I kinda figured that would be the case, but thought I'd pick your brain to see if you had tried to do this before and you have. Thanks for the feedback. I'll let Amro know. Anyway, I think the way we set it up for Typhon Pact is still pretty good. Folks get to play as the other four races. Just would have been nice to combine both the main title game and bonus game into one singular campaign.
EDIT: Amro decided to give it a second look completely combining our mods to give it a deeper look and came to the same conclusion. Noting that combining everything into one playable mod as opposed to dividing the races into two separate mod options like we did for Typhon Pact, yielded less than desirable results. Playing in the Cardassian and 8472 slots, ships can't be purchased at all. If you play as the Rekelli or Pirate slots, the stations attack you whenever you attempt to refit or refuel and ALL ships attack you when playing in these race slots. We did notice though that if you go to any Neutral stations, you can refuel and repair playing as the Rekelli or Pirates. So that's that. Without doing major fixes to the AI in exe the UI is negligible in comparison. Sucks. ... Ah, well.
P.S. - Also going to be updating the Typhon Pact mod when we complete our mirror universe mod with your shuttle fix.
You can actually modify the galactic political stances and edit the scenario scripts so that if you want, for example, the Rakelli to be allied to the Romulans you can set things up in such a way that you can repair/rearm at Romulan stations, Romulan ships won't attack you (they'll even offer to join your fleet) and the right allies and enemies show up in scenarios.
Oh, almost forgot, one other problem is that ships that aren't from the first 4 race slots will spawn on a random location on the galactic map, even if you've given their empire a homeworld in the map editor.
Yup, we've done that for our Typhon Pact mod and will be doing the same for our upcoming MirrorrorriM mod. We also figured out how to set the "civil war" aspect by tweaking the political stances. In our Typhon Pact mod for example, we have the Klingon Empire, Borg and Rekelli generate factions that will sometimes join you and other times turn against you, even during missions. We've tailored the stock and custom scripts to the political stance also.
As far as random spawning, yeah it does do that if you have all 8 races - bummer, but for the most part the game seems to behave and spawn the races most of the time to the assigned empires. The only 'glitch' is when you completely conquer an empire (all corresponding hexes flipped) you have to exit the game then go back to the saved game to remove the race from the galaxy. A quick check in the news feed, will then only show 7 races active instead of 8 . On occasion when forcing a race toward defeat, the game produces a popup message in the news feed that says: [RACE] would like to discuss terms of surrender. YES or NO. Even if you select Yes, we don't notice any change to game play. I'm guessing this is something Taldren was working on for expanded game play that never got finished. It might also be that we disabled (or at least set victory outcomes to expanded seemingly infinite game play) the game from deducing the odds of a human victory for the galactic map so it doesn't conclude the game early. This gives the human player the option to play for a long, long time. The map in game is a 50 x 80 and the AI adjusts its tactics as a result, which makes game play interesting and more fun.
EDIT: Our programmer Amro, has pretty much given up on combining all 8 races to one game as you and d4v1ks pointed out a lot of issues that just can't be resolved easily. At this point, he just doesn't have the time or necessary programming experience (yet) to expand upon what the Starfleet Community has already contributed or tried. But thanks for everything.