What do these racial bonuses actually do?

Not sure about courage, But IIRC on the creativity you get a roll to research faster. To my knowledge it doesn't lead to getting 'new tech' - something not on the tech tree.

Defense works as you stated, and Weapons the same way.

I'm with you there, but loyalty makes 'em stay with you longer. Try playing the Yor who get 100% loyalty as a racial bonus.


Actually I'm sure this is answered on the wiki...

Courage (does this go to my soldiering?) Creativity (is this some kind of research bonus?) Defense (does this actually apply to my ships' defense? Eg, if I have +30%, does by ship with armor 10 actually get armor 13?) Loyalty (doesn't morale already make a planet less likely to revolt? Why would enyone take loyalty over a morale bonus?) Luck (I have no clue) Weapons (as with defense)

Creativity gives you a chance to research techs quicker than expected occasionally.

Defense boosts all ship defenses as you say. Note that any bonus it gives is rounded down (truncated, actually), so fractional amounts are lost.

Loyalty grants a bonus to your planets' rolls when they are under enemy influence, so they will not culture-flip as easily.

Luck increases your minimum attack rolls in battle to the Luck% * the max roll. So a ship with 4 attack and 50% Luck will roll 2-4 when attacking, rather than 1-4 (in DA, it is possible to roll 0 on attack rolls as well, so this is even more useful). It may also do more, but I'm not sure exactly what if anything.

Weapons functions exactly like Defense, but for weapons as you would guess.

Courage is not really documented, so I'm not sure of its exact effect.

Creativity gives you a chance to research techs quicker than expected occasionally.

Yes, but IIRC the description of this racial bonus reads in such a way that it implies a bonus to come up with a totally new, unknown tech... at least in v1.4DL. So then I guess it is safe to assume that it is in fact worded incorrectly?

Courage gives you a soldiering bonus when defending your own worlds. At least that is what it said when I clicked on it during the set up of the last game when I was curious.

What about the Luck from Surveying the "1 bc...it must be your lucky day" anomalies? What's going on there?

What about the Luck from Surveying the "1 bc...it must be your lucky day" anomalies? What's going on there?

As far as I know, nothing more than you receiving 1bc to your treasury. No luck bonus or anything like that.

What about the Luck from Surveying the "1 bc...it must be your lucky day" anomalies? What's going on there?

that's just you getting bad luck and hitting a sucky anomaly

mabye luck gets you more rangers mid-game?

Creativity is certainly poorly worded. Sounds like a chance to suddenly discover a tech you don't know (and aren't researching), but it's not.

I stopped picking the creativity feature in DA, because it has so far done nothing for me. In DL I would occasionally get a random tech benefit, but in at least 10 long DA games, nothing.

On the other hand, I'm not really having the bugs/problems that others seem to have, so it's not a big problem for me to spend that point on a more useful ability, like social/military/research.

Hi!

IMO that's not exactly true. In DA ships fire each weapon separately, so you need to have a weapon that deals at least 2 points of damage to see 50% luck at work, or 4 damage to see 25% luck. If your explanation would work, then my 4*plasma ship would never made a hit for 1 point of damage to an undefended ship, always at least 2. But when I've been watching battles under DA 1.5x, it did.

In DL Luck gave Lucky Rangers quite early. The amount it gave was so big, that it was game-breaking. IIRC Stardock nerfed that to no Lucky Rangers before year 5.

BR, Iztok

Hi!

Asked many times, AFAIK developers never answered. But its description sounds to me like it could give my race access to tech from other alignments, e.g. playing good, but getting access to evil weapon(s).

BR, Iztok

In all the games I have played as Neutral I have never gotten a tech from a different alignment, no matter how much I have experimented with Creativity (try giving yourself 90%, 100%, or even 10,000% Creativity sometime, and see if it changes a @#$% thing).

And as far as I can tell, it does nothing at all.

And as Iztok pointed out, it has never been addressed clearly by the devs.

Play for 50 or so turns with a race with Creativity, save your game, open the debug.err file in the application directory and search for "Creative" or "Creativity" (can't remember which is used for certain).

This will show you exactly what it is doing.