Perhaps better planet physics for SEV or future SE games |
In my opinion, there could be a lot more planet types, attributes, and interactions that could be added to SE without unbalancing the game, as well as adding a lot of much needed realism.
Planets should include "biome type" and "climate type".
Examples of Biomes for planets:
Forest (A planet covered in Temperate Forest)
Oceanic (A planet covered or almost completely covered in an ocean)
Mountain (A mountainous planet)
Flatlands (A planet covered in plains and foothills)
Desert (A world without much life. Remember a desert is just a place with less than a certain amount of rainfall)
Barren (A world without life)
Jungle (A planet covered in jungle)
etc...
and Climate will basically include tem.perature and moisture content of a planet's atmosphere.
Biome and Climate should be seperate, except for contradictions (e.g. Desert will not have high moisture content in the air.)
In addition to choosing your race's native planet type and atmosphere, choices will also be given for biome and climate.
Climate is directly affected by population and what it does, and biome is affected indirectly by climate (i.e. if a race absorbs a tremendous amount of heat from an oceanic ice planet, the ocean will freeze into desert. Yes, oceanic ice. Basically Europa).
In addition, unless if your race has extremely high enviormental resistance, your race will almost be completely incompatible with climates they aren't native to. The climate control facility will change a planet's climate towards a race's liking, rather than the planet's condition. They will have to live in domes which instead of limiting population development, will instead cost a non-linear maintanence (i.e. supporting twice as much population should take 4 times the resources on a hostile planet). Same goes for incompatible atmosphere, planet type, and biome type, except each will incur a slightly less or higher penalty (i.e. it costs more to support a population on a completely different planet type than to support one in a biome). Certain biomes will be compatible (e.g. Barren and Desert), and do not need doming. The main point stressed here though is the need for doming on different planet types (rock, ice, gas).
And last but not least, the planets should be renamed to better suit both flavor and allow for more flexibility, as well as having a better scientific basis. The planet types i propose are:
Terrestial - The type of planet we live on, and comprises the vast majority (well all of) known rocky planets. It's mainly composed of silicate rocks.
Jovian - "Jupiter like". Doesn't necessarily need to be in gas form though (e.g. A liquid hydrogen planet... floating through space by a dead star...)
Urainian - This is still a bit controversial in the scientific community, but I think it deserves a class (Though i'm kind of merging Ice Dwarf and Ice Giant planets here). It is basically a planet composed mainly of 'Ices' (though they don't have to be solid, they include Water, Ammonia, and Methane).
Chthonian - A hypothetical planet, basically what happens if you take Jupiter and put it extremely close to the sun (but not so close that the two bodies merge). The hydrogen and helium atmosphere will be blown away, leaving a solid core not too different from a terrestial planet (supposedly, check the wikipedia).
Carbide - Basically a terrestial planet that instead of being composed of mainly silicate rocks, but rather carbon-based rocks.
Metallic - An imaginary class of planets I made up that I suppose could be theoretically possible in the later universe when heavy elements are far more abundant, it is basically a planet composed entirely of Nickel-Iron (basically the stuff of rocky-metallic asteroids and what our core is composed of).
Re: Perhaps better planet physics for SEV or future SE games
So you would have to chart out that races most preferred world types. ie. A Silicoid race might prefer deserts and mountains, and despise aquatic and jungle planets. While an Aquatic race would be just the opposite.
Re: Perhaps better planet physics for SEV or future SE games
Climate and Biome types are interesting, but I think "Enviromental Conditions" of the planet is meant to be a rough indication, and its vague enough to be applied to alien species.
Actually, as far as Planet types go, the ones you listed are quite possible as far as I know. I've been considering make a minimod to test how this might work, but havent had time yet. That, and I hate working with textures, so they'd all end up looking the same. The types I proposed were
Acidic
Alkali
Volcanic
Desert
Crystalline
Metallic
Barren
Sterile
Frozen
Terran
Arboreal
Oceanic
and Gas Giants, which would not be inhabitable. Races might be able to colonize their own planets and similar ones with inital colony tech, and further ones with research...
