2 minutes later, pirates having had a stronger boot than he expected*
Primarily, in addition to heavy armor plating and more hull points than usual, to compensate for the lack of shielding, Dark Matter Organization capital ships will have a 'polarized hull', dissolving energy attacks against the hull, and the polarized plating adding extra armor in and of themselves.
Another less prominent difference between the DMO and other races (mainly the unity people) is their drone strike craft.
These drones are smaller, unmanned, fragile, but the DMO swarms these like locust, having as many as 4 squadrons for a lvl 1 battleship, growing to 9 at lvl 10, and research upgrades vastly increasing the number of drones, as much as dubling it, in each squadron.
Rather than focusing on augmenting the lethality of their attacks against others, the DMO focuses on 'crowd control' and extra effects resulting from said attacks.
An example of this would be: -Spoiler alert!- :p
On the offensive tech tree, augmenting ballistic weaponry, instead of
there being three tiers of missile damage upgrades followed by a range
augmentation, the DMO scientists would have it be one slightly heavier
damage amplification tier, followed by an EMP buff to all missile
attacks, giving every missile volley a chance to disable all systems on
their target, and follow that up with a tier of range flight speed
amplification, and lastly, a damage-over-time buff with a warhead in
each volley containing the makings of a self-sustaining chain reaction,
albeit dissolving.
In addition to the tech style difering greatly, the methods of diplomacy, and defenses also differ.
In the defensive tech tree, tier 8, there will be 2 rather costly 'ultimate' upgrades, one allowing you to deploy 1 additional starbase per planet, and the second augmenting said starbases with two extra upgrades each.
To counter the obviously over-powering defense the uber-buffed-starbasing will put up, The starbase upgrade options will be much more diverse, making players think more carefully on where, and how to deploy their still immobile starbases, and each upgrade's progress value inflation will be layed out in such a way that no starbase will survive long as a sort of 'Jack of Trades'
As another part of balancing out the defensive superiority, the offensive category will be shrunk, due to the lack of offensive focus to the DMO, and at the least, both offensive and defensive categories will be equal in size.
With that being all I will be spoiling, (and trust me, there's a lot more to the DMO than what was put in the spoiler) I leave you with that in mind as I start working on the alpha release... Which, if I really cook it tonight, it should be released on the morrow.
[edit:] this will take a bit longer than I expected :i
