[Darkwind]

JimMorrison said:Okay, before I do a brief outline of all of the ideas that I had knocking around in my head (many of which I touched on in the original thread), I just have to say, R'lyeh is IN! The more of this thread I read, the more shocked I was at their lack of mention, until it finally happened and I cried out in pure joy. They're Illithid Starspawns - the perennial space aliens of Dominions, excluding them would be a terrible travesty!

Can I assume this means that I can go ahead with my terrible orgy of madness and non-Euclidian geometry?

and the various and sundry races from games like MoO, Ascendancy, and Galactic Civ should give plenty of templates that can be made as similar or as generic as we want them to be.

I'm surprised someone else here as heard of Ascendancy. I think it's a great game, and I was thinking we might want to borrow some of the concepts there.

-Species specific worlds - We can make the sites in certain species' homes radiate cold or heat. "Dominion" itself shouldn't play as large a part in this. In fact, if we could alter the relative bonus/malus of shifting your temp scale to make it unattractive, then we might avoid the possibility of someone making your planet cold, from 20 light years away, "on accident". Also each planet in a world would have several factors explored as far as resources (resources!), habitability (pop), and prevailing conditions (temp altering sites).

-Dominion spread will be a definite issue of some kind. In large part, due to the ridiculous idea of spreading cold or heat "through the galaxy", but also with the encapsulation of territory, dominion spread could create significant imbalances in short order. My best idea would be to make everyone act like Mictlan, with no Preaching, and Temples not providing checks. It needs to be engineered in a way that keeps people from being dominion killed through random events - I'm looking for ideas on how to make this work. <3

If we can remove random events, one solution would be to just remove Dominion-altering events that would prevent dominion kill. As to making sure that people don't change the temperature of empty space or other planets simply by wishing it to be so, we could force nations to have a specific pretender setup and have national sites (or preset sites, in the case of non-homeworld worlds) alter the heat/cold scales of the world (I think I'm leaning more towards one-province worlds now, for easier site-setting time and to allow a greater diversity of worlds).

-Summoned/Built ships - Forgot to mention how much I like this idea. I think perhaps "items" should have a less significant role in the game, and "summons" play an even greater role. It would be nice if most of the more interesting units are not built with generic "resources" (though there will always be the dichotomy of the average infantry lifespan of 9 seconds, with the acknowledged impossibility of holding a planet without infantry!). So the challenge is to produce a dynamic where you need cheap castle chaff, but you also need to develop your summons, and really push your gem income.

I'm glad you liked my idea (or was that one of the ideas also posited by this JimMorrison fellow? ). What I was thinking was that the stronger, more cost-efficient ships would only be able to be accessed through summoning (and the strongest of ships would be unable to enter land, meaning that a fleet of smaller ships would be necessary to guard the space-worthy landlubbers as they fly through space to take enemy planets). Thus, someone relying only on recruitable ships would likely be very weak compared to someone using summoned ships as well (or summoned ships only, for that matter).

Also, please excuse me for ignoring most of your post. That's a big post and I don't want this to devolve into huge posts quoting posts that quote posts which quote multiple posts all quoting one giant post.