PQ Concerns

The PQ in this build is way too low... I mean most planets are 5-7 tiles so a factory (more like 2 or 3 to be of any use really), spaceport,colony, farm (since they nerfed farming fromthe colony square way down),ent center come to between 5-7 tiles alone!

Those are just basic semi-functional colony stuf! LEts also face the fact that the orbital fleet controller is also a must afetr the beginning of the game because it is otherwise impossible to fight off the AI fleets. (Ships in orbit should just be a fleet automatically logically but w/e)...

This means that my PQ 10 home planet basically is doomed to mediocrity since it usually doesn't even get any squares from Soil enrichment, Habitat, or Terraforming!

We're tweaking the number of upgradable tiles planets will receive.  Terraforming will be much more important/powerful in the next few betas.

Is it going to work the same, but just more important? I ask because right now, a class 10 planet can't benefit from any of that series, but a class 11 planet can get three extra tiles, and as near as I can tell, a class 26 planet would get the same three extra tiles.

Of course I've got ideas, I just don't want to throw them at you if you (as a group) have already decided where you're going with terraforming.

I've played several games now where the highest PQ I've seen is 26 or 28. One I colonized at the start and one I flipped. The alien had hardly filled in any of the squares, so I had lots of places to build all those wonders and trade goods.

Terraforming will be much more important/powerful in the next few betas.

Good:) It was pretty frustrating to have an empire of 8 class 10 and below planets. All the terrforming techs were useless to me.

I have played larger maps, while the majority of planets ranged from 5-9, home planets were 10, 2 to 3 were 11-14, 1 was 17 and another was 26.

Wow. It does exist. Only prob is finding it and colonizing before the others. A size 26? Thats way better than 5 PQ 5 planets.

Depends, Shogun. You're probably going to collect more taxes off the 5 PQ 5 planets, unless you dedicate most of that PQ 26 planet to econ and morale improvements. It's easy to keep the maximum population of a PQ5 planet happy. Move all that population onto a PQ 26 planet, and there will be lots of unhappy people.

I think the algorithm for population morale factors needs to be adjusted, it just gets insane when you start getting over 10M on a single planet.

I think the algorithm for population morale factors needs to be adjusted

Agreed.

Yea, here's the deal on this stuff:

We want to make terraforming much more important because we think it'll reduce micromanagement.

That is, you'll get a planet with on average between 7 and 11 tiles on it to start with. You'll zone all your tiles with the usual stuff and leave the auto upgrade stuff to go.

Then over time, you'll get more tiles through terraforming techs. Now, when you go back and visit, there's various wonders and achievements that you might want to build ther.e  This beats the heck out of having to go back to planets, kill something you made, and build a super project on it.

There are planets as high as class 26 in the game. They are just rare.

So... the plan is that you will most of the time need to demolish something so that you can put in a wonder? You use those extra tiles with useful stuff. Most of the wonders from GC1 just aren't that useful when you can only build a couple of things total in medium and smaller maps.

Maybe we should be able to build wonders on useless tiles instead?

No, Star Pilot, They said that that's the way it is now with GC2. The goal is that you'd fill up your initial tiles with the basic infrastructure stuff when you first colonize that planet. The governor would auto-terraform while you're off researching, then, when you come back, you'd have new usable tiles that you could plop your wonders down on without having to tear down any existing infrastructure.

Basically, they're trying to change away from what you're thinking they're changing to.

I see your points about the terraforming, very cool idea

I think the map wasn't big enough before I was playing on. Since they are very rare. more stars = more chances.
On the larger maps no probs at all. I think there's good distribution now that Ive tested on larger maps.

i'm glad terraforming will be made more potent. any thoughts on a PotentialPQ for a planet rather than a PQ? eg you settle a planet that is rated say 16, but only 10 tiles are usable, with the remaining 6 already colour coded for the specific terraforming tech - that way you know the potential of your planet at the start, rather than unlocking it as you go? just a thought.

They've already taken a step in that direction, Evil Roy, you can see what's terraformable by the next tech as is.

No, Star Pilot, They said that that's the way it is now with GC2. The goal is that you'd fill up your initial tiles with the basic infrastructure stuff when you first colonize that planet. The governor would auto-terraform while you're off researching, then, when you come back, you'd have new usable tiles that you could plop your wonders down on without having to tear down any existing infrastructure. Basically, they're trying to change away from what you're thinking they're changing to.

