Building Small, not Big: Why no Artificial Planets?

I, too, have posted this idea in the past.

-ability to create planets without using asteroids, using the hyper-density cables and plates used for Ringworlds and Sphereworlds; this technology should be in the technology tree/chart between creating planets with asteroids and creating Ringworlds.

http://www.spaceempires5.com/en-US/node/78
post date: 2-23-07

Sounds good in theory, until someone fills every sector they can with a planet. Put limits on the number of planets in system (their gravitational fields could prevent adding more) then this could work.

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StarCraft 2, it's about damn time!

Planets should never, under any circumstance, be create-able from empty space. They should always use a limited resource: asteroids, a star, another planet, etc. Virtually unbounded resource production is never a good idea. Creating them from nothing is just asking for rampant abuse. Artificial limits on how many planets can be in a system, how many planets can be in a "ring," etc., are like putting a band-aid on a severed femoral artery... The best option is the status quo, where every planet creation mechanism has a real cost in terms of stellar objects.

I think that is an untenable idea for SE. Its a silly restriction when there is no "terrain" used by the city/planet object. It works fine for Civ, since the space between cities is actually used by the city. But in SE, you just have the planet. What's so special about artificial worlds that they can't exist in locations where planets placed by the map generation routines can legally exist? Such a restriction would kill moons, which typically exist in a one radius ring around the parent planet...

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Borrow from Civilization IV where cities must have at least two spaces between each other. Planets could require two or three spaces between each other.
This would allow a "Ring of Planets" around a system such as in a science fiction novel series that I forget the name of.
Although, can't we do this already in a system that has a ring of asteroids? But the point of this topic is to advance to where we don't need the asteroids to form a new planet.

I think these "moons" are a product of "player assumption culture". I believe that they are meant to be a double planet where one has lost it's atmosphere. Their size and lack of "typical" moons elswhere supports this.

Requiring spaces between created planets doen't have to be "artificial". It can be called the safe distance from the gravity of each planet...or what ever. Insert any "technobable". Heehee.

Ring Worlds and Sphere Worlds are created from "nothing". Well, from the components. Yes, a star is present. But these are an aside from the "typical" planets creation of which we speak.

We(If I can speak for some others too) are just expressing that first a civilization creates planets from asteroids. Later it creates Ring Worlds and Sphere Worlds from components. Between these two eras of civilization construction abilities there should be the ability to create a smaller version, a "typical" planet from a lesser amount of these components.

It wouldn't be "some thing from nothing" any more than the Ring Worlds and Sphere Worlds are. These "typical" component created planets will still require a star for orbit and energy; the same as a Ring World and Sphere World.

Any further debate I think would just be semantics. But you are welcome to respond. I'll try to continue...maybe another night though. Heehee. Pillows are calling.

-Wade

Besides...What's so wrong with filling every sector with a planet? The opponets should just keep up! The same as a system filled with a Sphere World!

I don't like artificial quantity limits. I like, instead, requiring guidelines, increasing costs, fees, maintenance, etcetera. In Civilization, and other games, there used to be artificial quantity limits. That was lame!

-Wade

I'm not gonna argue if it is a balanced idea or not.

Can we mod a component to create a random planet from thin air? (or space..)
Are the restrictions hard coded?
If they are then this should fall in the category of future feature requests.

You Scifi examples all were ships with a task to do (attack, or what ever). The reason making planets from nothing is unbalancing is that the "produce". Basically the game would deevolve in to a race to see who can get to this technology.

Anyway, go ahead and mod it. I'll play. you might be able to set up planet creation to use nothing to start with, or maybe you could have every sector start with an "unseeable" astroid field (maybe cloaked level 50, or maybe have the astroid field graphic be black). Don't let other people tell you, you can't do it.

SEV, more than a feeling.

Not to mention the stupidity and anti-logic of just whipping planets into existence without any source material... RW/SW are bad enough, but at least they eat up any planets in the space to be occupied (IIRC). But that's beside the point that it destroys game balance...

