When I play IS:G, I like immersing myself in the setting; role-playing a little. I noticed that the first leaders one can hire are not necessarily from one's starting species, which I find a little odd when I have not found other species yet or when my first exploratory fleet is not captained by a member of my starting species. Would it be possible to restrict the first few available leaders to the player's species for immersion purposes? Thanks for considering.
Hi, thanks for your suggestion, and welcome to the forums! I understand it could be interesting to have the first leaders be of your own species. However, these are mercenary leaders that travel around the galaxy, so they could be met before formal contact is made with the empires of their race. Also, not all leaders are of the races present in the game. So, the leaders system works like this for practical reasons as we don't have that many leaders to offer of the same race, which could lead to a lack of diversity and much repetition of leaders offered at the beginning. That said, this could be something interesting to consider at some point if we have more leaders to offer. So, I've added this to the big list of items to consider in the future. We'll see.
Thinking back on the opening cinematic, which establishes that your species has contact with the wider galaxy, if not with specific empires, from the beginning of the game, I concede that hiring mercenaries makes sense lore wise. I do still like the idea of starting with my own specie's leaders at the beginning of the game for narrative purposes. The limited species leader selection pool would make the starts repetitive which, understandably, one wants to avoid. Personally, I wouldn't mind an option where one or two of my species leaders were guaranteed to appear for hire at the beginning of the game, even if they were the same ones every game, but I understand that might not be as designed or to everyone's tastes. If/when there are enough species leaders to support it, having a guaranteed representative or two of my chosen species for hire in the game's beginning stages would be very appealing to me. Thank you for your time and putting my suggestion on the Big List of Interesting Thoughts.
It does not bother me if these leaders are not my species. In MOO2 its the same, so I am a traditionalist
