Idea--Race Specific Planet Quality

Can methane and oxygen breathers live side by side?

from GalCiv2 Forums
I had a set of ideas on my drive in to work today. Summarized they are:

1) Change planet quality to be a function of gravity, atmosphere, and temperature values.
2) Each race has its own function for determining planet quality.
3) The lowest planet quality is 1 or 2, not zero.

The terrans prime planet would be an oxygen atmosphere, 1.0g gravity, and temperate climate. Drengins might prefer oxygen atmosphere, 1.4g gravity, tropical climate. Yor would have some flat function that would allow them to use any planet, but only at quality 4-6. You could introduce methane breathing aliens that prefer planets with a methane atmosphere. This would really change the game, since suddenly the races value planets differently. If you invaded a very different species, you could wipe them out, but you'd only have a very minimal outpost colony in a harsh environment. Aliens that preferred gas giants could checkerboard around your empire. Pretty cool, huh?

The big downside is that this would ruin influence. If I occupy all the earthlike worlds, and the AI occupies all the gas giants, how are we going to flip each others worlds? If you did flip it, what use is it to you? Why would methane-breathing floating gas bags be interested in nikes and hamburgers anyways?

--Brad
ideas
5,015 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I doubt it. It ruins some of the planets, as you said. Just take the PQ bonus to make all planets more hospitable for your race.
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I have played games that do this (Stars! comes to mind) and it's a neat idea. But the major difference is that in Stars! you occupy the star system, not any individual planet. It is abstracted. You correctly pointed out that flipping ownership of a colony via influence would not work, and there is no method or orbital bombardment to destroy worlds that you can't colonize.

It's a nice idea, it works great in games that plan ahead to include this type of feature, but I don't feel like you could change the scope of this game to include that. Apples and oranges.
Galactic Civilizations III
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I think it's a bad idea. Why? PQ measures how much of the planet you can use to BUILD. it doesn't matter if it's a Torian or Human, they won't be able to build on say, a gas giant. And it makes teh game much more complicated.
Simple > complicated
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Intersting idea I agree. I've seen this to varying degrees in other games, but I am agreeing with #3. What happens when you invade a planet that has built up quite nicely because the planets previous owners were a good match for the climate? Would you randomly destroy things to bring the PQ down to the new owners level?

Congrats on thinking outside the box and trying to bring in some new features, but I think this idea is just a little outside of what I would like to see in this game.
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I know this game play feature from good ol' Pax Imperia.
I think it's a nice idea, but as the above posters stated it won't work properly. Unless ... you could just withdraw your troops from the planet after conquering it, thereby destroying all of the improvements. After that, if you don't have any Colony in this system but there is a suitable planet, go for that planet with a Colony ship. That would give the Colony ships a reason for existance in the late game.