Let's just get real for a moment. When I see that Earth or Eden or any other of my planets have finish terraforming a tile, I jump to it and give it a "Build" order for that tile. But I rarely, if ever, stick a wonder on it. Why? They aren't useful. Not when I only get 11 or 13 tiles. Earth is always aching for more tileage, what with having its Manu center and other reasonable bonuses put on it.

Now, Mars, I might toss away a bank or lab on it to let it build a wonder. But Earth and the other big worlds just cannot afford the waste of tileage on something that is basically superfulous under the current game design/balance.

Sorry... got a completely blank screen back when I posted the above reply. So I hit refresh, and created a DP by accident.

We're failing to communicate somewhere. If you want to argue the value of wonders (I find they're useful, but I don't build them on my home world or my best planets, I've got lots of PQ11-14 planets for that, usually), but I was responding specifically to

So... the plan is that you will most of the time need to demolish something so that you can put in a wonder?

That's the statement I was trying to correct. The plan is that you won't have to demolish an improvement to make room for a wonder, the various terraforming techs will make room for you. Whether Earth or a high PQ planet is where you'd want to stick a wonder is a different debate, one I suspect we'd agree on at least to some degree. The only reason I don't consider Earth (or whatever starting planet my custom race has started on, it won't name the planet "Big Giant Rock" like I specified in the custom race setup) as a place to put a wonder is because it does have more manufacturing capacity than it's size would suggest. In most games I play, PQ 11-12 are almost a dime a dozen, it's my PQ 16, 17 and 18s, or the rare 26 that are my industrial or research giants (only one research giant, other than the planet that gets the Omega Lab and Tech Capitol, there's no reason to bunch up research).

I suspect that part of the modifications to terraforming will be to make them have some effect on planets with a PQ lower than 11, the current cutoff, which means that even Earth won't benefit. Most of the time when you think of terraforming, you think of improving the quality of barely habitable planets, not planets already better off than Earth In fact, I'd argue that terraforming should have a GREATER affect on lower PQ planets. Say each level of terraforming adds max(int((10-curr PQ)/2.25),1) to the PQ. Naturally, the 10 and 2.25 are SWAGs and subject to play balancing, but this would ensure that all planets get at least one point of PQ per level of terraforming, and a PQ1 planet could become a PQ 8 planet eventually, though with the undustrial capacity of a PQ1 planet, it's going to take a long time to make that first step. As it should be.

Once again, I say, be glad I'm not writing this game

Did more testing, and agree with you on the PQ 5s and large planet like 26. It does get insane. All those extra tiles went to extra entertainment centers trying in vain to keep planet happy. On a side note, you can keep your big planets in check by not building a farm or waiting till you're ready (already building a decent infrastructure ).

I've noticed there's no penalty for not building farms that I can tell, is this planned? Or would people start getting angry at some point ?

Is there some way of figuring how many people can fit on a planet? How many people would fit on that pq 26 planet ??

Unless I am mistaken, but people are angry because they are too numeroius, not because the population can't increase. It is just what farming do: allowing you to control the siez of planet population.

And it is very nice to be able to control population without resorting to having a morale of 50% like it was the case in GC I

it would be nice to terraform unusable tiles into usable. even if it has to be done in long stages.

My main complaint is when you set habitable planets to abundant, I'm still seeing systems with five class zero planets. I don't care if they are class 1, class zero is useless and serves no purpose in the game at all. Even a planet like mercury would be class one, we could set up a small research station there on the day/night line. A planet like Venus would be class 0 until some significant terraforming and shielding techs, but in the end would be usable. Jupiter maybe class zero, but it has moons we could set up a small colony on.

I think the game takes moons into account already as I found a usable low-PQ gas giant with a moon that looked like earth. Either that or the textures are screwy.

Well, I've yet to see a world over 17 in my games. But I'm playing on the lean side of things, so that is probably why.

And my point is that as soon as you get that new tile, you put the most useful item into it. There is only 6 or so actually useful tile fillers that are not factory/lab/bank/embassy (industry/research/money/culture). Most wonders are now useless. Remove all but those ~6 useful items from the game, and I bet 99% of all GC2 beta testers wouldn't miss them! Indeed, their games would go faster/more efficently, because that's one less thing to mess with.

I have my setup at gigantic and abundant and have four 26 planets in the game I'm currently playing along with numerous 18's, 17's, and 16's. In fact one of the 26's got a 50% planetary bonus for tiles and ended up as a 39.

Sabre21