The Crescent factions are the best developed. They had a ton of personality going with them in the original game. I have a pretty solid idea how to give each of them a distinct, fun, and balanced play.
Igadzra
The Igadzra are the most developed faction that I have worked on so far. They are the easiest because of the rediculous claims of their own government. "The Igazra is the most powerful ship in the galaxy." Whenever I read that, I always think of the LARGE variety of ships, individual and grouped, to kill the Igazra.
The faction will be tough and powerful, but inflexible. They will hopefully have a very limited number of upgrades and variations. Meaning you will be tempted to use regular Endless Sky weapons and outfits to try and get that little bit of extra for these ships. Or stick with the limited options.
Azdgari
The Azdara is fast and incredibly powerful, but small and difficult to use. The Azdgari will have the only small super ship. It will be able to go toe-to-toe with a voinian dreadnought, but be so tiny. I am permanently hung up, thinking of the Azdgari as fast-romulans. So that's what I am planning on doing. They will also have a lot of fighters and 'drones'.
Small, fast, and romulan-y. But instead of cloaking, they have unbreakable shielding. It may only be 1000 shields versus a 300000, but it wont die if you can't get it below 900.
Zidagar
These will be very fun to play with. Raw, unbeatable power is the key to this faction. They will do a lot of damage, but only for a few seconds. Kill the enemy quickly, we will be out of ammo in fifteen seconds. Fighting on the edge of defeat is their style, but at the price of fragile ships. There outfits will be almost impossible to fit onto anyone else's ships. Probably.
United Earth
Vanilla. It's all I can come up with. Fortunately, the original faction was incredibly developed. I wont need much creativity to fill out their fleet.
Voinians
Lets of design flexibility, but SLOW. Just like they were in the original game. A Voinian Cruiser could fit EVERY passive outfit from the original game onto it. Nuff said.
Emalgha
Even in the 'good'ol days of gaming' there was the stink of rushed games, incomplete story arcs and so on. I always suspected the developers had some really cool ideas for the Emalgha, but just never got to do them. They didn't have a lot of personality, so it will be difficult to 'stay true' to the game here.
I currently have, almost every ship from the original game, laid out at some point or another. Balance became a huge problem in the UE has a good 10-20 ships, Voinians had 8, Miranu (Who were they again?) had 8, Azdgari had 3, Igadzra had 3, Emalgha had 3, and the Zidagar had only 2.
Sadly, the most interesting factions also had the smallest fleets, but I have a 'quick and dirty' fix to that problem. End result is almost everyone, except for Emalgha will have about 10 ships to start. The next release will be around V0.30, and it will have 50+ ships in it. This version will be as 'true' to the original game as possible. After it, I start adding my idea of improvements to the races. Look in the pictures for some sketches.
Original games ships were incredibly bland, and I hope that will be fixed soon.
