ScifiFan wrote:
The idea of forming planets from humidity and temperature is really interesting.

Burning + Flooded should be named to Magma

No it shouldn't assuming a planet happens to be in a way that the water doesn't cool down all the lava it should get a really cloudy atmosphere because all the water becomes steam again when it goes down and at the end rather than the planet's floor being flooded with water the planets atmosphere gets flooded with water, with the lower parts of the atmosphere containing like both cooled down water from higher up raining down and newly heated water from the planets burning crust. It would basically be a combination of a lava planet and a gas one and be as difficult to colonize as you'd expect from that.

Sinnaj63 wrote:
No it shouldn't assuming a planet happens to be in a way that the water doesn't cool down all the lava it should get a really cloudy atmosphere because all the water becomes steam again when it goes down and at the end rather than the planet's floor being flooded with water the planets atmosphere gets flooded with water, with the lower parts of the atmosphere containing like both cooled down water from higher up raining down and newly heated water from the planets burning crust. It would basically be a combination of a lava planet and a gas one and be as difficult to colonize as you'd expect from that.

Disagreed.



That sounds more like humid (gaseous vapor) + burning (molten lava) to me.



From dev diary :

We don’t use the term Star System as some systems won’t have star. Here is the list of types we have planned:



Star System: a classic star system.

POI: the planets and other element orbits around an artefact or other elements that can hold .

Black hole: sometimes with planets? (even if unrealistic). Fleets can orbit and might be used for teleporting.

None: the content is in middle of nowhere.

If a blackhole can have planets, then there is no problem with a planet being a combination of flood + burning = magma planet.

ScifiFan wrote:
Disagreed.



That sounds more like humid (gaseous vapor) + burning (molten lava) to me.



From dev diary :





If a blackhole can have planets, then there is no problem with a planet being a combination of flood + burning = magma planet.

I find it much easier to suspend disbelieve about a black hole planet than about a planet that's literally both full of burning rock and also flooded with water. Besides, why would that be magma anyway? Magma is lava that's still containg gases while it's underground, and it turns into lava once those gases leave the magma. So a planet full of lava and flooded with water, which still doesn't make any logical sense at all(Unlike a black hole system, which is not totally unbelievable), wouldn't be a Magma one anyway.

I find it much easier to suspend disbelieve about a black hole planet than about a planet that's literally both full of burning rock and also flooded with water. Besides, why would that be magma anyway? Magma is lava that's still containg gases while it's underground, and it turns into lava once those gases leave the magma. So a planet full of lava and flooded with water, which still doesn't make any logical sense at all(Unlike a black hole system, which is not totally unbelievable), wouldn't be a Magma one anyway.

This is a game discussion forum and not a an astrophysics one.



There is no reason whatsoever to not think out of the box and be confined to the known law of physics.



If scientists can make hypothesis about frozen stars, dark (matter) stars, quark stars, etc - then why can't a planet be of a magma type ?

ScifiFan wrote:
This is a game discussion forum and not a an astrophysics one.



There is no reason whatsoever to not think out of the box and be confined to the known law of physics.



If scientists can make hypothesis about frozen stars, dark (matter) stars, quark stars, etc - then why can't a planet be of a magma type ?

It can be, but then it would just end up being an earthlik/non-lava one because all the magma would have to stay underground.

Sinnaj63 wrote:
It can be, but then it would just end up being an earthlik/non-lava one because all the magma would have to stay underground.

"Magma" is simply a term that I can think off right now.



If anyone suggesting other names, then there is no reason to not include them as candidates for naming that particular type of planet.



And yet, there is no reasons to think that it is not possible to not have the combination of 'burning' + 'flooding' for planets.

ScifiFan wrote:
"Magma" is simply a term that I can think off right now.



If anyone suggesting other names, then there is no reason to not include them as candidates for naming that particular type of planet.



And yet, there is no reasons to think that it is not possible to not have the combination of 'burning' + 'flooding' for planets.

As I explained, it would be more like a combination of a lava planet and a gas planet because that's what happens when water gets really hot.

