Too many planets

[solamnic76]

Is it hard to reduce amount of planets in systems?

My playins style is very "hands on"...i just hate use ministers because of AI manages totally different from what i want and see reasonable.

There just are too many planets every system. In Moo2 were maximum of 5 planets and that was good. In SE we have 13 planets. Huh. I'm micromanager but too much is too much even micromanaging.

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Suomi on paras!

[Barnacle Bill]

quote:

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Originally posted by God Emperor:
I too get a bit cheesed off with the micromanagement, and sparse systems seem to help the computer players a bit (less planets for them to slowly colonise). Also, given the issue of gravity suitability not really being accounted for, less coloniseable planets makes more sense to me.

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I went even farther in my data set. I think of an �ice planet� as being down in the range where gases are liquid, etc�, not just a terrestrial planet having an ice age. Obviously, a gas giant is another entire situation with huge gravity and huge atmospheric pressure. Nothing that evolved on any one of the three is ever going to live unprotected on any of the others, and due to the gravity issue I can�t see a rock/ice race living on a gas giant even with domes unless you postulate the existence of artificial gravity fields. Likely the gas giant types could not live in the very low (from their perspective) gravity elsewhere for very long, either. Humans have health problems after long periods in zero G, so imagine the problem for gas giant creatures. There are simply not enough settings available in the game to model this properly. So, I built into my mod the assumptions that there is no indigenous life on ice or gas giant planets, and used the available tools to deal with just properly modeling it for rock dwellers. As there is no programmed ability to let you convert planets from ice/gas giant to rock (aside from blowing them up & rebuilding them), this means you are only getting out of domes eventually on rock planets.

First, I edited all the AI race files to originate on rock planets, and verified that they all have some atmosphere other than �none�. The �house rule� is then that you can�t select ice or gas giant or atmosphere �none� when creating a race at game start.

For ice planets, I eliminated all planet types with atmosphere other than �none�. Thus, any race with the tech to colonize ice planets can colonize in domes, but atmosphere converters don�t work (nothing to convert to). If you build an atmosphere converter on an ice planet and nothing bad happens, but no matter how long you wait the atmosphere never changes.

For gas giants, due to the gravity issue I simply eliminated the tech to colonize them. You can remote mine them, but that is it.

Although I did it for the sake of �realism�, this has the side effect of greatly reducing the number of USABLE planets, and thus the number of colonies to micromanage.

You could just as easily do ice planets like gas giants, reducing the number still further.

Unfortunately, gas giants cannot have atmospheres of �none� so there is no way to do them like I did the ice planets. Otherwise, you could just set it up to open the gas giant colonization tech area on some really high level of gravitic technology, to reflect that you can now create an artificial gravity field strong enough to keep things at 1 G on the surface of a gas giant. You could still do this, I suppose, if you gave up one of the existing race atmosphere choices (in addition to �none�). Then you could eliminate all gas giant planet types with atmospheres other than that, so that once you got the tech to colonize gas giants you�d still have to stay in domes. That seems like more trouble than it is worth, so I probably won�t attempt it.

I�m also not sure how the game decides what planets to put in systems. If it randomly selects among the entries in the file, then my mode has decreased the % of planets that will be ice dramatically, and therefore not reduced the number of habitable planets so far as I think (again, I didn�t do it for that reason). On the other hand, if it first decides randomly on rock-ice-gas giant and then randomly among the entries for that type, I have not affected the overall % of each. If the former is the case, the fix would be to change all the ice planet entries in the �stock� file to atmosphere = �none� instead of deleting the ones that are not. You�d have to change the pictures and maybe the descriptive text appropriately as well. Then, assuming the program does not object to duplicate entries, you�d be OK. Adding even more duplicate uninhabitable planets to the file would let you reduce the number of habitable planets in the game even more, if desired.



[This message has been edited by Barnacle Bill (edited 29 January 2001).]

[DirectorTsaarx]

An idea, purely to maintain the level of diversity in the game, but without allowing a race to colonize all types of planets:

Make the colonizing techs into racial traits! Then you can't research/trade/analyze/etc. to get the others...

