Planet/Anomaly Generation



I would like to see stars treated as planets how this would work is have every planet have it's own temperature that effects not only it's self but to some degree the planets in the same node. Therefore a star would be a massive planet with a huge amount of heat. This would allow races that survive at high temperatures/gravity to inhabit stars instead of planets. It would also allow super low temperature stars that approximate Y spectral class brown dwarfs that are known to exists and emit no visible light and have a temperature range that includes room temperature.

Wikipedia wrote:


WISE data has revealed hundreds of new brown dwarfs. Of these, fourteen are classified as cool Ys.[22] One of the Y dwarfs, called WISE 1828+2650, was, as of August 2011, the record holder for the coldest brown dwarf – emitting no visible light at all, this type of object resembles free-floating planets more than stars. WISE 1828+2650 was initially estimated to have an atmospheric temperature cooler than 300 K[45]—for comparison the upper end of room temperature is 298 K (25 °C, 80 °F). Its temperature has since been revised and newer estimates put it in the range of 250 to 400 K (−23–127 °C, −10–260 °F).

How do Visibility Levels affect completing a Constellation? Is it possible for the Nodes in a Constellation to have a mixture of different Visibility values (I assume yes), and if so, do Nodes only revealed late-game affect the completion of a Constellation? Are Nodes always part of a Constellation or is it possible for some exotic types to be "orphans?"



My concern is that some Constellations will be impossible to complete without late-game technologies, while other Constellations could be completable immediately. And furthermore, it wouldn't be possible to distinguish the two until either expending resources colonizing, or waiting an infeasible amount of time. There are a few possible resolutions to this issue:



1. Only low-visibility systems count towards completion. This has the awkward side-effect that someone can settle hard-to-see Nodes in your constellation without disrupting your monopoly.

2. All constellations have hard-to-see elements that are needed for completion. This makes constellation completion a mid- or late-game bonus.

3. Leave it to the RNG that some constellations are harder/later to colonize, but make it so that starting constellations are consistent.

4. Leave it to the RNG, but have the constellation bonus be tied to difficulty.

5. Hard-to-see Nodes are orphans, or an entire constellation will be at the same level of visibility.

I have to say the idea of Constellations being like the continents from the board game "Risk" is just genius.



Whoever had that idea has become my hero.

and should be rewarded with a very big cookie.

Sovereign wrote:
I have to say the idea of Constellations being like the continents from the board game "Risk" is just genius.



Whoever had that idea has become my hero.

What if he or she is Adventurer/Commander? And yes, sneaky edit. Who wants cookies if you could get 2 units of dust per year per level?

After reading the GDD3 and some of the other posts in this thread I have some concerns/ideas for how planets are generated. I'm not sure the temp + humidity variables are going to be sufficient to define planet types, specifically that the proposed system will have trouble dealing with gas giants and asteroid belts.



First, gas giants, which are as common if not more so than rocky worlds. While temp is a big variable in defining types, humidity is not. Gas type and size are far more important in determining the type of gas giant you have, everything from a lowly Neptunian ice giant to a brown dwarf. You can easily define gas giants based on temp; you have hot Jovians that are close in to the star, normal gas giants in the hab zone or slightly past it, then you have ice giants out past the frost line. You can further define them based on gas types - helium, hydrogen, methane, ammonia, etc., as well as size. Those factors would better determine usefulness/exploitability. I don't know if the proposed system can handle this unless the humidity variable can be tweaked to gas type.



Second, asteroid belts, which the proposed system can't really account for at all. Asteroid belts of various types are fairly common based on observation. You have multiple types, that would have different compositions and habitability - standard asteroid belt like in the solar system, ice belts out past the frost line, and circumstellar debris/dust disks in young systems. Having a standard asteroid belt near the habitable zone would be highly desirable. Asteroid belts with decent metal composition would actually be easier to exploit than planets (which is why NASA is going to an asteroid before Mars) since they have easily exploitable metals/rare earths, minimal gravity, and based on current data decent amounts of water. You really wouldn't need any greater technology than what it would take to exploit a moon similar to our own. It is a fairly common sci-fi trope of hollowing out decent sized asteroids and spinning them up for artificial gravity or just simply mining them out and using the tunnels for habitation. The other types of belts would not be as desirable, but would still be interesting. The proposed system can't really account for asteroid belts unless they are handled as anomalies, and I don't know how well that would work out.