This sounds allot like the story of the Endless Homeworld...



btw this forum has been known to turn into an astrophysics forum. From time to time

Sinnaj63 wrote:
As I explained, it would be more like a combination of a lava planet and a gas planet because that's what happens when water gets really hot.

No point debating with you further.



I don't care even if you're the director of nasa of its chief scientist.



One thing for sure - I refused your imposing what you think is 'right' to me.



'Burning' + 'Flooding' planet = 'Magma' planet is possible in the game context. Period.

ScifiFan wrote:
No point debating with you further.



I don't care even if you're the director of nasa of its chief scientist.



One thing for sure - I refused your imposing what you think is 'right' to me.



'Burning' + 'Flooding' planet = 'Magma' planet is possible in the game context. Period.

But it would make sense as much as the tree of worlds on a lava planet. You know why people accept that? Because everyone knows it's randomly generated and stuff like that happens. On the other hand, if you had it always be in a lava world and the planet was called redwood forest, then that wouldn't make any sense, which is why it's called Tree of World and is spawned as a wonder on random planets.

In the same way, it doesn't make sense to have a both Burning and Flooded World, and have it called Magma. You know why I can impose that that's right on you? Because it's Science. It's science that Magma is Lava with all the gases still inside it, which changes once it actually gets outside from inside the planet. Flooding and burning also doesn't really work out like that because of the way it works. You can think if it as Fire and Water. Now obviously it's not really fire but mostly molten rock and a lot of water, but just like fire and water, they counter each other more or less. Now if you do suspend your disbelieve that the planet can even somehow have formed with both lots of water and enough volcanic activity to be burning, the only thing that's really possible where the planet stays both burning and flooded is if all the water became steam and moved into the atmosphere.

It will be nice to have a magma planet with burning magma flooding its surface forming oceans, rivers and seas of magma all over its surface, unlike what you may see in some part of the earth or other planets and its distance from its star keep its temperature hot enough as to prevent the magma from cooling off. lol

"When a bird is alive, it eats ants. When the bird is dead, ants eat the bird !

Time and circumstances can change anytime so think twice before you devalue or hurt anyone in your life !"

ScifiFan wrote:
It will be nice to have a magma planet with burning magma flooding its surface forming oceans, rivers and seas of magma and its distance from its star keep its temperature hot enough as to prevent the magma from cooling off. lol

That's just a lava planet though. It still isn't Magma and just Lava. The flooded is supposed to be water having flooded the planet, as seen by the planets within that category being oceanic planets full of water.

It will also be nice to have a gelid planet with cold liquid methane flooding its surface forming oceans, rivers and seas all over its surface, unlike what you may see in some part of the earth or other planets and its distance from its star keep its temperature barely cold enough as to prevent the liquid methane from being frozen off. （￣∀￣；）

"When a bird is alive, it eats ants. When the bird is dead, ants eat the bird !

Time and circumstances can change anytime so think twice before you devalue or hurt anyone in your life !"

Planets around black holes? Mmmmm...



This makes me think that it would be a nice idea for ES2 to have some sort of exotic life form tied to the physics of black holes. The Harmony were interesting as living crystals, but what about some incomprehensible life form made of exotic matter?

Hey Guys and Gals, back from a long hiatus. Glad to see this being made, and always glad to see brilliant minds coming together to build another great game. I apologize if this has already been talked about extensively, but regarding the Lanes section there was something that kinda bothered me about ES1 regarding travel and that was the ability to travel through open space. Every time I played ES, I hardly wanted to utilize that tactic, particularly because it would usually take quite a while for a fleet to reach a backdoor system, blah blah blah. It was also a pain to have to manually use the ability, instead of it being intuitive (Though I might be wrong about this, again sorry).



I think it would be interesting to have lanes/systems that are never part of the main chain of lanes, but can only be found through sending out a scout ship into open space. Truly, I feel that would make exploration a true task and one that could be enjoyable and fruitful. An example could be using the open space in a Ring Galaxy map and dotting the darkness with events/systems/etc. but can only be reached by an expedition, not by an Endless Wormhole or some teleportation to get to those lanes.



