Intelligint Alien Hostilities, Friendships, and Alliances and More

I absolutely love this idea! All for it.

And I was thinking, maybe one could hire friendly species as mercenaries?

 

Maybe.... but... "Declares war" NOW MERCENARIES ATTA- Slaughters Player

 

Well, hopefully, if they like you enough to hire them, they probably wouldn't declare war, right?

 

Possibility to exterminate other races when I consider it would be good for me - I am apsolutly supporting this. But one note - when dealing with numbers (how many I have to kill in order to make entire race go extinct) I would like to actually see this bit of important information. Also - this idea is unacceptable for me as long as I am unable to attack friendly if I chose to do so. Howewer there is possibility to delcare a war so I think that in the end it is possible to attack them.

Also this could be nicely combined with my idea proposted on forum "War of the Worlds".

 

Well, yes, you COULD attack friendly races... if you attacked them, a GUI would pop up saying do you REALLY want to attack them? (Think Civilization)
The numbers, would probably depend on they're technological advancement.

 

Like in Civilization. So all idea is really ok for me. I like it. But don't You think that technological advancement would be more fitting to decide what kind of weapons they may have? For number determination I would like to suggest having diffrent parameter.

 

I think a diplomatic aspect to the game, though complicated, would be very interesting. Sharing technology and working with the other species can lead to a very diverse population on your space station and possibly recruiting members of that race as squad mates (and future characters made on that save file) To often in games "alliances" just means "I'll kill you last". With the vastness of the Starbound setting, taking on the whole galaxy/universe is far to daunting a task alone.

Meeting new races and working with them can help expand the sphere of influence of your space kingdom without having to check every planet yourself. Maybe once these friendly Civilizations attain space travel themselves they will explore along side you sharing coordinates of planets of danger or interest.

Another aspect of finding friendly species is a common science fiction concept of "uplifting". Through slight genetic modification a species that may still be at the "beat bad man with stick till he falls down" can be brought up to a higher intelligence where they can start forming their own nations and eventually join the galactic community as a proper sentient race. There could even be a quest around preserving or uplifting a race with the reward being a crew member of that race.

I'm somewhat reminded of the latter end of SPORE, traveling the galaxy and interacting with many races some even more advanced then your own, in trade, war, colonization, etc.

This would all require quite amount of coding but would add a great layer of depth to how we interact with our pixelated neighbors rather then just seeing them as multicolored loot pinatas.