The Monolith Builders, aka. the Interceding

Lore:

A peaceful and ancient race, perhaps even as old as the Endless, the Interceding have watched over the galaxy for eons. They constructed colossal orbital structures, known as monoliths, in order to "uplift" smaller races, and to disrupt others who proved to be to destructive to the rest of the galaxy. However, the cataclysmic destruction brought by the Endless' civil war nearly wiped out their entirety of their civilization, forcing the few remaining of their kind to retreat to the superstructures orbiting their planets, sending these into a temporal stasis in order to preserve the remains of their people. However, while new Generations of Interceding could live safely within their temporal stasis, much was lost over the course of time, including most of their advanced technology and knowledge, as well as the ability to survive in biospheres outside of those found on their monoliths. But now that younger races have arrived in the race for galactic power, the Interceding have returned, and seek to prevent another war as destructive as the one that nearly brought their race and the rest of the galaxy so close to extinction so many eons ago.

Gameplay:

Faction Affinity: Monolith builders/Ancient Architects

1. The Interceding cannot declare war.

2. The Interceding don't live on planets, instead they live on monoliths that orbit them. When they colonize a planet, they build a monolith to orbit the planet instead of creating a colony on it. This means that their population units live on the monolith, while leaving the planet completely empty of their population. The FIDSI the population generates on the monoliths is dependent on the planet type, as if they were on said planet. However, monoliths grant a small bonus to overall FIDSI (10%-25%?), while limiting the amount of population that can live on a monolith (3-5?). Both of these can be increased through research. Only Interceding population units can live on monoliths, and they can also not be moved to a planets surface.

Additionally, other populations living on these planets also are affected by the bonus FIDSI from the monolith without having to live on it. This is means that the Interceding do very well when incorporating minor factions into their empire.

3. Monoliths can also be built on planets colonized by other races, where they orbit the planet as inactive. A Interceding player can choose to change the status of the monolith, depending on their diplomatic status with this player. All effects of the monolith are increased by the amount of population on it, however, apart from that the populace on the monolith effects nothing else. Monoliths on these planets cannot be destroyed by anything, other than from becoming a shard. Also, the Interceding player can research in order for their colony ships (that build monoliths) can fly through other factions territory even if borders are closed, as long as they are unarmed.

Inactive: the monolith does nothing.

Uplifting: If their status is anything from cold war to allied they can "uplift" the planet:

The monolith grants the planet a FIDSI bonus, as well as system-wide bonuses that can be discovered through research. These include happiness, buyout bonuses, system-wide FIDSI bonuses, faster ship biuld times, etc... Activating a monolith costs a set amount of dust. Additionally, the Interceding gain an empire-wide FIDSI bonus and a happiness bonus that increases for each system with an uplifting monolith, the bonuses growing depending on the diplomatic relations to that race (cold war: 1% per system, peace: 2% per system, etc...?)

On the other hand with relations from between cold war and war, the Interceding player can also turn the monolith into a shard: The shard costs dust to be created, and negatively affects the planets FIDSI, as well as applying system-wide negative effects that can be researched. These effect include unhappiness, buyout increase, ship building time increase, war effort acceleration, etc... Keeping a shard activated costs a slowly increasing amount of dust, and will be deactivated after a certain amount of turns (10-20?) (that can be increased with research). However, after the shard is deactivated or the Interceding player doesn't have enough dust to pay it, the shard destroys itself, ie. it no longer orbits the planet.

Design:

The design behind this gameplay derives from the way i used to play diplomacy in ES1: Economically. The larger, more dangerous races don't make peace with you because you "want to talk about it", but because you have something to back up your words. The Interceding's focus lies on balancing the scale of galactic power between the different factions, preventing wars and the general destruction of the galaxy. They use uplifting monoliths to support allies and assist weaker factions, while using shards to punish aggressive military players or dangerous rivals by damaging their economy. The inability to declare war is to prevent them from abusing their powerful economy lategame, where they should have a lot of uplifting monoliths, in which case the Interceding player might ditch all their allies and build up a massive fleet to wipe everybody out, which, lore-wise, doesn't make any sense. Victory-wise, they might go for either diplomacy, economy or science, lore-wise focusing on either galactic peace and balance, rebuilding their ancient empire to former glory, or rediscovering their lost technology and knowledge.

Also, i would like to note that some of this races features are obviously pretty op, such as indestructible shards and monoliths, a stack-able empire wide FIDSI and happiness bonus, as well as just a base FIDSI bonus on all of their planets. Even though their small max-population limits this during the earlier stages of the game, with the new propaganda mechanic and minor factions, I can see this easily spiraling out of control. That is why all numbers are basically placeholders, and should be changed depending on balance.

Also, i'm personally not really happy with the name yet, so very open to suggestions! (Also open to suggestions about the other stuff too, of course )