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[edit]
The best of the average races is the Silicoids. They have a huge early game advantage, but their problem lies in their Faustian bargain 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 (though 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.
Additionally, note that the Silicoid's advantage of not worrying about pollution shrinks as the game goes on. Every time an enemy gets a "Reduced Industrial Waste X %" Technology, the gap between the Silicoids and the other races shrink. Every time the enemy gets an "Ecological Restoration" Technology, the gap shrinks. The other races may start out paying 40%, but halfway through the game they will most likely be down to no more than 10% and at the end it is likely to be 0 - 5%. Industrial Waste Elimination eliminates the gap completely. Expect this gap to narrow as time passes.
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.
As a Silicoid player, understand one thing if nothing else, every advantage you have at the beginning of the game either goes away completely or turns into a disadvantage as time goes by. It is absolutely imperative that you do everything possible to get a strong early start in the game and do everything possible to use that for all you can get from it, because every time you take one step forward, the opponent will be taking 2. You may get 50 or 100 steps forward early on due to your advantages, but slowly and surely you will fall behind if you can't take advantage of the early game lead.
The Meklars[edit]
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 the Psilons.
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.
One drawback the Meklars have is that they are poor in Planetology, they get - 20% to Planetology spending and receive fewer techs from the field in the average game. This results in them having generally fewer population per planet than the other races and reining in the production benefit they generally have.
Their production benefit comes from their large number of factories, so rich and ultra rich worlds have an even larger benefit for this race than for other races.
The Sakkra[edit]
The Sakkras are the next of the average races. The benefit of this race is that they reproduce with each other at a very fast rate. This allows them to generate more people more quickly and use those people for their manual labor to help stand up colonies more quickly. This trait also has military benefits as well, making it more likely they will be able to defend against early planetary invasions and making it easier for the Sakkra to send waves of population to overtake planets. Thus, the Sakkra's unique ability has both directly economic and military benefits.
To get the maximum use out of this race, it is important to try to take full advantage of their reproduction. Any time you control colonies with low amounts of population and you have planets getting close to maxxing their population, it is a good idea to move people between them to allow maximum population growth. The ideal situation would be if all of your colonies capped their population at the same time.
Technologically, the Sakkra are the galactic experts in Planetology. They receive + 40% to research spent for Planetology and they will get more techs in this field than other races. This generally helps them to have higher maximum populations per planet than the other races and to colonize hostile environments faster than the other races.
The Alkaris[edit]
This is the only race with a combat advantage that makes it into the average races. This race is generally below the other races in the average category, but it does have enough advantages compared with the worst races to land it a spot in the purely average category.
First is that the Alkaris default to an Honorable personality. This generally keeps them from breaking treaties for short term gains and helps them to forge lasting friendships with some other races that helps to keep them from getting dogpiled by enraged former friends.
Secondly, the Alkari are the galactic experts in Propulsion. Being birds, apparently, means they are experts in flight. Propulsion is very important early in the game and allows the Alkari to quickly research the technology that will allow them to reach more distant planets, hopefully allowing them to get to the normal environment planets farther away from the galactic homeworlds first and giving them a bigger share of the generally larger and more habitable planets than the other races that are slower to develop long range fuel cells.
Master of Orion, also, tends to be a defensive game, and theirs is the only combat advantage, among the races with combat advantages, that is inherently defensive.
It is better to kill 1 enemy ship and lose none of your own than it is to kill 2 enemy ships and lose one of your own. The Alkari's "dodge bonus" of + 3 for all ships helps them keep their ships alive and in combat longer. This helps them to keep ships alive and usable rather than having them kill lots of enemy ships and lose many of their own. In that system, though they might win, they would still lose enough strength to make them easy targets for the next race. Some of the weaker races suffer from this problem, but the Alkari mostly avoid it.