Thanks for the thoughts, guys. In general I'm against working titles, as they tend to stick. Also, it means we can't do any advance marketing about the game without then losing all momentum when we change the game.
And there are quite a lot of things that I know about the game, but I'm not ready to share all of them yet as some may change. I also don't want to focus too specifically on one specific faction or leader, as that would be really misleading. You can play as any of them. That would be like calling Civilization "The Catherine The Great Plan" or "George Washington's Big Adventure," for instance.
As to your question of what the race that is landing is like -- are they nice, are they mean, etc, etc -- well, that all depends. Whatever races you DON'T play as start out on the planet and are already established. Whichever one you choose is the one that lands as the invaders, the lost colonists so to speak. This could be a group of the equivalent of Burlusts or Peltians landing, or anything in between. So there again you can't really say if these are nice guys coming down to play with everyone else well, or if they are jerks coming down to conquer.
This is why I like broad names: as with most 4x titles, this has multiple paths to victory, and unlike The Last Federation or AI War, there is no one specific end goal that you are working towards. Instead, like Civilization for instance, there are maybe 5 or 6 different end goals that you are working towards, and if one starts going south then you can switch gears and try for something else.
In terms of Tau Ceti, that was indeed the reason I avoided using that. Omicron also just sounds really cool, and makes me think of both Transformers: The Movie (yes, I know that was Unicron) as well as a variety of other things.
The name of the planet that you are on is not really something that is set in stone; the one I had been thinking of before was something that people can't pronounce well, and looks like other things. Even so, Omicron Ceti is a star, not a planet, so the planets around it can have any names (it doesn't have to be Omicron Ceti III or whatever).
I can kind of see the reluctance to the word empires, but bear in mind that has connotations of majesty and power. Whereas imperial typically has connotations of oppression and other bad things. I'm not a fan of having really negative words in the title, as that then is an immediate turnoff.
The title does need to really evoke what the game is about to get people to click into it. If they see this, they see just the tiny steam icon thing and the title, usually. They see it's Strategy and Indie, and that's it. That could mean 4X, RTS, tower defense, or more questionably-strategy sort of titles. So short of putting the word "4X" in the title, which is tacky, putting a word like Empires in there is kind of a necessary evil in terms of actually attracting the attention of people who would be interested in the 4X genre but are tired of clicking on strategy titles and finding out it was tower defense or whatever.
You may discount the importance of that level of info (what about reviews, videos, screenshots, larger banners, and so on?), but our data from the last 5 years shows that the clickthrough rate from people just seeing the title and the name blind is a really key factor. The Last Federation evokes some pretty obvious stuff, and so the clickthrough rate there was nearly 2x the global average for all Steam games. That makes an enormous difference.
I'm not saying the word Empires has to be used, there have been other examples like the game Colonization that were really strong, too, and provide a context if we use anything with the word Colony in it. Settlers also evokes the right thing, as does the word Master. Master Of Omicron Ceti would be way too similar to MOO, though, of course. And something like Colonists of Omicron Ceti is just linguistically weak.
Anyway, we are working on a variety of other things right now, relating to this game, TLF, and AI War. But the purpose of this thread is to find THE name for this game as a sideband process while we do that other stuff. In other words, we're multithreading.
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