I'll have to do some testing to see how this might work, but maybe the usual team of modders can think about it too & come up with something...

[DirectorTsaarx]

All right - I did some preliminary testing, and I think it'll work OK. I'm attaching a file with some of the appropriate changes; you'll have to cut & paste into the appropriate data files (and do a fair amount of modding to the race files, too; may even have to alter the "*.emp files" if you want to use the "Quick Start" option).

First, you add three new racial traits to "RacialTraits.txt", one for each Colonization Tech; obviously, give each one it's own racial trait ID. I set the cost to 0 (zero) so it wouldn't unbalance the existing setup options. Of course, it would be up to the player's discretion not to abuse this, since it would be fairly involved to allow the AI to start using all colonization techs again after following the rest of these steps...

Second, edit the colonization techs in the "TechArea" file to include the appropriate Racial Tech ID.

And here's where it gets tricky: you have to add the appropriate racial tech to each race. I've used the Abbidon in the example in the attached file; basically, edit the "*_AI_General" file so the race has one more "Advanced Trait" at each option level, and add the appropriate planet type as an advanced trait. For example, the original Abbidon_AI_General file reads:
=========
Race Opt 1 Num Advanced Traits := 1
Race Opt 1 Adv Trait 1 := Psychic
=========
And the new file would read:
=========
Race Opt 1 Num Advanced Traits := 2
Race Opt 1 Adv Trait 1 := Psychic
Race Opt 1 Adv Trait 2 := Gas Giant Race
=========
This is clearer in the attached file. I'm not certain what would happen in games where racial points are set to 0 (zero) for setup, but the above should catch the 2000, 3000 and 5000 racial point options.

Finally, all the "*_AI_Research" files need to be edited to remove all references to colonization techs.

You'll also have to pay attention in startup and select the appropriate racial tech for your environment; I wouldn't suggest selecting "Rock/Oxygen" as your environment, and then taking "Gas Giant Race" as a racial trait .

Any comments on my plan for implementing Barnacle Bill's idea?

[God Emperor]

Sounds interesting and should work. A bit too involved for me though. Think I'll probably follow BB's suggestion of just linking Gas Giant Technology with a Gravity Tech level....

[Daynarr]

You will need to make new emp files for all races if you implement such changes. The game doesn't allow you to use old ones if you have made any changes to racial trait file.

[dmm]

I don't have a problem with allowing races to colonize all types -- gas, rock, and ice. The way I deal with believability is to assume that the game's definition of a "Gas" planet is not what one normally thinks of as a gas giant. And same for Ice planet. Instead, the planets shown are all reasonably Earth-like, but represent extremes that one could not colonize with standard technology. So a Gas planet might be like Venus -- very thick atmosphere. An Ice planet might be like Mars.

This mental adjustment brings its own problems. For instance, how can there possibly be so many Earth-like planets in one star system??

[Elwood Bluze]

I've made a simple mod to reduce planets per system to 4 or 5 for the standard solar systems, and 1 to 3 for binaries and trinaries. This has made each planet that much more valuable and the AI seems to come out more aggressively looking for real estate to conquer. I'll post it is there's interest.



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Elwood Bluze

[DirkHowitzer]

Dmm,
Think of this way...remember cloud city in Star Wars? You have to have some kind of device to negate effects of gravity in the colony but that should be easy enough to an advanced race...Easy way yo colonize gas planets...as for ice, well people live on the north and south poles right? Much of those are ice, in fact if I recall right the entire North Pole is ice...

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"He's dead, Jim."-- Lt. Commander Leonard "Bones" McCoy |Chief Medical Officer / USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)

[This message has been edited by DirkHowitzer (edited 29 January 2001).]

[apache]

I really don't find it unrealistic that races can colonize any planet type if they research it. If you want to base it on something like a race is born on a solid, rock planet, they should easily be able to adapt to an ice environment, since it is essentially a different type of rock.
Gas colonization obviously brings up quarrels with gravity since gas giants are more massive, and hence have a much larger gravitational force. But then again, we have already abandoned mass effects with the propulsion systems, so why not allow a similar line of reasoning with gas giant colonies? My thoughts are that this type of problem is exactly what would be researched anyways.