why planets and not systems?

Er, what?

There's one galaxy (the overarching game) populated by solar systems, which are in turn populated by planets and other anomalies. You travel between planets/anomalies, and between solar systems.

nah you dont understood what i had in mind sorry english is not my first language.

imagine 1 "gravity well" as what its called around planet. why in that field we have planet instead of system (each well would be a system)

i know it would force huge changes in whole game thats why im askin

Basically your saying that we'd settle stars like we do planets and stars would be in galaxies like how planets are in stars, right?

Well I can think of one minor problem with that, our galaxy, the Milky Way, is relatively small...and has 100 billion stars. Maybe you could have 100 stars in a galaxy under your system, but that would seem pathetically small for anyone who knows anything about astronomy. While I'd say the number of habitable planets circling stars is almost certainly wildy optimistic from a realism point of view, its also better for a game trying to be "epic" to have too many of something for realism than too little.

thats not an argument - it has nothing to do with reality (phase lines?)

it rather an estetic thingy i would rather raid systems than single planets like in other 4x games for instance pax imperia.

in pax you were creating "galaxy" by entering number of stars and what was around these was generated randomly.

you get my point?

i just wana know why they decided to go with planets instead of systems as battlefields

We don't have this because it is on a smaller scale is why. You play between several stars with a large amount of planets. It doesn't work to say each planet would instead be a star, because not every star has planets. So, leave that to GalCiv and let SoaSE stick with it's more limited arrangement of stars. Arguably the amount of space on a galactic scale that this game uses is quite small, so to scale it upwards and still handle anything on a planetary scale would be quite messy. IIRC, they already had trouble trying not to overflow a 64bit integer...

Well, If the devs make it possible to add moons to planets then through modding we could be able to change planet meshes into stars and add moons as normal planets. Visually I think that's good for some mods like Star Wars for example.

There would be a few problems though: the new "stars" would have all the planets attributes and things like that. It wouldn't make much sense I think. (Populated stars? lol...) But who knows, It might be easy to mod.

Anyway, I agree that It's for the best that Sins deals with a smaller scale, and the concept we have now, although not too realistic ( # of planets and such) benefits gameplay.

I think it has to do with immersion.

Zooming in on your precious planet, to build it up and defend it gets you more involved. You see the object of your efforts rather then a icon if you simply controlled solar systems instead.

Thinking about just controlling solar systems and viewing planets from afar is making me board already. Even if you could zoom in on a planet there would be little reason to as the interaction features would have to be gutted if they wished to keep the same "epic" scale as they are aiming for this the current game (eg, solar systems would replace planets for the size of your empire).

well you could point out that star is populated as statistic but in fact it would be the planets that circle around it.

There is a lot of Babylon 5 reference in Sins (a good thing!) In B5 some of the most powerful races had what...maybe a dozen colonies and some outposts?

...while we all dream of an Empire-style from Star Wars, I get annoyed sometimes needing to build farms on the "Planet o'Hamster 98".

I do miss orbits though, a nice tactical hoo-hah if that was in there. "What angle will they come from?!"

Sure, why not?

But then you would have to bomb the star and colonize it too... wouldn't you?

Phase lane exit and entry points can be thought of as stable Lagrange points in the planets orbital system - the only practical points of movement to and from the gravity well.

well colonizing a star thats not that bad but bombing yeah i agree.

if it would be easy i would not ask. i just wana know if it was made by design(planets) or just to simplify it coz of lack of time.

i know its not a fully 4x - its made purely for multiplayer and some simplfying was required also research was build for rts type of game not 4x. imagine sins as pure 4x wich happens in real time not turns,

that would be GOLDEN game for me.

im not criticising (spelling?) i just wana ask when IC made a turn to make this game simpler (becose i bet they wanted to make it more like what i said (geez i hope)

i didnt buy or peworder yet - im a practical man ... i dont buy 1 day games like call of duty 4 or crysis - when i buy a game i want ot to least ateast as long as counter strike did.

im not a lover of fps or any rts wich makes you claustrophobic .

after SC (supreme commander) all of old school games was too "small"

im just a turtling guy who dosnt like to much brain fatigue

hope you guys score with sins coz i love space games and i never have enough of em


p.s.
sorry i was drunk when i wrote it

Design.

thx Kryo

One simple reason. Its more fun to manage individual planets with "personality" and stuff, than have a star to represent your homeworld etc.
Thats one thing i liked better in Haegemonia compared to Sword of The Stars

Well, nothing stopping a person from making a custom map where you have a planet (that functions as normal), a MUCH larger gravity well, and a 3d star model off to the side (in the same gravity well).

This way, the planets are what are hooked up to each other, and the stars are just in the same gravity wells for looks/feel.

I am fairly sure that EvilleJedi's Star Wars mod for this game will use this kind of custom map.

Even in most 4x in this era you manage planets in systems and not the systems themselves, and this is a 4x/RTS..so even more so at a micro level.

I also found it a bit too unrealistic to have a map with 5 star systems and over 100 planets, but that problem can readily be solved via the custom map editor, as was already said. In fact, I already made a custom map with 25 star systems, each having anywhere from 1-12 stellar bodies. So far its working as intended, though I think the "development" phase on such a map will be quite long (as opposed to "early encounters" more compact distribution of planets entails).
But, as an old fan of 4X games like Master of Orion, I just have to have lots of star systems. Eventually I hope to play on a custom designed 50+ star map with epic, months-long campaigns, just like the good old days...

These are the kind of maps i would be interested in.
seems more realistic than 1 star with 50 planets that can be colonized.