Re: Perhaps better planet physics for SEV or future SE games
As much as I hate to say it, I don't think making things more complicated will help the game any. You have to remember that the sole reason we have different planet is to give different races differing colonization priorities, and in that manner I think the current system works very well.
Besides, your idea, while seeming to make sense at a glance is actually a very simplistic look at a planet. Just take a look at the earth, there are deserts, oceans, temperate forests, jungles, mountains, flatlands, barren wastelands, frozen tundras, and we have a constantly shifting climate... Pretty much every planet with an atmosphere is going to be like this, they have many different characteristics at differing areas of the planet. If you look at it this way, planets will have areas that will be easily habitable, and some which won't be. But even then, is it really that hard to cut down a few forests, or flatten a few mountains for a space faring civilization? A nuke will do nicely in both cases...
But suppose you could make a perfect system to replicate all this, what good will it do for the game? If it's just to vary the max population and maintenance costs, wouldn't it just be better to link those two into the planet's environment? IE: Make a terrible planet incure 4x the maintenance cost, and 1/2 the population... problem solved, and it probably won't even take much planing/coding.
Re: Perhaps better planet physics for SEV or future SE games
Master of Orion 3 has easily the best, and most complicated( although easy to manage ), planetary/colony system ever made in a 4x game. Each planet is divided into a number of regions, depending on the size of the planet. Each region can contain two facilities and has its seperate Population( and Pop. Growth rate), Unrest Level, Bioharvesting/Mining Efficiency, Terrain Type, Ecosystem Density value, Fertility Level, Specials, etc. So you can have one race that thrive in some of the regions on the planet, while in another region they might have trouble surviving. Some regions will be better for Bioharvesting, some for Mining, others might just be useful for research and the likes. Each of the regions are basically like one of SEV's planets, although they share things like gravity, obviously. Definitely a system Space Empires should adopt.
Re: Perhaps better planet physics for SEV or future SE games
Except that the MoO3 way includes MOONS in the planetary mass. Half the "planets" in MoO3 look like a string of beads......
Re: Perhaps better planet physics for SEV or future SE games
I'm sure they had their reasons for not keeping moons seperated from the planets. It's a simple and small problem at any rate.
Re: Perhaps better planet physics for SEV or future SE games
I would like to see some diversity in the SEV planet types.
As it is right now you pretty much colonize everything and dont ever care if the climate is Optimal or Hostile. From a gameplay point of view it makes sense that you should care to choose what colonies you colonize first and how much maintenance would you pay for them.
I do believe there's an easy way to achieve some of this. Not all the features Normandy proposed, but at least you'd care about what you colonize.
1) Make the maintenance of dome colonies hurt. badly.
2) Make maintenance of colonies directly proportional with the happiness of the population existent.
3) Make sure there are no easy way to achieve "Jubilant" with just troops stationed on a planet.
4) Make the climate of the planet affect growth rate and migration in a more radical way. For instance on a hostile planet people should actually die!
5) Make the population of a colony have a more radical effect on the production. No more colonizing one tiny planet, building one mine and getting a surplus in your tresorerie.
Trouble with this system is that the AI won't be able to keep up. So whoever wants to implement this in a mod must make sure the AI knows how to do stuff like shuffling population, building urban pacification centers, building climate modifiers, etc.....
Re: Perhaps better planet physics for SEV or future SE games
As it is right now you pretty much colonize everything and dont ever care if the climate is Optimal or Hostile. From a gameplay point of view it makes sense that you should care to choose what colonies you colonize first and how much maintenance would you pay for them.
With the mastery of space travel, self contained environments would be a common and easy to achieve thing, and assorted materials can be made to componsate for assorted environments. Enclosed transportation networks or even underground facilities/transport networks means that surface conditions would have no direct effect on people so long as they didn't go for a walk outside in shirts and shorts.
1) Make the maintenance of dome colonies hurt. badly.
2) Make maintenance of colonies directly proportional with the happiness of the population existent.