Point is: I'd like to see more done with Open Space Travel in ES2

Brazilian_Joe wrote:
Agreed. Additionally, gas giants could have their own unique anomalies such as:



Perma-vortex - Planetary gas currents maintain a hurricane vortex of continental proportions permanently (think jupiter red spot). when properly harnessed, it becomes a huge energy source. The eye of the storm is also an area of calm in a convoluted atmosphere, which can be set up to base operations to mine the energy and dust from the atmosphere.

+ max pop, + industry, + dust



Helium 3 - the planet atmosphere is rich in helium-3, which can be used to power fusion generators. Spaceship fueling costs are diminished since this planet is an abundant source.

+ industry, + movement on lanes touching this system proportional to industry



Dust gaea - This planet's atmosphere is a dust-powered sentience. It was discoverd how to communicate it by means of light wavelengths and artificially producing atmospheric effects. A simple diplomatic arrangement was made where we keep bringing dust to it, and it uses its vast processing power to further down technological advancements of our interest.

- % dust income on system, ++% science income on system proportional to planetary population.

I think Noble Gases like Helium are also Important for Terraforming because they can made an basic air Pressure without reacting with Ca like CO2 or O2 with everything or Nitrogen to its compounds its possible that it is important for electrostatical discharges (see also Harald Lesch about the Permuda Triangle). Maybe for diffusion of frozen Gases and Water into the Atmosphere as solvent for chemical reactions.

Concepts which could be explored for species variation:



Mobility-themed:



Race with great mobility from the get-go, but takes little or no advantage from the lanes.

Race which can teleport their ships to owned planets at early game, any system non-combat mid-game, and to sieged planets on late game, but have huge maintenance costs limiting the number of fleets.

Race which can sacrifice a colony ship in a system to create a teleportation beacon. The beacon cannot be destroyed. Any owned fleet can jump from one teleportation beacon to another. Home planet starts with a teleportation beacon (but it's useless until a second one is created).



Visibility and siege:



Race-specific improvement allows entire system to be cloaked, preventing siege attrition. Trade routes are disabled when system is cloaked, imparting siege-like effects for economy, but no militia attrition. Could consume an amount of FIDSI and/or luxuries while on. Can hold off a siege for a bunch of turns while other systems pick up ship production, allowing a defense fleet to catch up. Can also cloak only some planets, making a 6-planet system look like a 3-planet system with 3 dinky rocks instead of 6 PLANET SYSTEM WITH 3 huge juicy forest/ocean planets.



Perfect cloaked ship evasion. Hunted race is adept of fleeing for survival and has superior technology to flee. At higher tech levels can stay in an enemy system without detection as long as it does not engage. In combat cloaking cannot be perfect evasion except when retreating, but ships would still be hard to hit.



Expansion/colonization mechanics:



Instead of colonizing, a craver-like race lives solely in space and dries up planets like it sucks oranges, more aggressively than the cravers. They never colonize though. They create motherships - have one ship size larger than the largest one. A mothership has a huge, huge amount of hit points, can suck a planet dry very fast and grows in power the more resources it sucks, eventually being able to split in two. The other ship sizes may have harvester modules which can drain a planet - stealing the output of enemy planets, eventually making them become deplete too, or speeding up the depletion of 'their own' systems. Once a system is depleted it has little use, usually being left behind. The best planets to harvest are the non-colonized ones.

A mothership is a greater-then-death-star massive compound which moves slowly through the galaxy. Wherever it is, it behaves kinda-sorta like a planet/system, so it can be blockaded from advancement by enemy fleets. If it reaches another player's system though, it's a tough battle, as they can munch through the planets and the mothership counts as an uber-fleet.

The mothership eats through the stocked FIDSI when in combat though. So while it's a force to be reckoned with, it is also a tough attrition which delays growth (splicing the mothership), so it's usually a good idea to preserve the mothership from combat. Would be interesting IMO to have a very different, really nomad bunch of space grasshoppers.

Did you considered gravity on top of humidity / temperature to generate FIDS ?

Less gravity could help industry generation and high gravity could help dust generation maybe ?