Sorry to make this seem long winded, but as a scientist and a sci-fi geek with an interest in planetary formation I felt compelled to throw out some ideas/comments.



One other small note that came to me when I was typing this up. "von Neumann Probes" for exploration. Self-replicating probes that you can launch at a system, which can scavenge small asteroids and self replicate sending out more probes to nearby systems or even the same system. It could be deep in the exploration tree or maybe a racial. Just thought it might be a cool idea.

JonasV wrote:
After reading the GDD3 and some of the other posts in this thread I have some concerns/ideas for how planets are generated. I'm not sure the temp + humidity variables are going to be sufficient to define planet types, specifically that the proposed system will have trouble dealing with gas giants and asteroid belts.



First, gas giants, which are as common if not more so than rocky worlds. While temp is a big variable in defining types, humidity is not. Gas type and size are far more important in determining the type of gas giant you have, everything from a lowly Neptunian ice giant to a brown dwarf. You can easily define gas giants based on temp; you have hot Jovians that are close in to the star, normal gas giants in the hab zone or slightly past it, then you have ice giants out past the frost line. You can further define them based on gas types - helium, hydrogen, methane, ammonia, etc., as well as size. Those factors would better determine usefulness/exploitability. I don't know if the proposed system can handle this unless the humidity variable can be tweaked to gas type.



Second, asteroid belts, which the proposed system can't really account for at all. Asteroid belts of various types are fairly common based on observation. You have multiple types, that would have different compositions and habitability - standard asteroid belt like in the solar system, ice belts out past the frost line, and circumstellar debris/dust disks in young systems. Having a standard asteroid belt near the habitable zone would be highly desirable. Asteroid belts with decent metal composition would actually be easier to exploit than planets (which is why NASA is going to an asteroid before Mars) since they have easily exploitable metals/rare earths, minimal gravity, and based on current data decent amounts of water. You really wouldn't need any greater technology than what it would take to exploit a moon similar to our own. It is a fairly common sci-fi trope of hollowing out decent sized asteroids and spinning them up for artificial gravity or just simply mining them out and using the tunnels for habitation. The other types of belts would not be as desirable, but would still be interesting. The proposed system can't really account for asteroid belts unless they are handled as anomalies, and I don't know how well that would work out.



Sorry to make this seem long winded, but as a scientist and a sci-fi geek with an interest in planetary formation I felt compelled to throw out some ideas/comments.



One other small note that came to me when I was typing this up. "von Neumann Probes" for exploration. Self-replicating probes that you can launch at a system, which can scavenge small asteroids and self replicate sending out more probes to nearby systems or even the same system. It could be deep in the exploration tree or maybe a racial. Just thought it might be a cool idea.

I feel like having more gas planets, as realistic as it would be, would make systems less interesting and, more importantly, more difficult to colonzie, both because the Gas Giant tech would probably be relatively far into the Expansion Tree and the Approval Maluses would make it much more difficult. I do agree that Asteroid belts should stay and be changed though. Right now, the way they are in Disharmony, they're just meh, They can be nice to have once your other planets are full, and if your system is at the frontier and you have lots of spare industry to get the deep space installation for the defenses, but otherwise, they're the planet type to get unlocked last, or often enough not at all, for many players. They could probably be implemented like planets again, except they'd have less parameters affecting them. Or maybe have them as a system anomaly, that can be colonized later on and that gives boni from technologies without being colonized.

