Will drastically change the static map and add a twisted complexity:

1 - stars will slowly age, old stars will eventually deplete (supernova/dwarfs and other astrophysical creatures)

2 - in dense areas of the galaxy new systems are born (with completely new uncolonized and resource full planets...)

3 - systems gradually move outwards (spiral expansion), probably will require the galaxy to spin as suggested in other thread



In my opinion will do the following effect:

1 - make Pilgrim faction extremely more powerful because of fleet errant feature (need to be balanced in other factions somehow/ be researchable at late stages)

2 - make fight for central parts of the galaxy more fierce (new systems will appear there)

3 - make colonization a possible in late stages of the game

4 - require capital relocation (it will also go kaboom one day...)

5 - require dense fields (nebula?)

6 - make depletion of resouces on planets non permanent



And in general will add a unique twist for the game (don't think such feature exist somewhere else)

This would add an interesting twist, I agree, but...I don't think there's enough time in a game to account for this.



Each turn is just one year passing, if you keep track of that on the End Turn button (game starts in 3,000 After Dust, and, for me, the longest has only lasted until 3,679 A.D.). For stars to be born, and systems to form around them, we're talking along the lines of tens of thousands of years passing. That's just far too long to account for it in a game.

If accounting for real time, then half of the tech is not correctly aligned (terraforming in one turn?), if say technology pushed the players ability to terraform so quickly, then why not say "dust gone whild and speed up star formation" :-)

In Space Empires 4 (and 5?) some stars have a chance to go nova and destroy everything in the system (it's indicated when you look at the star details). IIRC a part of the players hate this feature intensely and always disable catastrophic events in their games. I always set my random events to the maximum, but never had this happen to me...

Well the idea is nice, but i think some people would rage like never seen before, when one of their star-system goes "booom" lol

Tredecim wrote:
Well the idea is nice, but i think some people would rage like never seen before, when one of their star-system goes "booom" lol

Particularly so should there be a glitch/bug which results in all your systems suddenly falling pray to disasters... a sort of "mass-boom"! lol

n18991c wrote:
Particularly so should there be a glitch/bug which results in all your systems suddenly falling pray to disasters... a sort of "mass-boom"! lol

Nonono, not a bug! Name it "interactive event" lol



But the idea of something "bigger" happening, is nice too

:-) facts of life...

With proper science you can get a fair and timely warning :-)



The more important issue (in the proposal) is the "replenishment" of new and resource full planets (mitigating the planet depletion barrier), the "Oops my capital went Kaboom" is not a big loss in the long if you can move it...

plexaikm wrote:
:-) facts of life...

With proper science you can get a fair and timely warning :-)



The more important issue (in the proposal) is the "replenishment" of new and resource full planets (mitigating the planet depletion barrier), the "Oops my capital went Kaboom" is not a big loss in the long if you can move it...

Uh...I still repeat my early comment of this simply taking far too long. Moving systems, stars aging, all of that? It would take a very long time, times much longer than are represented in the games (which, what, tend to cover a century or two at most?). The only thing in here that might make some sense would be doing something to a system to cause its star to go nova, which would ultimately just be some kind of late-game super weapon tech.



Anything else simply seems...Pointless. The only race that has to worry about resources being depleted are the Cravers, but creating a method to "fix" planets they've devoured would likely make them too powerful. They could just undo their damage when they start taking FIDS penalties, and go back to getting bonuses. No other race have planetary depletion issues.

As a map option it would be really interesting.

FinalStrigon wrote:
Uh...I still repeat my early comment of this simply taking far too long. Moving systems, stars aging, all of that? It would take a very long time, times much longer than are represented in the games (which, what, tend to cover a century or two at most?). The only thing in here that might make some sense would be doing something to a system to cause its star to go nova, which would ultimately just be some kind of late-game super weapon tech.

I want to reiterate this point. The only useful thing seems to be the idea of stars going supernova, as a form of random event like the other random events already in the game. A new star forming would require a complete revamping of the years system to be on the scale of 10s of thousands of years, if not more, which is unrealistic with how the game works. But i definitely would agree that supernovas would be a very interesting add on to the game, and possibly even the idea of forced supernovas as a form of espionage? or maybe a planet buster (death star type thing). Other than that, star formation just simply isn't practical or in the realm of making sense.

