Question on Minor Factions

[Sizzle]

With the sheer number of minor factions (especially with the CoN expansion), it begs the question,  if the faction is checked off, does it guarantee the faction's presence, or is it just possible for it to appear?

How are minor factions seeded in?  Each has a chance of appearing?  (leading to some games with a lot of factions or some games with near none -- just due to random chance)  Or is there X # of minor factions present, with a random selection of those enabled?

If they have a 100% chance of appearing if checked off, then I'd like to suggest some sort of randomization mechanic as we get more minor factions added.

[Fleet]

Whichever ones you check will be enabled, and will usually happen if the game is of any nontrivial length.  

I agree with you about the randomization. I would enable just about ALL of them if they would come and go at random times. So maybe 1hr in a devourer golem drops by, at hour 3 a rebel colony needs saving. Would add tons of variety. I don't want to deal with all of them at once, but having them come and go would be very cool, and I think more players would open up to enabling them for rotation.

[MaxAstro]

What I'd like to see is something along the lines of a "percent chance of being in the game" box being added below the minor factions (just one box, not one per faction, that would be too much work).  This way, for example, you could set it at 50% and create a situation where the minor factions you turn off are guaranteed to not be in the game, and the ones you check each have a 50% chance to be in the game or not.

I never, ever want to see a devourer golem, but I would love if there was some randomness in the minor factions; it would make things a bit less predictable as you'd have to wait and find out who's showing up to the party. 

[Vinraith]

Yeah, I mentioned this same thing in the suggestions forum (and I probably wasn't the first), it'd be great to be able to set some factions to appear at random, so you never knew exactly what you were going to get.

http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,6457.0.html

[x4000]

Right now it's 100% chance of anything you check.  We might introduce some sort of uncertainty slider for them later on, but we'll see.

[snrub_guy]

An idea I might be quite interested in seeing would be a checkbox where it would select a random choice from the available minor factions, so that I can make the game choose, say, 4 or 5 random factions for me.

[Vinraith]

That's an interesting thought. It also occurred to me that it might be interesting to have an optional "generic" difficulty option off the front which would give you a random setup tuned for a given level of play (easy, medium, hard, or something finer grain if that's your thing). Regardless that ability to have some randomization in AI plots, minor factions, and the like is something I'd really love to see. The underlying idea of giving you a galaxy where you don't necessarily know what's going to threaten you is an appealing one, however it happens to be implemented.