[QUOTE=]

As I said I have no problem with megastructures or end-game tech, I'd welcome the addition. I'd just rather they were grounded in something that is viable, rather than something that isn't "but might happen in the future".[/QUOTE]



based on our current understanding, possibly. however science as we have now still has some big blind spots. we do not yet have a theory of everything. what is viable now has no bearing on what will be viable in the far future. also remember that this is a game. not everything in it has to conform to current scientific standards its ok to stretch it a bit. who knows what the future has, remember, lord kelvin looks like an idiot today because of all his preconceived assumptions. (x rays will be a hoax) for instance.

Zamjr86 wrote:
based on our current understanding, possibly. however science as we have now still has some big blind spots. we do not yet have a theory of everything. what is viable now has no bearing on what will be viable in the far future. also remember that this is a game. not everything in it has to conform to current scientific standards its ok to stretch it a bit. who knows what the future has, remember, lord kelvin looks like an idiot today because of all his preconceived assumptions. (x rays will be a hoax) for instance.

Oh yes most definitely, there will be some stuff that us physicists are missing otherwise we'd be out of a job! I just think that considering the vast majority of game techs are based on some form of current physical theory (there's very few I spotted that weren't, as Slowhands said earlier there are dark matter weapons) the devs should stay along this sci-fi yet believable path they are currently taking. Personally, I'd say ringworlds or Mass Effect citadel type structures are about as far as they could push it.

If you want to build things atom by atom, this is comparatively simple. You pick up an atom with a negatively charged needle, then set it down where you want it to be.



If you want to build atoms out of protons and neutrons from scratch, this is NOT simple. For the most simple case of hydrogen fusion you need to get two charged particles together, namely two positively charged protons. Those repel each other due to the same charge with a force that is proportional to 1/r². Let's say the strength of the electromagnetical force were 1, then the only thing enabling you to stick a proton to another proton is the strong force with relative strength to electromagnetism of about 100, but unlike electromagnetism not infinite range. The range of the strong force is very limited, about 0.000000000000001 meters (Don't get a heart attack, fellow scientists, sometimes writing out numbers is good for shock & awe!). You will need to get your proton inside that range.

Now, what does this really mean? We have to exert a lot of energy to bump the proton against an electromagnetical barrier until it is caught. This is the reason why stars' ignition temperatures need to be high. The reason why any stars are burning at all is, that quantum mechanics allows tunneling through that electromagnetical barrier, so you don't actually need the full energy. You just have to randomly try often enough.

If you now wanted to do that process controllably, without endless random trying, you'd need to put the full energy needed for traversing that barrier into your designated particle and shoot it unerringly unto the other proton.

I'm not talking about throwing a dart leasurely at a board 10 meters away after drinking too much beer, I'm talking about something akin to hitting a dartboard on the moon after being drunk as Znork in a champagne factory. With enough power to leave a damn deep crater.



For very very special unimaginably valuable materials this might be viable to do. But not for a whole planet.

Even today it is possible to e.g. make gold by shooting heavy ions at other heavy ions and sorting the resulting gold ions out (very sloppily said, I know), but the effort and cost of the process is incredibly higher than financing a mining operation in Klondike and for good reasons. -.-

Igncom1 wrote:
Then fair enough on the small scale stuff,



But still, building a planet?

Planet-scale gravitic manipulation is already used to counteract anomalies. Actually, this brings up a good 'shortcut' to planet-building. If you only build the shell of a planet, and use gravitic controls (preferably self-stabilizing ones) to make it basically hollow... it doesn't require dismantling one planet to build the next one. The requirement is more like dismantling the core of the next planet over. And that's something you're going to be doing casually by the end of the game. Core mining is an EARLY technology.

Platescale wrote:
Planet-scale gravitic manipulation is already used to counteract anomalies. Actually, this brings up a good 'shortcut' to planet-building. If you only build the shell of a planet, and use gravitic controls (preferably self-stabilizing ones) to make it basically hollow... it doesn't require dismantling one planet to build the next one. The requirement is more like dismantling the core of the next planet over. And that's something you're going to be doing casually by the end of the game. Core mining is an EARLY game technology.

Wouldent that just be a fancy space starion?



Also Core mining doesent hollow a planet, not even close or you would destroy the planets magnetic shield! you can just get more materials deeper down into the planet, not actually hollowing it out!

Igncom1 wrote:
Wouldent that just be a fancy space starion?



Also Core mining doesent hollow a planet, not even close or you would destroy the planets magnetic shield! you can just get more materials deeper down into the planet, not actually hollowing it out!

