My project.

[gvari7]

I´m planning to do a scenario, specifically a realistic space scenario.

Any advice and ideas welcome.

I will use a giga map, so that I can make sizes and distances more or less realistic.

That is, the planets themselves will not be in scale, but I plan on making this a lot more realistic than any other space scenarios I have played.

I plan on using roads to show the circles the planets travel in around their stars. Not sure if this would look good though.
Space will give no food, trade or production.

Not sure what I will use RR for.

Irrigation I might use to show the Oort cloud, and/or Cuiper belt.

The third dimension is not getting in my way, it´s the way directions are difficult to keep when you have no poles(N/S).

Seems to me that I should simply decide Proxima is directly to the north, on the map that is.

Now it gets serious.

The Sun is 0.0000158 LY away from us.
Proxima is 4.2421 LY away.

The distance to Proxima divided with the distance to the sun gives 268354.
So, unless I´m incredibly thick and got this wrong I would need to have 268354 squares between the earth and Proxima if I have one square between the Earth and the Sun?

I guess that kills the realism idea?

Hope some of you veteran mapmakers can give some input.

[IMG] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ne...ly_Radius).svg [/IMG]

Edit: dunno why that pic won´t show up.

[King Mir]

Yeah, stars are pretty far apart compared to planets. You can make 5 or 9 square solar systems instead of the usual fat cross, and it would be an improvement.

Remember that AI only builds cities on plains and grasslands. Also it requires the number of continents to be small, so having mostly water cripples the AI.

You can use forests mountains and hills to make orbits.

Galaxies are relatively flat, so if you make the scale large enough it would make sense that the game is flat. No one would venture beyond the disk.

But none of this addresses the larger questions of what you are going to do for a tech tree. That's much more important than trying to decide how to represent planets and asteroids.

[gvari7]

I don´t intend to have a computer run faction, will only have a hidden city somewhere...

The tech tree will of course not be realistic. No one can really tell how science will advance in the future.

I will have to find some way to condense interstellar distances, I guess.
Should not be so much trouble, maybe I´ll use ocean terrain for that,
and so traveling in this interstellar aea will be slower.

Well, I did not realize just how far away all these stars are.

Jupiter 816.520.800 Km

Saturn 1.513.325.783 Km

Neptune 4.553.946.490 Km

Pluto 7.375.927.931 Km

Voyager 1 16.596.000.000 Km

Alpha Proxima 4.200.000.000.000 Km

Barnard´s Star 5.900.000.000.000 Km

Wolf 359 7.800.000.000.000 Km

Lalande 21185 8.300.000.000.000 Km

[Gelion]

All I can think of now is using an extensive tech tree that gives civilizations more and more advances "triremes" so that they can go futher and further into space.

If you are using a big map, then I recommend some "probe" units that scout the space.

Again, having mostly the solar system means that only 8-20 colony sites are avaliable. It is not a lot if you are using 1 tile per planet. You might either make planets bigger (hard to make it look nice) or exted the range of colonisation consiberably futher into space.

One question. How are you going to simulate 6-7 Eather factions on one planet/tile? (Who are they by the way?)

[Arthedain]

Kobayashi used 9-tile planets in his SG-1 scenario. They were nice, but I guess it won't do for this scenario then.

[gvari7]

The 9 and 4 tile planets he used are very clever and look amazing.
They won´t do here though.

I guess making the planets only take up a mall part of the graphic theyre on would be a good move.

I think the limitations of the engine are just too many for this to be doable,
at least I think I should start with something less ambitious.

[curtsibling]

I have a space scenario on the back burner, set in the Star Wars universe,
(the proper one, not those crap fan movies in the 1990s) I was planning
to use oceans and islands as stars/planets/installations and ships with
various capabilities as star vessels...Check out "Master of Orion" scen
that came with the CIV2 MGE edition, or Kobyashi's Star Trek works.

The CIV2 engine limited, but a decent sector-sized space drama is workable.
Sadly we a limited to under 300 cities (or worlds in this case) But I still plan
to dust off my Grand Moff scenario one day...

[barthi]

And my german Star Trek Galaxy scen (v1.05) with ahlpa, beta, gamma and delta quadrant. I Plan a giga Map under Civ2 unlimited with 600 Cities

[McMonkey]

I'm pretty sure Civ2Unlimited failed to get around the maximum city limit problem

Or rather you can add the extra cities but then the game goes a bit wonky!

[gvari7]

@ curtsibling: I look forward to try that scenario out. I just played through Kobyashi´s Star Wars: Insurrection, a well made scenario, but as as most scenarios with islands the AI is almost non existant. Plus it´s some alternate timeline, I believe.(Not a big issue for me though, as I´m not so much of a purist on these kinds of things.)

@barthi: I have your scenario, I haven´t got around to play it yet though, as my german is horrible. I guess playing that scenario will teach me something though.

[gvari7]

I am set on making this scenario.

Just these past weeks the information that there are probably many many brown dwarves, even close to the Earth, makes this much more interesting.

Who knows what is out there!

Are the space backgrounds, such as the one Kobayashi uses in his scenarios, the only ones that exist?

I do not recall ever seeing any other, so I guess they must be.

[Patine]

I had actually planned a spacefaring scenario in a scifi setting of my own design in the future (I have a few projects to mulch through first), but have few hard ideas for actual mechanics. I did, however, consider 9-square homeworlds and all other planets 1-square. I look forward to seeing how this one turns out.