Speculation on planet system in Dark Avatar

[Hansolo88]

Just to maybe spark some discussion...

What do you guys think the new planet colonization system will be like in Dark Avatar, and how do you think it will affect gameplay?

I know from interviews with Brad approximately how the system will work, i.e. you can't colonize planets with certain characteristics until you have a matching technology. I.e., a planet with severe radiation cannot be colonized until an "anti-raditiation" tech has been researched.

However, there are a lot of questions in my mind still... will all colonization techs be available from the start? Or will they be a tech line or tree of sorts? For example, say I discover a class 23 planet near my home, but it has this radiation problem, will I be able to jump right to that tech and research it or will it have a set of prerequisites that I have to research first and that might let me colonize planets further away in the meantime? This could result in a huge amount of varying start situations.

It will no doubt complicate further the already complicated research choices at the start of the game, and allows for another element of racial diversity.

And of course there is the issue of how the AI will handle it, I'm not incredibly impressed with how the AI prioritizes research, for example the low priority they seem to give Xeno-Ethics, a rather powerful tech that grants lots of free bonuses but which the AI seems to ignore for far too long. Will this also be true of the AI and colonization techs?

Anyways, I'm curious what others think the system will be like and how it will affect your gameplay and the AI.

[V1m]

As you say, a lot depends on how well the AI handles the new system. If it lives up to it's potential, it could lead to a much more interconnected, hetrogenous political situation rather than the current blobs we see now. This could solve or at least ameliorate the problem of the colony rush.

I suspect it will take at least one patch before everything's working properly.

[Hansolo88]

One other thing I forgot to mention is that, depending on how different each race is in its ability to colonize certain planet types, and depending on how quickly new colonization techs can be researched, this addition to the game will result in much more complex borders. Rather than both empires colonizing every planet up to a line, there will be a lot more going into other people's space to colonize planets that they couldn't, and vice versa. I might be able to colonize a planet next to my neighbor's home system that he doesn't have the tech for. All in all, this will produce a much more interesting and (hopefully) longer colonization phase for the game, resulting in much more randomized planet control instead of "I have this blob here, they have that blog there", etc. It will probably become much more common to have systems with planets controlled by multiple empires.