uninhabitable planets - whats the point?

4) uninhabitable planets create a barrier to move around, as well as some realism - since no star system has all habitable planets (at least, as far as we know).

So, what's your beef?

"* - always thought 'terrain' could be added but probably only to larger maps :-""

Terrain (1 a (1): a geographic area (2): a piece of land) can not be added to (or subtracted from) maps. It can not be added to (or subtracted from) planets either. Terrain can only be modified, never added to or subtracted from.

Think before you post.

What has 'education' come to these days?

Uninhabitable planets can also be subject to events, transforming them into asteroid belts, inhabitable or even inhabited planets.

In my very first game I had several asteroid belt events, a minor race popping up mid-game (on a formerly unihabitable planet) and an event where discovery of a precursor artifact created a mass of class 3 planets (that were no further terraformable .

ps: I do not know whether anything of the above can happen in the original Dread Lords game (asteroid belts are obviously out). There, they're still scenery and obstacles at least.

The point is...

they are simply uninhabitable, except for evetually some special event during game progress

Technically your ships are reacting to asteroid belts in DA/TA by reducing their movement to 1 parsec.  They really slow down to avoid the damage of hitting them.

Uninhabitale planets in TA can become asteroid belts with the use of a Terror Star blowing up the system.  Any habitale planets in that system get turned into asteroids too lol.

The point of unihabitable planets is that during the colony rush at the start of the game you need to explore an area before knowing if any planets are useable. If all planets were, it would really change the colony phase. Have you ever gone to a star to see 5 class 0 worlds? DOH!  wasted time.

You ideas for added content to the galaxy are good but they have all been suggested before, long ago.

It would be just as easy to make the uninhabitable planets only show up on the minimap. They are nothing but useless clutter on the main map.

Maybe the developers just wanted to add a bit more random detail to what might have been otherwise blank screen space.  But I wish they'd devoted more effort (and maybe a bit more screen space) to making the icons more useful -- things like indicating ship direction and speed, and maybe showing more useful planet information without having to change views.

I know a lot of people just love the heck out of the spacecraft detailing, but does anyone really spend a lot of time playing in close-up view?  I practically never do.  Personally, I'm about a hundred times more interested in the actual game part of the game than in the pretty ship fenders.

The precursor artifact event that improves the PQ of all planets in an area is in vanilla DL.  I had it happen late game on a medium map- it was colony rush all over again.

As for uninhabitable planets in general, I feel that they add much needed diversity to the map.  Space is, unfortunately, quite dull.

Incase you have not noticed this is a game we are talking about anything can be patched, added, deleted etc, nothing - including terrain - is set in stone.

That was my thought unless I was missing something were different races could inhabit different class planets that others could not.

There are a lot of options in the video section to reduce textures, memory ussage etc so I thought that if uninhabbitable plannets are not of any real use would not turning them off same some resources.

If you increase Habitable Planets and decrease Number of Planets in the setup options you can minimize the number of class 0 worlds.

I said it once, i'll say it twice & over until someone at StarDock codes this in;

The Class 0 planets (not all, maybe a few, if only a single jewel shining in Space!) should gain some useful feature - somehow;

- Spy bases! It is a ONE tile per planet affair, no colony, no starport, no manufacturing... nothing else but a listening, watching, scanning outpost. Unflippable, impossible to invade, permanent. Right there for anyone to have ONCE, only. The Spy Base per race location. Choose wisely.

-- Of course, you're welcomed to suggest another type of 'feature' for IT.

That got me thinking, uninhabbitable planets have one square where you can build a special type of automatic / robotic building (with the right tech), spy base, research station etc. Possability of random events such as the research station does dangerous research (thats why it is automatic) and the research gets out infecting, destroying ... the system.

That gives you a reason to place them in enemy space and you cant tell one is there until you orbit the planet and which point you can use a contructor ship to either convert it to you are decommision it.

Special coding for class 0 planets is simply not going to happen. It is too late in the 'game', so to speak.

Live with them as they are.

Well, maybe not for this GCII iteration... but, i've heard they ***will*** have a GC3 & nothing stops me or anyone else from suggesting whatever new stuff they'd like them to consider at least.

There are a number of threads in this very forum which are, indeed, extrapolations into people's wishes for other gameplay features and if the past is any indication SD staff is always listening to us all.

I use it exclusively. I tried the zoomed out strategic view a few times and hated it. I don't need to be able to see every ship in motion at the same time and for everything else, there's a zoomable minimap. Then again, I'm one of those people that can keep a map of a Wal~Mart in their head, and tell you within a few feet where to find something.

hmmm.. i like the ideas about using class 0 planets for something, but i think it would have to come from a different tech string - not to mention they would have to create aquatic uninhabitable, radioactive etc.

This could add a lot of content to the game, and as people said theres loads of things they could be used for (heres some of mine, and a few that i liked that have been mentioned already)

-Refuelling stations, be it a space station orbiting the planet, or an actual self contained building on the planet, refuelling stations could add ship range without adding any influence, they could be 'captured' by enemies and a line of techs could make yours more secure!

-Mines, who says we can only mine asteroids? I'm sure that any planet will be just as usefull to mine, but then again there will be gravity issues and whatnot so space mining 2/3 could allow you to do that?

-Sensor hubs and relays, after all any civilistaion in space will want to keep an eye on its territories, so they would inevitably want to build sensor stations in outlying systems that are likely to avoid enemy sightings, and in the spy sense that others have mentioned before wouldnt it be cool to spy on New Iconia 3 from 4? decode enemy messages and generally spy!

-When you go to attack a system you look for enemy ships in space and orbiting a planet, but wouldn't it be a lot harder to look for a ship that was hiding on an uninhabitable planet? Of course such ships would require specialised landing gear to land on a planet with say, no atmosphere.

-Research stations, as aforementioned these could be really hany places to mess with some pretty dangerous techs!

Agreed, I couldn't stand the zoomed out view.  Always up close and personal for me (and designing ships was one of the huge selling points for me, stuff like that alone can keep me occupied for hours at a time).