Reality aside, that is still subject to the creation of one star per system limit, and thus 1 RW/SW in systems that are not naturally binaries (where you have a natural, logical limit of 2). Its not at all like the silly arbitrary planet creation proposed. RW/SW are big, yes, but they have finite, natural limits. They are not inherently broken, as creating arbitrary planets from nothing would be.

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Woa.. as I said I will not discuss game balance.

As far as the source of the building materials is concerned, I can provide many sources:
1. Gathered from extrasolar entities.
2. Gathered from another dimension.
3. Collected from background subatomic reactions.
4. Religion tech: from god! Faith works miracles!
And there's more technobable that can justify the creation of a planet from just a component. But that's not the point:

I just asked if we can mod it, not make it part of the stock game! Since the limit of 1 SY per colony was eliminated I hope we would get those restrictions lifted about stellar engineering and play with it a bit.

I understand the problems that such a capability will produce as far as the game software is concerned (what's the limit for objects in a system? in a quadrant?, However as it is usual with modding, one can very easily break the game balance and game code as it is, without lifting this restriction.

Besides you don't know how I plan of letting the player build a planet from nowhere in my mod. you don't know the costs or prerequisites or the way that I will enforce. Why oppose this change in the moddability of the game?!?! If you don't like the mod that I will make with it, simply don't play it. Please don't judge a proposed change by speculating on how one unwise modder would use it to break the game.

I also like the idea of stealing planets from other systems. It is trivial for a civilization that can create a star, to move an earth sized planet around, yet as it stands we can't even move a tiny moon or an asteroid field. If I can't steal my opponents terrain I would like to have the costly tools to create more land for myself.

this sort of thing is essentially what my mod explored. My discovery? only two ways to do it.

1: mattergravity sphere tech.
2: Stellar construction techs.

Both have decent limits. What IS a major pain, is the amount of RP required for the Stellar manipulation techs. Seriously has anyone ever managed to do the required research while actively fighting off an enemy?

All we are saying is give peace a chance....

Groovy Baby Yeah!

All we are saying is give peace a chance....

Groovy Baby Yeah!

Personally I don't see much of a point to creating planets. I mean why go through the trouble of building a planet when there are plenty of nice already built ones just sitting around waiting to be used/captured. Being able to build worlds competely eliminates the need for expansion and thus the need for war or research or advancement of any type. A single system could provide such a large amount of resources that it'd never come close to needing more.

Anyways, realistically speaking, why would a culture build a planet anyways? I can see RW/SW's, those are engineering feets for a ultra high-tech society (Don't fool yourself into thinking you build them for strategic reasons ). But a society that could build an entire planet could just as easily build a ship the size of a planet with engines and shields and nice shiney weapons. Would be silly to go the extra length and waste resources making a planets that is immobile and requires extra buildings and defenses to be added once done.

I've got an idea, but I'm not sure it could be modded in. I suspect it would require MM to code it for the stock game.

Only allow 1 planet per orbital.

If a system has a radius of 15 hexes, not counting the dead center hex, then allowing 2 hexes away from the sun for the size of the sun (3 or 4 for red giants) is the starting point for where a planet (or storm, gas cloud, asteroid belt) can occur. Allow additional places for stars in a system with more than 1 star.

Far as I know this is realistic (the mass for a planet came from the cosmic detrius in that orbit) and also allows for a limitation upon building artificial planets without the hassle of forcing an asteroid belt to clump together. Heck, one planet/asteroid belt per orbit around the sun(s) and it might allow (in a future SE game) the systems to actually orbit around the sun(s)! Different planets orbit at different rates, y'know - and it could be fun to contend with stationary warp points but moving planets (that drag ships and such in orbit around them along over the course of the "year").

How to tell that it is in an allowed orbit? Simple - if it is in that six sided figure X hexes out from the center, it is in that orbit. Should planets and such actually move around the system, I invision them following that hexagonal path (the best aproximation of an elipse available to a hex based map system).

The game has no concept of "orbitals," unfortunately. The map generation routine can use "rings" for calculating placement of planets, but past that point, there is only location on the coordinate grid. Hopefully SE6 has orbitals and moving planets..

