My T.I.3 group all tend to be the creative types and we all like to create our own content for the games we enjoy, or even just make up our own new games. So now that we have completed a couple of games, we inevitable came to the topic of homebrew races. Since I've only played two games so far though, I really don't have a solid sense of balance yet, so I thought I would share the rough draft of what I've got so far. Any and all feedback is welcome, and I'm open to any ideas for changes or help with filling in the few blanks I still have.

I don't have a full back story yet, but the general theme I went with was a scavenger race of cyborgs. As scavengers, they aren't nomadic like the Saar and they aren't as aggressive or opportunistic as the Mentak. As cyborgs, they aren't a cold and calculating collection of only the best parts like the Borg, nor are they clean and uniformly assembled army like the Cybermen. What they are is very good and making the best of what they've got, meaning that they are all basically MacGyver'd together with spare parts and duct tape. They are the epitome of the phrase 'one man's trash is another man's treasure'.

The ability to swap one tech for another feels to me like it could be very broken. Letting you regularly climb up the tech tree while still using all your resources to build stuff seems very powerful to me. I could be wrong though.

The flagships ability to give sustain damage is pretty definitely too powerful. Giving all your cheap destroyers and cruisers that are escorting it 2 hit points would make a fleet that could absorb so much damage as to be virtually unbeatable. Possibly limit it to just one or two ships chosen when the battle begins.

I'm with ForgottenLore; much of these are simply too powerful and I would add the stacks of free Trade Goods to the things he already pointed out as unbalanced.

Alright, I've been thinking over possible tweaks for the things you pointed out. For the tech ability I realized having it work for the primary and the secondary is definitely too much, so I think the tweak on it should be to only work when executing the secondary. So you do still get a tech without having to pay the resource cost, but you would have to lose a previous tech to do it. Plus, with it only working for the secondary the best you can get is a 1 for 1 swap of techs after paying the SA counter, rather than executing the primary and getting a free 2 for the price of 1 trade. Also, one thing I just realized I missed entirely in the wording of the ability is for the discount to not include the additional cost of race-techs. So when executing the secondary, you would still pay the SA counter, then if you choose to discard a tech card you could ignore the 6 resource cost, but if the tech you want is a race-tech you would still pay its specific cost.

As for the flagship, I think dropping the hit dice to 3 dice at 8 is probably a good idea, since I'm not sure there are any other flagships that attack with 4 dice anyway. Also, dropping the movement to 1 sounds like it would help keep it from being a threat to steamroll with a pack of cruisers under its wings. As for the actual ability, the idea for it taking up more than 1 fleet spot was meant to help balance it some. I suppose it could be made to take up even more space and say it takes 3 fleet supply, but then it could very well take up more space in the fleet than the rest of the ships with it. Maybe take sustain away from the flagship itself and only provide it to the other ships?

For the trade goods being too much, I assume you were referring to the race-tech? As I said, I haven't play-tested it at all and don't know whether 1 or 2 TG's would be more appropriate, but you could either set it at 1 instead of 2 or up the research price from 3 to 4 or 5.

Alright, I got another idea. This one is even more of a rough draft idea than the last, but the help and feedback would be great to get it going in the right direction. At this point this is basically just an ability idea, with some possible ideas for race-techs to go along with it.

Race: The Hexxus (shoutout to Fern Gully!)

The Hexxus are a ravenous plague of bat-like parasites, swarming from planet to planet and scouring them of their resources before moving on to the next one.

Abilities

- Whenever you exhaust a planet, gain one trade good and place a depletion counter on that planet card.

- Planets with depletion counters on them produce one less resource per depletion counter and cannot be exhausted if they have a number of depletion counters equal to or higher than the planets total resource value.

- At the start of the Status phase, discard all but 5 of your Trade Goods.

- During the refresh step, remove one depletion counter from each un-exhausted planet with depletion counters present.

So basically, the first ability is that they can pull extra resources out of a planet at the cost of damaging it's long-term production. The second ability is just a common sense check on the ability since a planet that is entirely depleted shouldn't be able to produce anything. The third ability is to show the their short-sighted, hunger-driven mindset. They are good at getting food, but don't necessarily concern themselves with storing it for later. Plus in practical terms it just helps keep them from quickly stock-piling TG's. The last ability is just the idea that a planet will slowly recover if left alone long enough, and also helps make sure that any planet left behind by the Hexxus can later be colonized by another player and not just stay permanently useless.

Race tech ideas:

- Make Your Mark (4): Any time you attempt a ground invasion, you may place a depletion counter on the planet being invaded and receive 1 Trade Good.

- Bigger Bag of Holding (3): At the start of the Status Phase, you now discard all but 10 of your Trade Goods.

The first tech would make their ground invasions a thing to be feared, since even if the planet is successfully defended it would still be damaged and take time to recover. The second ability is just to let the Hexxus have a theoretical chance of qualifying for the 10 Trade Goods public objective, though I'm not sure if letting them hold onto that many would end up ballanced.

Other than that I haven't tried to think of a balanced starting fleet yet, but I think it should probably be a single carrier, a few ground forces, maybe a fighter or two, and a cruiser. Hopefully this would let them expand a little bit early without being too much too fast. For starting techs, I'm thinking Anti-Mass and maybe Hylar V Lasers. Starting system would probably be a single planet with maybe 4 production and 1 influence. Trade deals would be low. Probably 1 and 1, maybe 2 and 1.

Any thoughts?

I like the flavor, but I think the logistics of using the counters in actual play would be cumbersome and potentially confusing.

Yeah, the way I was picturing it working would be to put the counters on the planet cards rather than on the tiles themselves, but I guess it could still get problematic if your table gets too cluttered.

I know on my tables the cards get shuffled around, bumped and moved all the time. Keeping track of what cards are supposed to have what counters on them...

Plus, technically, I think to exhaust a planet you are supposed to flip the card face down. Naturally, everyone does that, no one actually taps , err.... rotates the cards 90 degrees.

Actually I hadn't been aware that you're supposed to flip the cards to show that they're exhausted. My group plays a lot of different card and board games, so we've just been content to tap/bow/turn/rotate the cards.

I guess, at the risk of clutter the board, you could just put the counters on the planets. I'm not sure how else you could accomplish the same effect without using some kind of counter though. Perhaps just say that any planet you exhaust can't refresh during that turns refresh phase, but that would end up causing a weird back and forth rhythm were you would only have your planets available every other turn. Plus it would still have the problem of needed to some how mark which planets have been exhausted during which turn.

As a counter argument (for counters), there isn't much difference mechanically between your depletion counters and the refinery and colony upgrade cards that get put on individual planet cards.

I don't know. I do really like the flavor you have going there. I also like the side effect that abilities that untap your planets so you can use them again would be treated differently by this race than others. It is definitely worth playtesting.