Von Neumann(Who was that btw?) Probes would really be interesting, but I'd assume they'd either be OP or useless because they come too late. And having them would bring up the question why you can't weaponize them in some other form, like having Von Neumann Weapons Platforms that you put into a tasty uninhabitated Asteroid Belt to replicate and then assault the enemy. I suppose that would only work on low defense systems, but still.

Trying to clear up some questions!

Caotico09 wrote:
What is the reasoning behind hiding wormhole/warp lanes until you get the tech?

The primary reason is to encourage exploration. We can use this in the Galaxy generation to hide parts of the galaxy to have special areas that are only accesibly from deciding to focus on exploration. This also gives us better pacing for mid to late game expansion. Overall it's a tool - depending on play test we will decide to what extent we will use it.

Caotico09 wrote:
(In regards to 'Renewing Exploration and having discovery levels on galaxy lanes/curiosities) As a single-player gamer only, im not a huge fan of this. I assume the AI is going to get huge resource boosts like normal to be competitive. This will mean I will be behind in research, and the AI will have "researched" hidden lanes before me. This would allow for phantom fleets from nowhere attacking my system- might not be fun.

Firstly exploration will be a large part of the game and focussing on it should be encouraged. If you don't actively ignore it, you will likely not have too much of a gap in unlock pace.

Secondly there are many gameplay options available here. Using probes + free movement can bypass hidden lanes, but avoiding discovery level tech will also limit your ability to find valuable curiosities.

Zenicetus wrote:
I have to say I'm not a big fan of the lane concept for space 4X games, and would prefer free movement as the primary travel mode, like Endless Legend. But since it's locked in now, I think the additional nodes that aren't just star systems will help.

We really enjoy what the Lane system offers (more directed play, more options for mechanics surrounding movement). Coming from ES1, we do want to be less restrictive and allow Free Move early on in the game. Just note that Free Move requires you to know the node before you can use it - which makes it work well with probes.

We also like how this direct links create conflicts in interesting ways, due to how they 'funnel' ships into conflict zones - as opposed to large open spaces. Especially with things like Endless Temples and other 'nodes of interest'.

PAnZuRiEL wrote:
I hope that planet temperature is tied at least partially to its distance from its star, unlike in ES1.

lo_fabre wrote:
Order and type of planets

In ES1 when I saw a system with the nearest planet to the star being arctic and the furthest being lava, it appeared very strange to me. I suspect it's not difficult for you to:

- Put the hotter planets near to the star and the colder farther once the planets are generated. It'll look better.

- Tune planets depending on star temperature. So, stars with low temp (Red dwarf) will have colder planets, and that with higher temp (blue giant) will have hotter planets.

ES1 started with having ordered distribution on systems - but it quickly led to systems becoming too similar. For ES2, this may not be an issue (primarily because of several planets of same temperature will 'randomize' order a bit more). This is neither difficult to do and we will likely try it. Just know that if we end up not having it in the game, it is likely an intentional choice due to visual fidelity.

lo_fabre wrote:
I think that it has no sense speaking of humidity in gas giants. It was always about their composition that affects the game.

A part from what you need when programming, It would be better to just show: "type: large gas" "composition: hydrogen" in the GUI description than speaking of humidity.

I sort of agree. It entirely depends on how we decide to feedback effects related to these parameters.

If we say '+X on Humidity: Dry planets' it will be a little wierd to say '+X on Humidity: Gas planets'

But if it simply says: '+X on Dry planets' or '+X on Gas planets' it doesn't really make a lot of difference. The image visualization is an representation to explain the system - it will not appear in the game.

Note that the 'Gas' section was recently added. We will re-evaluate the name for the category as it may not be as applicable anymore. Maybe atmosphere?

JonasV wrote:
After reading the GDD3 and some of the other posts in this thread I have some concerns/ideas for how planets are generated. I'm not sure the temp + humidity variables are going to be sufficient to define planet types, specifically that the proposed system will have trouble dealing with gas giants and asteroid belts.