Check the fluff. Not only do many planets not have a magnetic shield on them (Molten Core, an anomaly, is valuable because it gives a balanced natural one), one of the more valuable system improvements in the game is the Artificial Magnetic Shield. Your people really might be hollowing out planets.



EDIT: Also, it'd be a fancy space station, but it'd be a BIG fancy space station. The size of a planet, with a population bigger than a planet of comparable size.

Platescale wrote:
Check the fluff. Not only do many planets not have a magnetic shield on them (Molten Core, an anomaly, is valuable because it gives a balanced natural one), one of the more valuable system improvements in the game is the Artificial Magnetic Shield. Your people really might be hollowing out planets.

Wierd... i suppose space magic err...i mean Dust right?

Late game you get the Non-Baryonic Shield, which is like the artificial magnetic shield except it blocks all uncontrolled forms of dark energy and dark matter interaction as well. Now that's space magic. I really don't understand why it's as powerful as it is...

Platescale wrote:
Check the fluff. Not only do many planets not have a magnetic shield on them (Molten Core, an anomaly, is valuable because it gives a balanced natural one), one of the more valuable system improvements in the game is the Artificial Magnetic Shield. Your people really might be hollowing out planets.



EDIT: Also, it'd be a fancy space station, but it'd be a BIG fancy space station. The size of a planet, with a population bigger than a planet of comparable size.

True, but now I imagine our astronomers getting the itch due to people hollowing out their planets and moving things to the surface, which is of course not a firsthand gravitational problem (if the distribution of matter is spherically even, which should still approximately be true for a hollow planet, the gravitational field is the same as if all the mass of the planet shell were a sphere in the center of the shell), unless it already had low gravity and you should then take care, not to jump. Never.

It is a secondhand gravitational problem, once you convert all that matter into dreadnaughts and erase it from that solar system. This would severely affect the gravitational landscape of that system and our astrophysicists can probably play billiard a lot better than me, but I just have to imagine the possible effects of removing mass from a planet with velocity v while not also removing velocity. It would at some point fly straight out of the system. Could we perhaps use this as a weapon or as an alternative spaceship hull?

Nosferatiel wrote:
If you now wanted to do that process controllably, without endless random trying, you'd need to put the full energy needed for traversing that barrier into your designated particle and shoot it unerringly unto the other proton.

I'm not talking about throwing a dart leasurely at a board 10 meters away after drinking too much beer, I'm talking about something akin to hitting a dartboard on the moon after being drunk as Znork in a champagne factory. With enough power to leave a damn deep crater.

To put a number on the chances of two Hydrogen particles fusing in a star, I had to calculate it in astrophysics in third year, and it was roughly 10^-9% (give or take a few orders of magnitude since I have a shocking memory). If anyone has the actual value, feel free to correct me; I just remember it being surprisingly and astronomically unlikely that two atoms fuse together. The reason they do is because of the quantum tunneling that Nos mentioned, and the sheer amount of collisions occuring in a star.

Nosferatiel wrote:
True, but now I imagine our astronomers getting the itch due to people hollowing out their planets and moving things to the surface, which is of course not a firsthand gravitational problem (if the distribution of matter is spherically even, which should still approximately be true for a hollow planet, the gravitational field is the same as if all the mass of the planet shell were a sphere in the center of the shell), unless it already had low gravity and you should then take care, not to jump. Never.

It is a secondhand gravitational problem, once you convert all that matter into dreadnaughts and erase it from that solar system. This would severely affect the gravitational landscape of that system and our astrophysicists can probably play billiard a lot better than me, but I just have to imagine the possible effects of removing mass from a planet with velocity v while not also removing velocity. It would at some point fly straight out of the system. Could we perhaps use this as a weapon or as an alternative spaceship hull?

Erm well it would depend on many other variables such as the make up of the planetary system, the mass of the star, how far away the planet is that is being played around with, but generally speaking the effects would not be good as it would upset what was otherwise a fairly stable state. I'd recommend taking a look at Universe Sandbox if anyone wants to see what would happen when adding or removing a planet from, for example, our solar system. You can't beat sending a black hole straight the solar system and watching planets fly off left, right and centre.

Given that excess gravitons can be bled off into adjacent universes 'simply and straightforwardly', perhaps your people compensate with the reverse by bleeding needed gravitons in from adjacent universes. Perhaps there's a vast multiversal flow from infinite realities pushing gravitons around and the real reason the Wonder victory works is that the five-dimensional sensor systems you built to become 'invulnerable' abruptly let you see the graviton flow and tap it for infinite energy, at which point all the other struggles become pointless.