We already have an option to set the galaxy age, this idea would work great with a few tweaks: giving basically every system a chance go nova is too risky, random and unreal, but it would be much more balanced to set this risk just on older systems ^^

At the same time, it would be a deep strategic choice wheter to colonize or not a system with an high chance to go ka-boom, don't you find? This would add the strategic risk factor without unbalancing your playthrough ^^

Hackuity wrote:
We already have an option to set the galaxy age, this idea would work great with a few tweaks: giving basically every system a chance go nova is too risky, random and unreal, but it would be much more balanced to set this risk just on older systems ^^

At the same time, it would be a deep strategic choice wheter to colonize or not a system with an high chance to go ka-boom, don't you find? This would add the strategic risk factor without unbalancing your playthrough ^^

I wouldn't say there's strategy there at all. I'd imagine these space-faring races would be able to tell when a star is nearing the end of it's life. Even then, the end of that life may still take a number of decades, or centuries. You might be safe simply doing some mining, I suppose, if you could guarantee enough time there to make a profit, but anything else wouldn't be worth the cost. Setting up a colony, supporting it, and all of that, only to have all of those resources wiped away when the star goes supernova? Not worth the risk.



I only see supernovas working their way in as a doomsday, end-game tech, should the devs decide to go with that. I have no clue how you'd engineer a star to explode (dump a few antimatter bombs into it? *shrug* ), but personally, I wouldn't want to see tech like that in the game anyway.

FinalStrigon wrote:
I wouldn't say there's strategy there at all. I'd imagine these space-faring races would be able to tell when a star is nearing the end of it's life. Even then, the end of that life may still take a number of decades, or centuries. You might be safe simply doing some mining, I suppose, if you could guarantee enough time there to make a profit, but anything else wouldn't be worth the cost. Setting up a colony, supporting it, and all of that, only to have all of those resources wiped away when the star goes supernova? Not worth the risk.

You're obviously right, from this point of view...maybe adding powerful bonuses or game-breaking options (like the chance to research a powerful weapon for a limited amount of time) for the colonizing faction would be enough for some players to assess the risk ^^

I have no clue how you'd engineer a star to explode (dump a few antimatter bombs into it? *shrug* )

IMPACT: T zero



Just outside the expanding light cone of the present a star died, iron-bombed.



Something—some exotic force of unnatural origin—twisted a knot in space, enclosing the heart of a stellar furnace. A huge loop of superstrings twisted askew, expanding and contracting until the core of the star floated adrift in a pocket universe where the timelike dimension was rolled shut on the scale of the Planck length, and another dimension—one of the closed ones, folded shut on themselves, implied by the standard model of physics—replaced it. An enormous span of time reeled past within the pocket universe, while outside a handful of seconds ticked by.



From the perspective of the drifting core, the rest of the universe appeared to recede to infinity, vanishing past an event horizon beyond which it was destined to stay until the zone of expansion collapsed. The blazing ball of gas lit up its own private cosmos, then slowly faded. Time passed, uncountable amounts of time wrapped up in an eyeblink from the perspective of the external universe. The stellar core cooled and contracted, dimming. Eventually a black dwarf hung alone, cooling toward absolute zero. Fusion didn't stop but ran incredibly slowly, mediated by quantum tunneling under conditions of extreme cold. Over a span billions of times greater than that which had elapsed since the big bang in the universe outside, light nuclei merged, tunneling across the high quantum wall of their electron orbitals. Heavier elements disintegrated slowly, fissioning and then decaying down to iron. Mass migrated until, by the end of the process, a billion trillion years down the line, the star was a single crystal of iron crushed down into a sphere a few thousand kilometers in diameter, spinning slowly in a cold vacuum only trillionths of a degree above absolute zero.



Then the external force that had created the pocket universe went into reverse, snapping shut the pocket and dropping the dense spherical crystal into the hole at the core of the star, less than thirty seconds after the bomb had gone off. And the gates of hell opened.