Essentially the entire temperature + humidity part is primarily a way to simplify tooltips (i.e. +X bonus to temperature type, as opposed to specific planet type) and it is also a way to create a logical understandable system for terraforming. Moving up in temperature is a production for science tradeoff and moving down in temperature is a science for production trade off for example.

lo_fabre wrote:
But seeing Romain's interview on gamescon (here the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24ci5vQ0Snc) at minute 2:04 the description of a gas hidrogen appears on left bottom corner and says: "Frozen" and "Dry", which imo has no sense if you're speaking about planets that essentially hasn't any water (or not in an important percentage) in their composition.

Gamescom was before we made adjustments to the representation of gas giants. They should in the current iteration be: 'Frozen and Gas' or 'Hot and Gas' for example. I.e. humidity will simply say Gas. Note that these sort of things could always change depending on feedback.

lo_fabre wrote:
- In Gamescon video, on galaxy screen you can see a resource counter similar to strategic resources in EL. Will be the mechanics more similar to EL than to ES1?

- Will you need to spend strategic when building ships or improvements, instead of being able to build as many as you want with only one source?

- I've read in GDD2 that luxury resources may be tied to a planet class to avoid all-terraforming. The same for strategic?

Cannot speak too much to resources and their use just yet. We will use a system closer to EL yes - as for spending the resource, we are using EL as a starting point, but we are not afraid of changing it if we see better oppotunities present themselves. Personally I would like to see some 'Monopoly' system, but we're starting simple and iterating.

As for resources being linked to strategic/luxury resources is something we want to experiment with. At this point, we know we want to try it and and see how it plays out. Linking it to luxuries may be a little safer. If resources are strictly used in the same manner as EL - it may completely discourage terraforming in some cases, which is also not desired. So this will be a little more of a 'wait and see' answer.

JonasV wrote:
One other small note that came to me when I was typing this up. "von Neumann Probes" for exploration. Self-replicating probes that you can launch at a system, which can scavenge small asteroids and self replicate sending out more probes to nearby systems or even the same system. It could be deep in the exploration tree or maybe a racial. Just thought it might be a cool idea.

This is a very cool idea. I certainly think this being an improvement to probe techs would make a lot of sense.



As always, thanks a lot for the reponses! We're looking forward to evaluate and see what we should focus more on!

The fact that we were able to colonize Gas Giants in ES has bothered me a lot. I always thought that we should only be able to colonize a Gas Giant's moons and not the Gas Giant itself since it is mostly gas until you reach the core and technically there is nothing you can build on it, let alone sending population.



In my opinion Gas Giants should work like a system inside another system. They would have between 1 or 6 moons(assuming 6 is still the maximum number of planets we can have in a system). Then we should be able to colonize those moons without researching a specific technology for Gas Giants since the moons will technically be a terran planet or something else(let's say one of the moons is a barren, if we have the barren tech we would be able to colonize those without having to research a tech for gas giants). Of course these moons would have the corresponding properties of their Gas Giant(if it is a Methane Giant, moons would get +3 Industry bonus). Basically Gas Giants would function as an aura over their moons.

Maybe aboard a special submarine..?



Just kidding.

Metalynx wrote:


Firstly exploration will be a large part of the game and focussing on it should be encouraged. If you don't actively ignore it, you will likely not have too much of a gap in unlock pace.

Secondly there are many gameplay options available here. Using probes + free movement can bypass hidden lanes, but avoiding discovery level tech will also limit your ability to find valuable curiosities.

If the tech tree is as big # wise as in ES1, it seems it would be easy to miss these techs. If I focused on colonization (unlock planet) techs and military techs and only do the occasional economic/exploration tech it could take me a while to unlock these.



I usually play these games on Endless difficulty. It sounds like your saying I won't have to force going after this tech (at the beginning of each game, every game) to avoid fleets attacking me from no-where?



Will you be able to intercept free movement fleets mid space? Or will any free movement fleets automatically begin with a 'siege'?



Free movement in EL really isn't 'free'-- it is bounded by terrain, other cities, and can be stopped by using strategy and stopped in mid-movements.

