More Awesome Than You!

I planted two homeworlds close together.  Homeworlds of other races you've started are clearly marked on the map, even if you've never visited.  While you can invade colonies of other races you've started, you cannot in any way attack their homeworld.  Eco-engineering tools are marked "you can't use that in this system," as are weapons.  You can't hire an invasion, either.

Time passes through the entire galaxy no matter who you're playing.  I had zero spice as the Blobs, and then sent my bloodthirsty carnivores to check out their homeworld to see if they could invade.  When I loaded the Blobs again, they had 50 spice.

 - Gus

So when you invade your own creatures...do they have space fleets to defend the colonies?

I'm guessing yes, which leads me right back into "What the fuck were they thinking when they made this game?"

It's like they paved the road right up to the edge of fun, but ran out of bricks so they left it there, ten feet away.  We, the players, pick it up and think, oh, well, maybe I can bridge the gap, it's only a few steps.

But you're on a treadmill.  Against the wind.  In a hurricane. 

I hate that you can't even use environmental coloring tools. I can understand not being able to use terrain shaping as it could eliminate nests, tribes, etc. But colors? I was really looking forward to painting my tribal races' homes all purty.

Hm.

I also found it annoying how you cannot colonise a planet if there's a sentient species in that solar system. I really wanted to build a colony on a planet with the rare (in my game at least) pink spice. Luckily, I just abducted several of them, destroyed all their cities and built my colony before dumping them back on their planet (and letting them start again from the stone age).

Hopefully, we'll start seeing some interesting hacks for the game crawl out of the woodwork soon.

How does diplomacy work with your own empires? Do your guys automatically attack you on sight?

Diplomacy is completely normal.  They don't hate you, they don't love you.

 - Gus

Last night I ran into the Songie, who were neutral and obsessed with how entertaining I wasn't. The Morekin were nice on sight. Both were Economic in civ stage, though Morekin started religious. I can't recall their exact make-ups.

Spode people will always attack.  The diplomats are annoying.  The creatures of the light need to STFU.  The Force people are able to be bought.

If you happen to go to war with one of your own empires, they will not attack your planets like AI Empires will.  I guess they assume that if you declare war on yourself that you're going to be playing both sides.

Also any creatures that you evolve using the Monolith will demand large amounts of cash from you like the Spode do.  I don't know if they will risk going to war with you over it though since they have a power rating of 1 and they only have 1 or 2 planets.

The sudden cash demands appears to be some kind of bizarre glitch. One time I had my allies who had been peacefully coexisting for ages suddenly start getting negatives for "you refused to give us tribute"...not that I ever got a message of them asking. It just continuously went down. I ate one of them through trade before it ended, and the other one broke the alliance so I crushed him into the DIRT.

So far the only other empire I've run into is a bunch of armless duck things that asked me to abduct a tribe member from another planet so they could sell stuff to it.
(Oh, and Zazazu! I've already run across one of your creatures in space now that I got them to show up in game.)