Landing on planets, moons, etc...

[pchang]

So, what about the concept of blockading a planet or solar system? Will this be possible?

[Stormhound]

I believe blockades will be possible, but I don't have much information on whether or how they would work.

[TCO]

What areas of the game are you familiar with? (Serious question).

[Stormhound]

Quite a few, but it's an awfully big game. Most of what I've done has had to do with government (including diplomacy) and population, as well as technology. For this game, that covers a lot of ground. On the other hand, I've not had more than peripheral involvement in space or ground combat.

Just to give you some idea, there have been 6 different people doing design work on this game (and 5 of those still are), and Alan is the lead designer. That's not counting the guys working on AI, the programmers, the contributions of other members of QS...

[ember]

If you realy wanted to have gravity involved, you could have the gravity control how wide the "suitibility bands" are. If its at exactally your homeworlds graity, you get very wide bands, but if its completly opposite, tehn the bands are only pixels wide.

If terafirming is not permanent , at least make it very slow to revert.

Even better would be 25% of whatever change you make is permanent, slowly increaing over time. Keep a planet stable for a couple millenina and it pretty much stays where you left it.

[jdlessl]

I really don't like the not-permanent aspect of terraforming. The whole idea is that you take an essentially dead planet and give it the self-correcting, self-perpetuating ecology that, for various reasons, it was never able to develop on its own.

For a terrestrial analogy, go read Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel". The part about European colonization of Australia; due to a number of factors, civilization could not arise there, but it could be and indeed was transplanted.

Similarly, the biggest hurdle in terraforming is getting the project going. Take Mars for instance. It can't support Earth animals, it can't support Earth plants, it might just barely be able to support Earth micro-organisms. So the process of converting all that CO2 has to be done by us. But once we get the air pressure high enough and enough topsoil developed, then the transplanted organisms will be able to take over the job of converting the atmosphere. If all goes well, it's not something that needs to be maintained, with the possible exception of mirrors in orbit to add sunlight.

How about spotting the grid with planet classes. One would be a oxygen-nitrogen-carbon system, another using something like chlorine, an lifeless airless planet, a runaway greenhouse system like Venus, etc, etc (Planetology is a fairly unknown field, so they'll have to take some creative liscenses for this). Left to its own devices, a planet of a class gravitates towards a single point on the grid. But each has a sphere of influence so to speak on the grid and attempts to move it away take effort. But once you move it out of one sphere and into another, your job becomes easier because then it gravitates towards the new point. The terraforming takes over and heads towards its own balanced system.

Regarding gravity, it should be a factor in determining how expensive terraforming will be. Again, we don't know really well how gravity affects life-supporting atmospheres, but they could just say that anything in the 1/2 to 2G area is relatively easy but outside of that range it gets very expensive.

--
Jared Lessl

[Sarxis]

MOO3 is sounding very juicy- I want a big slab of it please!

[November Adam]

Can planets lose their green/yellow/red class via industrial purposes.. thinking green house affect, etc?

If so would this tend to make races that live in inhospitable climates more industrially inclined?

[Stormhound]

I'm still trying to pry loose some details from one of the other designers, but I don't think that industry will affect the planet's status in that way (for the reason noted below). Whether it will affect the biodiversity level (which helps determine things like the population limit, bioharvest output, and so on) I'm not quite sure.

"Inhospitable" is a relative thing. The races and galaxy are balanced so that everyone gets their fair share of turf, so I don't think it'd be wise to have industry or similar things push the planet in only one direction.

[November Adam]

Good thinking... I was thinking along the lines of game balance as well, so at least that is one thing that wouldn't unbalance it.