I really like the idea of Risk-continent-like constellation, it's an interesting add to the expansion strategy.

For the new nodes, I think the best news are for battles outside the star systems

Sinnaj63 wrote:


Von Neumann(Who was that btw?) Probes would really be interesting, but I'd assume they'd either be OP or useless because they come too late. And having them would bring up the question why you can't weaponize them in some other form, like having Von Neumann Weapons Platforms that you put into a tasty uninhabitated Asteroid Belt to replicate and then assault the enemy. I suppose that would only work on low defense systems, but still.

John von Neumann was the first person to propose self-replicating machines or "universal assemblers" as he called them way back in the 40's. The idea of von Neumann machines that can be used as space probes involve creating self-replicating robot probes that can be used to explore the galaxy. You simply launch them at nearby systems where they use local resources (usually small asteroids) to create more probes, explore the system, and then launch them at neighboring stars. The whole process repeats and you have an exponentially expanding wave of probes transmitting information back to Earth.



They could certainly be used as weapons. I could see some species having a racial that allowed them to create probes that they could launch at a system to create self-replicating weapon platforms that then become active when another species attempts to colonize them. Sort of a way to booby-trap a system.

Metalynx wrote:


I sort of agree. It entirely depends on how we decide to feedback effects related to these parameters.

If we say '+X on Humidity: Dry planets' it will be a little wierd to say '+X on Humidity: Gas planets'

But if it simply says: '+X on Dry planets' or '+X on Gas planets' it doesn't really make a lot of difference. The image visualization is an representation to explain the system - it will not appear in the game.

Note that the 'Gas' section was recently added. We will re-evaluate the name for the category as it may not be as applicable anymore. Maybe atmosphere?





Essentially the entire temperature + humidity part is primarily a way to simplify tooltips (i.e. +X bonus to temperature type, as opposed to specific planet type) and it is also a way to create a logical understandable system for terraforming. Moving up in temperature is a production for science tradeoff and moving down in temperature is a science for production trade off for example.

Ah, I see. Would it be possible to expand it to gas type as well like in ES1? Some gas types would be more useful than others (helium3 being a good source for fusion reactor for example), but it is kind of a small detail, size and temp would have a much bigger impact on usefulness. Also can you tell us anything about how moons would be handled for giant planets since they tend to have lots of highly variable moons?



I'm actually more interested in how asteroid belts are going to be handled, since we haven't heard much about them. Having an asteroid belt like the one in our home system would have a big impact on industry for a star system. If you have a decent sized belt with a good amount of metaloid or metal/carbon asteroids you would have easily exploitable metals, rare metals, and even radioactives/rare-earths as well as water and even some organics. You combine that with micro-grav manufacturing and relatively straight forward habitability (you can colonize the mining tunnels or spin-up the hollowed out shells and teraform them) with built in radiation shielding and you have a nice bonus to FIDS for the whole system. I personally was not a big fan of how asteroid colonization was handled in ES1, you had to go very deep into the tech tree to colonize asteroids, when they would require less advanced tech than most of the more extreme planets (on par with colonizing a moon similar to Earth's).

Metalynx wrote:




ES1 started with having ordered distribution on systems - but it quickly led to systems becoming too similar. For ES2, this may not be an issue (primarily because of several planets of same temperature will 'randomize' order a bit more). This is neither difficult to do and we will likely try it. Just know that if we end up not having it in the game, it is likely an intentional choice due to visual fidelity.

Thanks for your answers!

I understand the reason for not ordering the planets is to make all systems looks different and some players may see all of them too close. Still, can you put an optin in galaxy generation which orders the planets after galaxy is created?

Just another question. You said in GDD that there will be 3 types of anomalies. Mixed/negative/positive. As in ES1 some negative/positive anomalies has opposite effects (just like -10 approval and +10 approval), may I suppose that you put some system to avoid anomalies that mutually cancels (or at least cacels part of the effects) in the same planet?

lo_fabre wrote:
I understand the reason for not ordering the planets is to make all systems looks different and some players may see all of them too close. Still, can you put an option in galaxy generation which orders the planets after galaxy is created?

