Now Stardock have said they count on people making custom races, which is good; custom races are great stuff.
However, GalCiv2 has custom races, but the things like styles, avatars etc were added later and are quite hackish. The 'xyz custom race style' STILL previews as 'xyz base race it was based on', even years later. The race-select screen has an icon for every base race, and another for the last used custom race, with other buttons for loading races.
Is this how it will be presented in Elemental? We've seen mockups of the race select screen. Do we have to load races like files? The game allows huge amounts of cosmetic customisation. Can this be used to allow a 'proper' or 'professional' select option? If the game is built on customisability, I think the race select screen should devote more real estate to custom races (which will form the bulk of any 32-race game) than GalCiv2.
Given the light/dark thing of the mockup we've seen, I think making each 'side' a ribbon menu which shows all races, including custom races, that is scrollable side-to-side would work great. Particularly if you allow players to move the races around on the ribbon, so the default shown races can be changed, this allows all the great work in moddability (and the player's work in setting up various custom races) to be much more accessible and seem more 'part of the game', which it didn't really in GalCiv2.
GalCiv2 took great strides in custom races (especially with ToA) and I'm also curious to know if Elemental will allow the kind of style/AI/look and feel/culture customisability that we see there. I hope the races are a bit more externalised and portable, too (burying things in user/username/user/appdata/local/distributor/developer/game/mod lol). Can they be 'exported' along with all the other custom business they are associated with (ie, race images, portraits, any building styles, etc)? People made a great many awesome races for GalCiv2, but getting all the associated files and such in the right place and working wasn't for the faint-hearted.