I'm just making stuff up at that point, though. I turn Wonder off. It needs rebalanced. Way too easy.



Graviton bleeding for planetary engineering. Hmm. Artificial 'shell planets'... That'd merit being a custom, irremovable anomaly, with positive and negative traits alike.

I agree. considering the game starts in 3000 ad, pushing things beyond dyson spheres into the realm of galaxy brains is just dumb. now if it started in 50,000,000 ad...

Zamjr86 wrote:
I agree. considering the game starts in 3000 ad, pushing things beyond dyson spheres into the realm of galaxy brains is just dumb. now if it started in 50,000,000 ad...

I think ad in Endless Space refers to "after dust" or something like that, so it could be 50,000,000 A.D. (anno domini)

Maybe a racial ability for the Sowers?

Considering how many people you can fit on even the tiniest of planets, I'm not sure adding a space station as the equivalent to another "planet" in the system would make sense—even if it only held one population. Space stations could certainly be built as system improvements though (obviously they're in orbit around a particular planet, but we don't need any more planetary improvements beyond the exploitation method).

I think we're having the wrong discussion here. Endless Space is a game, not a scientific simulation. Instead of debating whether creating planets is possible and efficient, we should be asking two very different questions:

1. How extravagant should in-game options become?

2. Would such a system enhance gameplay and the overall amount of fun?



These questions are largely preference based, which means we are almost certainly going to need a poll for any sort of conclusion.



In my opinion, factions should be able to create planets. But I wouldn't stop there. I'd let them build entire star systems. Why? Because it changes up the flow of the game, and makes it less predictable. Obviously, there would need to be constraints: every system would need at least one warp route or wormhole connecting it to the galaxy at large, there would need to be a minimum distance between distant systems, the technology required would be researched at the end of the branch, and the technology to destroy planets/systems would also need to be implemented (to preserve balance).



A large reason why I want this is that different play-styles don't make a noticeable enough impact on the galaxy itself. Imagine how a galaxy full of Hissho and Cravers could look in the last few turns: most of the galaxy in ruins, huge clusters of stars and planets turned into debris, and the surviving factions desperately squabbling over the few viable star systems remaining. On the other hand, a galaxy of Sophons and Sowers might slowly blossom into a galaxy bursting with ripe planets.

I still disagree, yet considering how I have been the perpetrator between 2 rather large arguments in the past I don't want to argue again.



I don't feel it would add anything to the game whatsoever, and would completely destroy the point of 'territory's' in the late game. While I do feel that how games play out on the generated galaxy should be enhanced, I don't believe this is a good way to do it.



Placing such technology's at the end of a branch with proper balancing factors would also be pointless in my opinion as it is very, very rare that the game escalates to such a point. Only highly technological races ever get to the end, and once they do they can only be stopped by a power of equal technology.



This is my opinion and I will not be changing it for something like this, I apologize.



(If there were more points in a galaxy to interact with like gas clouds, dead systems, endless stuff and various cosmic oddity's. Then that would get my vote.)

Igncom1 wrote:
I still disagree, yet considering how I have been the perpetrator between 2 rather large arguments in the past I don't want to argue again.

There's no need to apologize. You're perfectly entitled to your opinion. Just like I'm entitled to disagree with you .



In most of my games (I play on the largest maps), I've researched all the useful Colonization branch techs (as well as many of the techs in other branches) before the end-game even really started (and I don't play as the Sophons). It actually got rather monotonous, since by that time only 4 races were left standing and each one could produce a virtually unlimited number of ships. So either I'm completely in the minority here, or these kinds of endgame stalemates happen more often than you think.



Most 4X games add extra layers of strategy the deeper into the game players go. For example, the Civilization series (my favorite 4X games) adds the concepts of largely ignoring defenses (through the use of guns), then extremely quick travel (through railroads), next aerial combat (planes function completely differently than normal units), and finally tactical obliteration (through the use of nuclear weapons). This progression keeps game matches from getting stale, as players constantly get new toys to play with. One of my biggest problems with Endless Space is that it doesn't change up its style. It plays similarly in the early game, mid-game, and end-game.

I would like to see a type of ES nuke, just not one that destroys a planet or above.

Like a huge statis cannon...stops the planets movement dead in an instant.



Since our planet travels through space at a good 500,000mph it will tear itself apart under its own momentum.