I think customization is important, but not on the art side. It's stats and abilities that are important to customize. I don't care if my custom faction has blue armor or red, I care if they have +1 attack or +5.

In GC2 I've spent about 2 hours building cool little ships and 200 hours playing through races with different customized stats. Customizable art assets are cool but don't necessarily add longevity.

So for the art/lore, focus on the 10 factions for now and leave customization for the gameplay.

Expand the race distinctions and provide more assets and code to support players creating their own custom factions made up by their own custom races.

YES!!! This is the way we want it!!!

What are the greatest 4X games and how do they handle this question?

Mostly they limit customization to the hard core modders (talking about putting in orcs and ents and that kind of thing).

I don't see why Elemental should break from this mold, because this mold is clearly successful.

Though the answer I was expecting was "BOTH", which would be great, but I'm still not really sure why this is even a huge hangup.  It's already stated that the 10 'canon' factions will have a wealth of lore and history, and it's assumed that each of these factions will play differently from each other (because if they don't then what was the point really...).

So it boils down to how much dev time should be spent on making the modding of new races easy (because it appears that modding of factions is much easier) vs. dev time spent on... well something else?

I'm not a modder and I hope this game doesn't require me to find mods to make me enjoy it (different from enjoying mods for their own value), so I really want more time spent on making the vanilla game as cool as possible and toss in more tools for the modders as you go along.  As others have stated, the number of people who will actually use those mod tools to great extent is probably less than 1%, probably far less than that actually.  The number of people who will be enthralled by the vanilla game NEEDS to be huge to even make the modders efforts worthwhile.

So build in the ability to add the mod tools as they are needed/requested, but get the game to a kick ass point before worrying about what this <1% segment of the players is going to say.

Personally I would vote for lore, especially since you are going to have professional writers and editors helping you out (otherwise it seems something of a waste). I also think a well told story is very important and will also draw more people into the game particularily if it's possible to play the game as some kind of gaint RPG (I'm talking about achieving victory through questing here).

Still I would miss being able to create lots of interesting races but I think an expansion could fix that problem. Whatever decision you make gameplay will ultimately decide whether the game succeededs or fails, but for me an engrossing well constructed fantasy world goes a long way toward keeping my interest.

From my experience when I was playin orion and MOM, I think people whant to design race that are going to be powerful combinations. For example:

In orion: Subteranean + lithovore is very abusive

In MOM: Node mastery with  nature mastery can quadruple mana received by nature node.

So players will always want to abuse the system and make the most powerful faction possible or make the faction that fit's best for their way of playing. The players never think on how the race integrate itself in the world.

My suggestions is that maybe races are prefixed and have abilities. New races can be added through modding. But players can add skill or abilities to their race which makes them a different variation of the same race. So that for example, 2 players could play the elves but one player call it the wood elves, while the other one the dark elves. At the base, they are all elves, and for city population, they might both be considered as elves.

Modifications could come From natural skills, government structure or anything else not genetic. But the genetic package will be the same for every player who select the same race.

In that case, you can make sure players can customize their faction and that the race they chose fit in the story of your world. It also prevent players from beign abusive: taking all the advantage they want and the disadvantage they don't care.

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An alternate but similar solution that could be interesting: One of my friend had a designed for an RPG game, a character creation system that was done by simply choosing background traits.

You had a series of background traits that you could choose for your character. Each of these background traits give bonus to various skills but players does not know which skill it increase.

So players makes their decision according to the story of their character and their intuition rather than focussing on the stats.

Results: Players get a more balanced character, they can make sure their character is focused in what they wanted without beign abusive and surprisingly, characters get some skills that they never tought of acquirering or using but  could eventually be useful. It makes a combination of skills that players would not naturally choose.

So you could do something like this:

Players chose their genetic race ( HUman, elves, etc.)

Then player chose background story of their race: For example, they are nomad elves which got in contact though their travel with many crystals and they were living near water. So this could be details as:

elves - nomad - contact with crystal - coastal living.

