Could there just be one star system?

[Kuciwalker]

I'm actually not against interstellar travel. I think it makes a great basis for some games. However, I think this approach would be much more fun, in its own way.

[Blake]

The problem with one star system is the planets are too close together.
What this means is that a turn length of prehaps 1 week would be required, altough you seem to be expecting a turn length of 1 day or less with things like speed of light making a difference to when messages arrive.
And I would ask, how with a turn length of 1 day could the game possibly have a realistic growth/economy/construction model and still be remotely realistic and playable.

The point of having interstellar travel is to keep movement rates sensible, while still having a fleshed out and realistic society models. (theres other reasons too, ofcourse)

[Kuciwalker]

A week would work well, actually.

[Blake]

For a wargame, maybe.

[Kuciwalker]

This is a wargame, as are all of the civ games. There are other aspects of play, but war is a (the?) central theme.

[Jeremy Buloch]

About the wargame topic:
I would like to use weeks but it would be easier to use years. Nothing is ever perfect so we cant set a perfect time of the turns. I go with the year turn. Even though it would seem more realistic to use week turns. It would be alien from other games. Civ. and SMAC were and are year turned based games so why not keep it that way to lessen the confusion?
-J.B.-

[Blake]

No no no. It's nothing to do with confusion or tradition.

The problem with 1 week turns is the growth scale gets all muddled up.

Realistically, humans grow at around 4% per year. Growth rates as high as 8% are possible, that requires breeding like rabbits.

With a turn length of 1 year, and a growth rate of 4% per turn, it takes around 17 turns for population to double.
With a turn length of 1 week, and a growth rate of 0.08% per turn, it takes 870 turns for the population to double.

Even with a unreasonably short turn length in real time (10 seconds to play 1 turn) that is still way to slow building pace.

So clearly for a turn length of 1 week, we need to COMPLETELY disregard reality. We would need to take reality, turn it upside down, throw it out a window, and let an elephant take a dump on it so it's well and truly soiled, then deny we ever saw reality (that? thats just a big pile of elephant dung).

We wouldn't be able to have humans in our game, we would have to have hyperative breeding machines that live only to fuel the warmachine that goes to war 10 times a year against 10 different opponents..

Realtime strategy games can get away with grossly unrealistic build and expansion rates. Mainly because they completely avoid any mention of "real" time scales (reality? it's under that pile of dung, go have a dig, if you care), as an aside, in virtually all "city building" games, the major source of growth is immigration, which is how they handle the problem of keeping growth rates high enough to be interesting, as another aside, in StP the same thing will make new cities grow fast enough so you dont have to wait 1000 turns for them to become useful.

So anyway. StP will primarly be an Empire Building game. For some players, war will be the emphasis. For other players, war will only be for when diplomacy fails.

Now. I can tolerate some stretches of reality, some simplification of real processes, a bit of abstraction. So if the population is growing at 10%, then I'm aware that probably means 13 year olds having children, and that 80% of the population will be under 15. But atleast it's still close to reality.

And if we have to pretend that the speed of light is actually 6x10^8m/s, then sure, normally the speed of light is 800,000 times what I do in my car on the open road, so it's not like making it twice as fast as inconceivably fast is really going to matter. And if we have to make the game take place in a patch of universe that is so darn unlikely (all arranged in a plane, close together worlds, an unprobably high density of habitable worlds...) then so be it, the universe is so vast, I find it hard to believe there isn't some highly improbable stuff out there.

So in the name of gameplay reality can be bent and twisted. But it is my humble opinion that in a good empire building game, the rules of reality should not be flagrantly smashed to pieces and left on the ground under a pile of steaming elephant-doo.

So, the short of it is. When playing StP, I want to be able to believe I'm the leader of a nation of human beings, not fantastical creatures with unbelivable growth rates. If what you want is a good wargame, then go play one. Theres loads out there, especially in the RTS world (which is much better suited for most war games).

[Kuciwalker]

For a turn length of one year, we also have to completely disregard reality.

[Jeremy Buloch]

I agree with Blake on this subject. He has sufficient knowledge of what it should be. I think it should be 1 year. Making it more would be also un~realistic. Cause the time would be varied on each factions growth, would it not? So in order to have a precise amount of realistic time we would need to have random amounts of turns for example: for this part of time its 1 year another turn would be 1 1/2 year.
I hope I made my self clear, its a bit unorganised.'
-J.B.-

[Blake]

For a turn length of one year, we also have to completely disregard reality.

Please try to justify this. Prehaps you are thinking more realism than realistic?

[targon]

Why we need some _fixed_ turn length?

[Leland]

Because fixed turns are a lot easier to implement, and if you have enough of them (as microturns) the end result is a decent approximation of a continuum?

[Kuciwalker]

Unit movement. That's how it's unrealistic.