Brazilian_Joe wrote:
Concepts which could be explored for species variation:



Mobility-themed:



Race with great mobility from the get-go, but takes little or no advantage from the lanes.

Race which can teleport their ships to owned planets at early game, any system non-combat mid-game, and to sieged planets on late game, but have huge maintenance costs limiting the number of fleets.

Race which can sacrifice a colony ship in a system to create a teleportation beacon. The beacon cannot be destroyed. Any owned fleet can jump from one teleportation beacon to another. Home planet starts with a teleportation beacon (but it's useless until a second one is created).



Visibility and siege:



Race-specific improvement allows entire system to be cloaked, preventing siege attrition. Trade routes are disabled when system is cloaked, imparting siege-like effects for economy, but no militia attrition. Could consume an amount of FIDSI and/or luxuries while on. Can hold off a siege for a bunch of turns while other systems pick up ship production, allowing a defense fleet to catch up. Can also cloak only some planets, making a 6-planet system look like a 3-planet system with 3 dinky rocks instead of 6 PLANET SYSTEM WITH 3 huge juicy forest/ocean planets.



Perfect cloaked ship evasion. Hunted race is adept of fleeing for survival and has superior technology to flee. At higher tech levels can stay in an enemy system without detection as long as it does not engage. In combat cloaking cannot be perfect evasion except when retreating, but ships would still be hard to hit.



Expansion/colonization mechanics:



Instead of colonizing, a craver-like race lives solely in space and dries up planets like it sucks oranges, more aggressively than the cravers. They never colonize though. They create motherships - have one ship size larger than the largest one. A mothership has a huge, huge amount of hit points, can suck a planet dry very fast and grows in power the more resources it sucks, eventually being able to split in two. The other ship sizes may have harvester modules which can drain a planet - stealing the output of enemy planets, eventually making them become deplete too, or speeding up the depletion of 'their own' systems. Once a system is depleted it has little use, usually being left behind. The best planets to harvest are the non-colonized ones.

A mothership is a greater-then-death-star massive compound which moves slowly through the galaxy. Wherever it is, it behaves kinda-sorta like a planet/system, so it can be blockaded from advancement by enemy fleets. If it reaches another player's system though, it's a tough battle, as they can munch through the planets and the mothership counts as an uber-fleet.

The mothership eats through the stocked FIDSI when in combat though. So while it's a force to be reckoned with, it is also a tough attrition which delays growth (splicing the mothership), so it's usually a good idea to preserve the mothership from combat. Would be interesting IMO to have a very different, really nomad bunch of space grasshoppers.

that mother ship could be great

Whoa - soooo very late to this party, but on the topic of lane travel:



I don't think that a game has ever done "user-defined" lanes. Here is how I imagine it would work -

- Sensor technology detects the presence of nearby nodes (limited radius from colonized planet expands with planet/ship/faction advancement)

- Player analyzes these nodes and makes a choice which node to crate a "lane-of-some-sort" to based on faction or technology

- Once this decision is made, that lane becomes permanent (or changeable at a considerable cost). Only one lane can be setup per node until later tech/ability allows more.

- Player then sends a ship down that lane to investigate the next node and scans for more nearby nodes thus repeating the process.



This would allow the player to make difficult strategic decisions based on individual play style. Some people would like to make bee-lines across the galaxy while others would prefer circular or grid-like lanes. Without careful thought and analysis, players might find themselves backtracking from dead-ends they have inadvertently created.



The inspiration for this is simple: all 4x space games that use lane travel fail to adequately explain the existence of the game-generated lanes. "Who decided that a lane should go to that system? There's nothing there! Just a dead rock. I would've made the lane go over there instead..." Background fluff isn't good enough. Ancients, Precursors, Asgard, Uncle Louie... no. Make the lanes have a reason - gravity, existence of certain elements, fuel, etc. You get the point.



Difficult to implement something like this, but it's just an idea. Perhaps some late tech might allow the "bending" of existing lanes just to make travel between systems a little more interesting than just plopping waypoints or staging areas for the planets tucked safely away far behind the front lines.