Iron doesn't fuse easily: the process is endothermic, absorbing energy. When the guts were scooped out of the star and replaced with a tiny cannonball of cold degenerate matter, the outer layers of the star, held away from the core by radiation pressure, began to collapse inward across a gap of roughly a quarter million kilometers of cold vacuum. The outer shell rushed in fast, accelerating in the grip of a stellar gravity well. Minutes passed, and from the outside the photosphere of the star appeared to contract slightly as huge vortices of hot turbulent gas swirled and fulminated across it. Then the hammerblow of the implosion front reached the core …



There was scant warning for the inhabitants of the planet that had been targeted for murder. For a few minutes, star-watching satellites reported an imminent solar flare, irregularities leading to atmospheric effects, aurorae, and storm warnings for orbital workers and miners in the asteroid belt. Maybe one or two of the satellites had causal channels, limited bandwidth instantaneous communicators, unjammable but expensive and touchy. But there wasn't enough warning to help anyone escape: the satellites simply went off-line one by one as a wave of failure crept outward from the star at the speed of light. In one research institute a meteorologist frowned at her workstation in bemusement, and tried to drill down a diagnostic—she was the only person on the planet who had time to realize something strange was happening. But the satellites she was tracking orbited only three light minutes closer to the star than the planet she lived on, and already she had lost two minutes chatting to a colleague about to go on her lunch break about the price of a house she would never buy now, out on the shore of a bay of lost dreams.



The hammerfall was a spherical shock wave of hydrogen plasma, blazing at a temperature of millions of degrees and compressed until it had many of the properties of metal. A hundred times as massive as the largest gas giant in the star system, by the time it slammed into the crystal of iron at the heart of the murdered star it was traveling at almost 2 percent of lightspeed. When it struck, a tenth of the gravitational potential energy of the star was converted into radiation in a matter of seconds. Fusion restarted, exotic reactions taking place as even the iron core began to soak up nuclei, building heavier and hotter and less stable intermediaries. In less than ten seconds, the star burned through a visible percentage of its fuel, enough to keep the fires banked for a billion years. There wasn't enough mass in the G-type dwarf to exceed the electron degeneracy pressure in its core, collapsing it into a neutron star, but nevertheless a respectable shock front, almost a hundredth as potent as a supernova, rebounded from the core.



A huge pulse of neutrinos erupted outward, carrying away much of the energy from the prompt fusion burn. The neutral particles didn't usually react with matter; the average neutrino could zip through a light year of lead without noticing. But there were so many of them that, as they sluiced through the outer layers of the star, they deposited a good chunk of their energy in the roiling bubble of foggy plasma that had replaced the photosphere. Not far behind them, a tidal wave of hard gamma radiation and neutrons a billion times brighter than the star ripped through the lower layers, blasting them apart. The dying star flashed a brilliant X-ray pulse like a trillion hydrogen bombs detonating in concert: and the neutrino pulse rolled out at the speed of light.



Eight minutes later—about a minute after she noticed the problem with the flare monitors—the meteorologist frowned. A hot, prickling flush seemed to crawl across her skin, itching: her vision was inexplicably streaked by crawling purple meteors. The desk in front of her flickered and died. She inhaled, smelling the sharp stink of ozone, looked round shaking her head to clear the sudden fog, and saw her colleague staring at her and blinking. "Hey, I feel like somebody just walked on my grave—" The lights flickered and died, but she had no trouble seeing because the air was alive with an eerie glow, and the small skylight window cast razor-sharp shadows on the floor. Then the patch of floor directly illuminated by the window began to smoke, and the meteorologist realized, fuzzily, that she wasn't going to buy that house after all, wasn't going to tell her partner about it, wasn't ever going to see him again, or her parents, or her sister, or anything but that smoking square of brilliance that was slowly growing as the window frame burned away.



She received a small mercy: mere seconds later the upper atmosphere—turned into an anvil of plasma by the passing radiation pulse—reached the tropopause. Half a minute later the first shock wave leveled her building. She didn't die alone; despite the lethal dose they all received from the neutrino pulse, nobody on the planet lived past the iron sunrise for long enough to feel the pangs of radiation sickness.

from IRON SUNRISE, by Charles Stross