3) Make sure there are no easy way to achieve "Jubilant" with just troops stationed on a planet.
4) Make the climate of the planet affect growth rate and migration in a more radical way. For instance on a hostile planet people should actually die!
5) Make the population of a colony have a more radical effect on the production. No more colonizing one tiny planet, building one mine and getting a surplus in your tresorerie.
Trouble with this system is that the AI won't be able to keep up. So whoever wants to implement this in a mod must make sure the AI knows how to do stuff like shuffling population, building urban pacification centers, building climate modifiers, etc.....
1: Bad idea. Makes it rather pointless to even colonize a non-habitable planet unless it is big, or unless you get the tech to change atmosphere types.
Also, look at my first bit, of how enclosed environments and mastery of space travel means that such things wouldn't really have any major effect on things.
The best I could see would be somehing like a 10% increase in maintenance costs to represent the costs of having to keep the entire colony enclosed somehow.
But then again, I wonder why there is any need to dome a planet in the first place. No reason to dome an entire stinking colony if you have the tech to simply make each structure self contained and connected with something like a tube network, like in the old Sierra game Outpost.
Toss in other concepts, like arcologies, basically a city in a building. No need for a dome, and the self contained evironment means it doesn't matter what conditions are like outside, be it optimal or hostile, breatable or no appreciable atmosphere at all.
2: Excuse me? Please explain how that cannot be the worse idea possible?
It gives me the mental image of a grumpy fast food place worker charging people $5 for stuff on the $1 menu...
3: I agree with that. Perhaps a cap of sorts, maybe no better than Indifferent, or maybe Happy during a war for Peaceful or Neutral, since people know they are 'protected' from any enemy attackts, or for a Bloodthirsty race during any time, just because they like seeing all the firepower sitting around awaiting to blast the first thing that they don't like the looks of.
4: As I said before, when you got space travel, hostile conditions are not going to be a problem at all.
Buildings will be able to be highly resistant to anything short of a nuke blast or a glacier, enclosed or underground passageways replacing exposed surface streets/sidewalks for planets with bad climates without needing to dome a colony, and people smart enough to not got for a walk outside in their shorts during an acid rain storm with sand filled 100mph winds.
5: I somewhat agree, but my main complaint is not with tiny planets, but Ring/Sphere Worlds. Mainly the nonsense 'stop point' for bonuses once a population hits 10 billion. With a Ring World that holds 32 billion, or a Sphere World that holds 64 billion people, it creates barely better potential bonuses than a huge planet with a max of 8 billion people. I can see the SY rate improving more than it is. I can see how there is a limit to how much resources a single facility can produce, but if you got an army of laborers, they could get a lot of manual labor done quickly.
Extra farmers won't really speed up how fast plants grow, extra miners are a moot point when there is a limit to how fast a mine can be safely worked, etc... Cram a bunch of people in a factory, and watch stuff fly off of the production lines. A good example, the Liberty Ships in WWII, the German U-Boats sank a lot of shipping, but the US got to the point they were cranking out the Libery Ships faster than they were being sunk.
Overall, I've had ideas for a few new techs SE V could use, to add a little more 'realism' to things.
Such as a tech that allows for removal of domes on colonies with the wrong atmosphere.
Or 'underground' structures, with a 'limit' based on planet size since they might not take up space and could be resistant to damage from orbital attacks, and which will add extra capacity or production to a planet.
Another one, 'arcologies', structures that add a small amount of population capacity plus being able to do a little bit of everything (self contained/self supporting city), so even a tiny planet could have well balanced output of stuff.
Re: Perhaps better planet physics for SEV or future SE games
On the comment of space yards.... that cap has been effectivly removed since you can now stack them.
As for population, you can increase the population required to operate a facility meaning that a low population planet can only run a few facilities regardless of actual size.
Re: Perhaps better planet physics for SEV or future SE games
actually that system you proposed only makes sense if you assume life is going to be similar to us. beings made of living Silicone, might consider a planet with no water and toxic(to us) gases a paradise.
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Universe distortion