Master of Orion/Average races

This section contains a listing of the four races that are in the middle of the road. The ones that often show up as really tough opponents and just as often fail to do anything of note. It is generally not as easy to win with any of these as it is with the previous group, but the strongest among this group is almost worthy of being in the list of the best races. If four were chosen for the best races category, it would undoubtedly be number 4.

When playing these races, the player has a pretty average chance to win. Their advantages are generally enough to keep these races from having to face an uphill battle the whole way, but at the same time it isn't nearly as easy to win with these as the best races.

The Silicoids
The best of the average races is the Silicoids. They have a huge early game advantage, but their problem lies in their faustian bargian nature.

More than any other race, the Silicoids play completely differently than every other race. This derives from three very significant things, (1) They do not suffer from pollution, (2) they can naturally inhabit any environment, and (3) they cannot alter environments.

While other races have to research hostile environment technologies to be able to inhabit hostile worlds, Silicoids can begin inhabiting them without research starting from the first turn.

The Silicoid race never spends any production to control waste, they just let their factories pollute the environment, right up to the maximum an environment can even be polluted, and they don't even care. It doesn't negatively affect them to do this (thought it has serious drawbacks for civilizations who take over Silicoid worlds).

Lastly, their biggest drawback. They cannot make use of the technologies "Atmospheric Terraforming", "Soil Enrichment", or "Advanced Soil Enrichment". Every other race can use these, but Silicoids can never research them and even if they steal the technology or trade for it they will never use it. They can make use of the benefits of it if they take over worlds from opponents who have used it, however.

This means that they cannot increase the size of their worlds massively at the same time the other civilizations do. Every time the Silicoid's enemies use these technologies on one of their planets, it hurts the Silicoid's chance to win just a little bit if they are allowed to keep the colony. For the Silicoids, this is like a death from 1000 papercuts. It is barely noticeable at first, but the battle the Silicoids fight just gets more and more uphill every turn the game progresses.

The ability is generally a wash, but the Silicoids also grow all population at half the rate of other races or the same rate that the other races have on hostile planet environments. They essentially treat all planets as hostile environments. The Silicoids can still grow population in line with other races, though, if they just spend the same amount on growing their people as the other races would have spent to clean up their industrial waste. That is, if they spend as much as others would spend on waste, they will grow population at about the same rate as the other races.

The best use of the Silicoid's advantages is to quickly colonize every possible planet right away, and for the Silicoids to make a particularly large effort to get all of the Rich and Ultra Rich planets that are in hostile environments as quickly as possible. Other races will have to research this tech and because of that Silicoids will usually have first dibs, they just have to hold the planet once they have it. By doing this, the Silicoids can get a large early lead on the other races, a lead which they can hopefully hold.

If the Silicoid player does not manage to get into a dominant position early, they will be facing a very difficult game. As the Silicoids, if you aren't in the galactic driver's seat, you have probably lost the game.

Technologically, the Silicoids receive +20% to research in the Computers field and - 20% to research in every other field. This makes them effective at spying and defending against spies, and pretty much requires that they do spying on others just to keep up in every other field.

The Meklars
This race has the advantage that they can control 2 additional factories in addition to what their Robotics Controls tech level would normally allow. Other races start being able to control 2 factories each while the Meklars can control 4 right away. Other races end with 7 at most and Meklars end with 9 at most.

The Meklars are also the racial masters of Computers technology. For each research field, one and only one race gets 40% to research in that field and no race has more than one they are an expert in. For Meklars, that is Computers. This allows them to quickly master very high tech levels in the field and to be very effective at both spying and defending against spies. Opponents might as well not even bother to try spying on the Meklars in most cases.

Computers happens to be the field that includes Robotics Controls technology, so not only will they control more factories early, they will also gain access to even greater controls faster than all but one other race.

Computers also controls Battle Computers and ECM Jammers so expect their ships to hit very often for high amounts of damage and to be very difficult to destroy with missiles.