This could lead to various racial ability: here is some random examples.

- Being nomad increased their hunting skills so they are better in combat and can find food more easily.

- Having contact with crystal give them magic affinity but reduced their fertility, so their growth rate is reduced.

- Living near the sea allow them to use an extra source of food and sea units gain experience faster.

I think that could be a very good way to make sure each player's race is unique by preventing rule abuse. I suggest that each trait gives

1 strong bonus, 1 weak bonus and 1 weak malus.

What do you think?

Why can't we have race distinctions without custom races?

Even tho I love multiplayer, I gotta say that I like this approach.

Well, it will be easy to set up some "basic", yet unique custom factions if they will go with option 2. You won't have to mod anything in that case. Sure modding is the real deal anyways, if you want to add a truly unique race/faction, but you get the picture, yea? Option 2. will be good for "casuals" who don't want to mod anything. Also option 2. means that we end up having more diverse races, but the lore will be there as well.

I don't suppose we can just reduce the number of factions to like 6 and spend the time saved on making the game more mod friendly. I want a good story, but the fact that most games with that many factions just don't come out unique enough to matter. So I think a middle ground would be better.

As Draginol noted, most players seem to enjoy customizing their side.  Thus, they will choose their own characteristics and be indifferent to how those characteristics are divided between side / faction / race.  All they care about is the final set of characteristics and appearance they get.

Where things get dicey is when they start conquering other cities.  The relevant question now is the degree to which you can pick up different characteristics by conquering.  Again, however, the division between side / faction / race is largely irrelevant as a practical matter.  One can allow different characteristics to be picked up regardless of which mechanism is used (interbreeding, culture, knowledge, etcetera). 

To give a practical example, say your own side is based around sorcery, and you conquer a city devoted to tough ground troops.  Whether you call them elves and dwarves, or Pariden and Ironeers, doesn't really matter to the game play.  The question is whether you can then start deploying tough ground troops when you couldn't before, and how easily you can export that capability to other cities. 

Filling out a matrix of philosophy / faction / race only seems productive if the player is not allowed to just pick and choose characteristics.  If the player IS allowed to just choose characteristics, then the player doesn't really care how the opponents are put together - again, the player only cares about the final set of characteristics that they end up with. 

I'm all for customizing the AI opponents to fit the world.  Adds flavor.  But ultimately I think slicing and dicing at this level of detail is pointless.  Go ahead and customize the factions as much as desired, but recognize that 95% of the time players are going to custom build their own side and will not be assembling it by mixing and matching philosophy / faction / race.  In fact, trying to limit their choices by forcing them to do so would be, in my view, a serious mistake.

Having said all that, I suggest that the art assets be devoted to the peoples that exist in the backstory.  Players can customize their characteristics all they want, but the basic engine is built around this world, and your citizens are going to look like one of the stock peoples of the world, although their characteristics may have been radically changed.  If people want to insert elves, then the modders out there can go crazy and do so, but since you're already publishing a book on the world, I think it is best to focus the art assets on the world you've already developed rather than trying to let players introduce space smurfs.

I vote for this too!

My impression is that that would be in option 1, not option 2.  Option 2 is about making it easier for the modders to create entirely new and different races.  Choosing to change perks/styles which already exist should be part of #1.

I quite agree that lots of people will tweak 'little' things to get the feel they want.  What interpret Brad as asking is how much effort to put forth now so that the modders can change 'big' things.

Already there appears to be a large amount of customization available for the sovereign, and a decent amount of customization likely for factions.  Do we really need to worry about models for different races right now?

I say no, do it later, make sure the game is actually worth making people interested in doing this.  Otherwise you're looking at some kind of TOAW non-game game.

Nop, that is option 2. Option 2 = More customization [racial/factional] options within the game itself...at least I think that this is what Froggie meant.

Expand the race distinctions. I mean we will have expansions.