SUGGESTION: Moons

They already provide a free 10% production bonus (same for rings, but research), FYI.

I'd like to see lots more asteroids on maps with sparse habitable planets. Those campaign maps were fun, when you got spam miners and make this big web.

It would also be kind of cool to expand the idea to research stations. You get something unique in the universe and you set up a station to study it. The information you gain gets sent back to the nearest planet, boosting it's research. Maybe have stations in rings around uncolonized planets, and/or have certain anomalies become permanent.

i deffinitly like the idea of being able to use those uninhabitable planets for something other then nice little circles on my zoomed out map. i think a habitable planet in a system with other solid uninhabitable planets should be able to set up some sort of base for extra manu points and for gas giants/ringed planets youd get research points.

Yeah, I know. I just thought it might be fun, since they are in the game already anyway. You could drop the inherent bonus, and make people build a base in the rings or on the moon to get the bonus. Like I said, maybe for GC3...



Yeah, but bases on uninhabitable planets would be a little more complex. Asteroids, moons, and rings are fairly similar... all are small, with limited atmosphere (at least for moons of habitable planets) and not much wacky stuff (plate tectonics, weather, magnetic fields, etc.). Once you start "floating" a base on a gas giant, or dropping a base into the atmosphere of Venus, you are running into colony-scale problems which require a colony-scale effort to solve them. At which point, you might as well just allow everyone to colonize all planets.

You know, some planets (like Jupiter), the moon is more habitable than the planet is.

Just set some limits on what types of planets you can establish bases on. Ones like Jupiter and Venus would certainly be out. But some barren, rocky, moon-like one wouldn't be that difficult to have a base on. It wouldn't require much more of an elaborate setup than a starbase would.

for the gas giants i was thinking more of an orbital facility then a "floating" base. i would basically just like to see all these useless objects in the game be used for somthing.... anything... it would give the game some more depth. some might call it useless clutter, but i like the idea.

You could use the gas gianats as H resourse bases

If fuel for ships was actually a concern... for those fusion drives of course.
The best space strategy game I ever played actually had hydrogen and methane as fuel components, along with some other 15 or so elements that made up a planet's composition. It kinda made high H planets valuable for the huge fleets late game.

Yeah, but in that case you would have to set up a colony, not a "mining base." Habitable is great for colonies, but it comes with significant costs and complications that asteroids don't have: gravity, weather, wildlife, magnetic fields, laws, conservationists, taxes, etc. If you want to colonize major moons, ask for that as a separate request.





That would then basically be a "research starbase" or a "manufacturing starbase," wouldn't it?

basically, yes it would be. as much as i am for both manu and research SBs. i kinda like the idea of making them tied specificially to gas giants and low grav planets. im just tired of seeing all these circles on my zoomed out map that just clutter up the place and do nuthing. and id rather use them then make the circles disapear.

but, as for the semi-habitable moons around gas giants... im an astrophysics major, and gas giants actually have a huge magnetic field. thus the radiation that gets thrown around above those planets would zap any life that wasn't very well shielded. i dont know how much this helps my point. but realistically... you would have to have a very well shielded base to be able to survie there. either way i vote for a research orbital facility... studying those strong magnetic fields could be really good for something