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Can we mod in the creation of artificial planets by making them into a type of star base? Add a new size of base called "artificial planet" and use a spherical model with a planet texture.

There will be a set of components that you can place on it, that will have the same functions as facilities on a real planet. We'll need to add resource-generating components, research-generating components, intel-generating components, etc which take the place of mining facilities, research centers, intel centers, and so on. However, some types of facilities probably could not be replicated as a component, depending on whether the particular ability can be assigned to a component. Also, once constructed, you can't add or remove "facility" components on the "artificial planet" unless you retrofit the whole thing to another design.

Edit:
By the way, I seem to recall that in SEIV it was possible to mod it so that you can make as many planets as you want. I never tried it myself, but the idea was to modify the tectonic bomb component so that it can destroy sphere worlds. Then you follow these steps:
(1) build a sphere world around a star.
(2) use the modded tectonic bomb to destroy the sphere world and turn it into an asteroid field.
(3) turn the asteroid field into a planet.
(4) make a new star in the system, and repeat.

I don't know if this trick would work in SEV, though.

> It could be like in some sci-fi settings like Star Wars or Warhammer 40k,
> where some planets have been long since burried under many levels of planet
> covering structures.

I think the idea of a planet-covering structure originated with Isaac Asimov's foundation series of books, where the galactic government is located on Trantor, a planet totally covered by administrative buildings.

To believe this idea originated with George Lucas is a common misconception. Often honor is done to the wrong man.

For instance, many people believe the idea of a Battlemech originated with some boardgame producer in 1984, when to my best knowledge it originated with a book by William Rotsler ("To the Land of the Electric Angel") in 1976.

About the original post: good idea, but as others already said, prone to be exploited. We would wind up with star-systems literally plastered with planets.

Unless things have changed with the recent patches, resource generation in components doesn't work, so no research/intel components just yet. I think mineral, organic, and rad generation won't work either without something to extract them from (planet/asteroids).

well i think for this kind of discussion,

what happen if we aren't able to use such newly made worlds and mine them for resources ?
eg they are just dead world with out resources , wouldn't that fix the problem ?

the problem with SW & RW is we can mine them so in the long run will it be destroyed ?

I was sorta thinking the same thing. Creating limitless planets seems a little silly to me...but some sort of artificial population center would be nice. It would basically be the same thing as a space station...but large numbers of people could actually live on it.

Nailed it!

Groovy Baby Yeah!

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Sorry totally disagreed. The game, using its standard settings, defaults to unlimited resources so people can mine minerals and organics and radiaoactives forever and ever without running out. There are also facilities that creates things out of nothing, such as Nature Shrine.

If 20 base ships can turn into a gigantic sphere several times the diameter of a star, which is millions of times the size of 20 ships, why is it so hard to accept that in a futuristic settings an advanced empire can create a planet? Call it dark energy to matter conversion, or scientic voodoo, or whatever, if we can accept that a little component on a ship can somehow destroy a blackhole, creating a planet is in the same vein.

Simply put a cap on the number of planets allowable in a system to deal with performance issue, and allow the players to change this cap if they have an uber machine.

Yay for missing the point...

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Yay the feeling is mutual...

Bah. Seems this should really end there to be honest. I mean argue logic and realism all you want but if it is not possible to do then the arguement is pointless. The only way you are getting it added as a 'feature' is to argue game balance (which those supporting the idea won't do). Saying "this would be cool!" won't cut it.

Anyways I still think it is an unrealistic idea to begin with. If a culture could build an entire planet from scratch they could do better things with their time and resources. Would be better off modding in a massive ship/station and some components with the abilities of facilities. Granted as Fyron pointed out this would only work in orbit of an exsisting colony, but in the future that may change. This way you may even be able to argue game balance through maintenance costs and such.

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This is no different than any number of settings in our game options, from our abilities to determine whether we want to deal with slower turn processing by choosing a larger galaxy, or fit in more players, or have greater or fewer waypoints for more complex pathfinding, etc. It is no more or less detrimental to multiplayers than any of these other *existing* choices the game gives us.