That's not a bad idea!

lo_fabre wrote:
Just another question. You said in GDD that there will be 3 types of anomalies. Mixed/negative/positive. As in ES1 some negative/positive anomalies has opposite effects (just like -10 approval and +10 approval), may I suppose that you put some system to avoid anomalies that mutually cancels (or at least cancels part of the effects) in the same planet?

Indeed, we'll avoid anomalies with contradictory effects.

[EDIT]Thread merged for relevance - Frogsquadron





In ES1 you have 13 types of planets, including asteroids. You can colonize 3 of them from game start, and you needed 8 techs to be able to colonize all planet types (one tech allows colonizing 3 gas giants).

In tech picture in GDD3 you got 19 planet types, plus 6 different gas giants and the asteroids, which I suspect are maintained, but didn't appear in the picture. That's a total of 26 planet types. With all that number I suppose that the system to unlock planet colonization won't be the same (with will mean 17 tehcs to unlock in ES1 system). How will you solve this massive number of techs required to unlock all planet colonization?

May be:

- One tech for each planet tier, having 3-4 types per tier?

- Simply player chooses what to research, leaving aside some planet types?

- Will we have an era system similar to EL, unlocking planet types per era?

This would probably have been relevant within the scope of the GDD itself. But guess I'll respond here anyway ^^

The goal is to have colonization techs be based on one planet parameter - currently Temperature. So essentially a player may start with the ability to colonize all 'temperate' planets - then in one tech could get the option of colonization all 'warm' or another tech for all 'cold' planets.



We are also able to start a faction at a different starting point than Temperate, which means that different factions will be able to unlock slightly different planets at different times.

Meedoc wrote:
That's not a bad idea!







Indeed, we'll avoid anomalies with contradictory effects.

But wouldn't it make sense that a planet with different could have different anomalies canceling out each other? Like if you had one thing lowering approval that would make the planet less nice for the population to live on, but you could still also have something else that highers approval because it makes the planet a better place to live. And there's already plenty of approval factors canceling out each other, like, if you think about it, planet approval effects and anomalies, as well as wonders and anomalies and planet approval. And, especially given how most Anomalies in ES affect approval, keeping anomalies cannceling out each other from being on the same planet would probably limit the number of anomaly combinations very much.

Unless what you mean by avoiding contradictory effects is that there won't be Tree of Worlds on Lava Planets anymore, which totally makes sense and wouldn't make that much of a difference.

I didn't had time to read entire topic for now, will read responses later. For now I only want to share some thoughts about GDD3.



Finally GDD3! I was starting to think you forgot about us. ;p I just wanted to say that I LOVE the idea with treasure hunt! Though I do agree with VIP feedback somewhat. I wouldn't want to wage war on entire galaxy just to complete my family. Those families should be restricted to a specific amount of regions. For example one family may be constricted to 2 constellations, but that value should be based on the type of galaxy and amount of constellations in it. Additionally it would be interesting if sometimes for example parts of two families would be located in one constellation. That could add interesting diplomatic difficulties.

As for the rest it sounds like a huge improvement from ES1. I'm really interested, but I'm worrying somewhat for terraforming. I love the idea with unique systems and planets, but if it will constrict terraforming too much, than I will definitely be dissappointed.

I'm also worrying about system requirements. I'm playing on an old laptop. I hope it will not be an issue. :l

One of my favorite things about ES1 was that the early game actually made you feel like you were guiding your newly FTL-capable species out into space, exploring for the first time. Glad to see ES2 will not only conserve this feeling, but improve upon it and make it persist for the whole game as well.



Perhaps the values that will determine planet types can be determined by other values themselves... for example, heat could depend on the planet's distance from its star, the type of star (or other object) that it orbits, and a randomized level of geothermal activity. Just a thought.



Nebulae would also be cool.