I'm a bit confused by Planets in DA.

What?

I think he's saying all the Class 0 planets are solid and fit into the quantity of some specialized planet.

You make a good point, but there are some cases you haven't taken into account.
-Planets with no atmosphere- there's no tech for them.
-Ice Planets are not one of the types you can colonize, so your argument has no credit about them.
-Many of the Class 0s are Gaseous.
-Planets might also be affected by radiation or a toxin that even the technology in GCII can't cure or dissapate, thus they are considered 0s.

Addidtionally they could be too hot, tectonically unstable, or tide-locked.

Consider also that some planets overall quality is so poor that other than being used as a target for military bombing it is not economicly feasable to utilize them.

PC0 planets are why I'd like to see an additional tier of the Terraforming technology track that makes them habitable. Certainly, not for free, but still....

I try not to lean too heavily on realism with games like this, but the idea that every single planetary body in a star system could be made habitable pegs my realism meter on the low end. It would be believable if the game modeled things like moon colonization, or huge "L2" type space habitats, but that's not part of the game. I think having a few worlds that can't ever be colonized, helps us appreciate the planets we actually can colonize, or bend to our will with some extreme colonization tech. Besides, it would increase micromanagement on smaller maps. Some of us avoid the larger maps just because we don't want to be running 100+ planets.

Aside to Kyro:



I'll buy the first two, but tide-locked wouldn't necessarily be a problem for a race with advanced tech. If it was close enough to the star, there would be a narrow but habitable band all around the planet. Plenty of room to get a colony going. And with a high enough level of tech (especially engine tech), you'd have even better options. Larry Niven once wrote a neat short story about this -- "One Face." It's worth a read, for hard sci-fi fans.

The ability to place a mining base or other type of non-population-growing outpost would be nice, though. There could be modules that would increase ship speed in the area like military bases, influence booster modules, etc.

Such a base would be too small in effect to make any difference on the type of scale GCII is based on. In fact, you can even assume that some of those quality 0 planets even have some very small colonies on them, but just too small in insignificent to even count on a galactic scale.

...low realism? At the high end of the tech tree you are FIRING BLACK HOLES FROM A GUN. I do not think that if you can a) build space ships and colonize planets with toxic atmospheres, you would have much trouble colonizing an atmosphereless rock. Or hey, why not use some of that Sufficiently Advanced Technology to MAKE an atmosphere on the planet?

at least with TA, if you have a system of only PQ0 planets, you can doomstar them into an asteroid field.

I think there are some reasons to allow "uninhabitable" colonisation (it's technically possible, there's terraforming tech in the game anyway, everyone likes to have arseloads of planets...) but there are also some reasons not to: sure; with enough technology we could probably do pretty much anything -- terraform gas giants, fire black holes from guns, grow cabbages that glow in the dark -- but one could argue that we don't do everything we can because sometimes it's not necessary, or it's too expensive, or there are just easier ways of getting the same result. I personally think they've done a good enough job of representing reclamation of hazardous worlds with the extreme colonisation techs. Plus making every planet in the galaxy habitable would just kill my system...

That said, I guess it would have been cool to allow it anyway, despite its being a bad idea sometimes -- what the heck, put in that "0-World Colonisation" tech, let it be researched for 50 weeks, and when we have it, let's go and establish small, unhappy, parasitic colonies at exorbitant prices!

That's my opinion, at least.

J.

Think of it as more a matter of scale. A planet isn't considered colinizable unless it can support 5 to 6 billion critters.

Yes, with better tech we could put people on Pluto. But a few hundred million? Not so much.

Only if it has no atmosphere. If it had one, there'd be extreme winds. Air heating up and rising on the day side, cold air moving over from night side, hot air going over to night sight, then cooling and falling down.

In my case, i'd put a sort of tactical spying option (enhanced accordingly) on these Zeros and lurk around every enemy's core systems - all the while using the cheapest route possible!

Click, report, sabotage, influencing - name it.


- Zyxpsilon.

Even then the small square area available on a tide locked planet would make it nearly impossible to get any productivity out of the planet. You just wouldn't have enough space.