Fractal Softworks Forum

Starsector => Suggestions => Topic started by: JaronK on March 13, 2020, 05:30:25 PM

Title: Colony Improvement Thoughts
Post by: JaronK on March 13, 2020, 05:30:25 PM
Going through my second playthrough now.  The colony phase is in many ways my favorite, as I get to have fun exploring and looking for the best planets, an develop a new, better nation.  Here's some things that would be fun.

1)  For the Cryoship, I've had it appear in horrifically bad locations... edge of the map with nothing better than a Class 2 planet.  That sort of sucks.  At the same time, I like the idea that moving it ain't easy.  With that said, imagine if you could add it to your fleet as a ship, but one that can't be deployed, and has insanely high fuel and maintenance costs (enough that you'd likely need a Prometheus dedicated to it for movement), as well as a base burn rate of 0 (meaning you need Ox tugs just to get it going).  However, if you "store" it at a given planet, then all planets in that system can build revival facilities and use them.  Removing it from storage makes those revival facilities useless.  You can also spend a bunch of supplies to put it in stable orbit somewhere, in case you need to take multiple attempts to get it close enough to use.  This makes it an interesting undertaking trying to get it to worlds where you want it.  It also means you can leave it somewhere until that area is population 10, then move it again, as yet another undertaking.

2)  Solar shield and mirrors already exist in game, and could be fun to play with.  I'm imagining being able to steal them (which would instantly result in a faction drop to -100) and place them in another system, using a huge amount of cargo space to do it (so you'd need an Atlas).  Perhaps you could also build them, at huge cost (in the millions), but doing so would require an orbital works and a perfect nanoforge, plus a lot of time, explaining why other nations don't do this.  Perhaps you need to do some mission to find domain information on how to do this.  Stealing a shade or mirror shouldn't be as easy as hacking an array though, it should take time and the system fleets should be able to engage you when you try.

But what would they do?  For each shade you put up, there's a chance to reduce the temperature by one step (extreme heat to hot, hot to no modifier, no modifier to mild) and a chance for arid worlds to become terran.  For each each mirror, the temperature goes up by one step, and there's a chance for tundra worlds to become terran.  It's not a guarantee though, so it might take quite a number for it to grant the desired result.  You also might turn an irradiated world barren with shades, though that seems to not have much point.

3)  Some ability to export water from a water planet to a desert planet and make it arid.  I'm imagining a this might require building industries on both worlds, one for getting the water offworld, one for bringing it in... but eventually the desert world would convert to arid, or even jungle.

Anyway, it's a basic idea, allowing you to spend a lot of money and effort to make better worlds and actually finish the terraforming that the domain started.
Title: Re: Colony Improvement Thoughts
Post by: intrinsic_parity on March 13, 2020, 10:07:47 PM
Check out boggled's terraforming mod, it does pretty similar stuff to the second and third suggestions.

As to the first suggestion, I vaguely remember alex (the dev) saying he was looking at allowing adjacent/nearby system to the cyrosleeper get the benefits as well. Moving it freely would be a bit too good I think, but the fact that it often spawns in bad locations is definitely something that is being considered/thought about.
Title: Re: Colony Improvement Thoughts
Post by: Amoebka on March 29, 2020, 12:39:33 AM
Mildly sceptical about cryosleepers covering constellations instead of individual systems. The way mapgen works, all systems within the same constellation seem to be about the same. If a cryosleeper is in a system of a hot star and volcanic worlds, the adjacent systems will also be hot stars with volcanic worlds 90% of the time. Plus the shown penalties were extreme - the effectiveness drops down to half at merely 5 light years, which is basically as close as it realistically gets.
Title: Re: Colony Improvement Thoughts
Post by: Prolbo on March 30, 2020, 04:07:00 AM
Alex (developer) already said somrthing about Cryosleeper. Either you can move it once, or it will hang in a much more attractive system. The rest is already implemented in Boggled Terraforming (https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=17060.0) mod. Ofc it would be nice if it become vanilla function.