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That's actually a very clever idea. We're both pre-dated by games like Civ that break it into Ages, like the Stone Age and Bronze Age, which are themselves pre-dated by reality... so I think we're on firm territory, I suppose.

If the step between the two is a bit obfuscated, and requires a little bit of effort (like trying to move from tribal identities to a national identity takes a lot of effort and idea-generation) you can have a transitional stage where people have reached a large Star Empire and don't yet know how to administrate it, so you've got a troublesome period that is like "Late Solar Age, Early Sector Age" technology. Then you can have the cutoffs nicely, where people can advance to as far as they can go in a certain era, but can't fully realize the jump.

If you have it so moving to a new Step is a bit of work, then maybe people DO want to keep their loose Stellar Confederation arrangement, since it makes their species happy to have that degree of autonomy, despite the huge lack of efficiency. You may be able to advance to a new level of technology without ever increasing your infrastructural capacity from the Planetary Stage, so you end up as a technically advanced but insular species that lacks the ability to create and maintain an Empire.

Empire Infrastructure techs would probably be the ones that lead to things like bigger hulls, better colony stuff, and some of the other nice gizmos that is not necessary just for fun. It's like... your Empire's version of an Apollo Program. You are doing something laborious to enable you to expand your sphere, but you're not sure if you can do it, or what the result will be, or what techs the effort will unlock. The player might, but that's an interesting idea.

That sounds like it would be a fantastic game. Love the idea of it.


So MoO3 sounds very tedious, what are the earlier games like?

The first two are considered to be better than Moo 3 since they were actually more complete. Moo 3 has so many bugs and glitches and unfinished features, it can be a chore to play. The other two had their share of grinding but overall were more fun.

I like this sliding-scale idea.

The real goal of galactic 4X games, in my opinion, is to reproduce the grand gee-whiz sense of certain space opera (I suppose things like the Culture aren't space opera, but I'm lumping them in). Resources are enormous, individual planets relatively insignificant and quaint places, starfleets that can easily number in the hundreds, thousands, or even millions...

And playing Emperor of the Galaxy, or the rump portion thereof, really is more satisfying if the game is set up to allow you to issue broad directives rather than detailed ones. MoO I had an interesting (for the early '90s) take on this with its slider system, which rewarded you for roughly balancing your system, issuing general orders consistent with a planet's success, and also for saying things like "OK, this is my shipyard world, this is the garden world that spams population bound to other planets..."

MoO I had faults, but at least started to capture the proper sense of scale.

The real secret to this 'change the scale' game would be the detail design, IMO: the exact way that the expanding scale is portrayed to show that you're commanding the fate of a galactic empire with a few well-considered clicks.

Anyone remember 'Alpha Centuri' ?

As far as government systems and bonuses they had a pretty cool system (IMHO)
Instead of picking things like "Republic" or "Monarchy" or such, you had "Social Engineering" options you couple pick.
You start with "Basic" options which give simple bonuses. Say "+1 Production -1 Environment" or "+1 Economy, +1 Police state, -1 Happiness" sort of thing.
As you work your way up the tech tree, you get more and more nifty bonuses and you can mix and match them. So by the end of the game you can pick one that gives you "+3Production, -2 Environment" and balance it with a "+4 Environment" pick.

IN an Improved MoO game, I can see the 'bonuses' advancing with the overall scale.
At "Planet stage" you may get "+2 production to all planets" or "+2 Moral, -1Spies" or small things like that.
At "System" stage there could be ones like "+5 efficiency, +5Moral" or something.
As you go up, the bonuses get bigger and bigger. Also the thing that are effected change. You could have specific bonus that only apply to buildings that you don't get till late in the game. Such as a bonus like "+20 production to all Factory Planetoids" or something.

That for me, is one way I see of 'interfacing' with political and colony settings.

Another concept I have is "Slots"
In all of the MoO, and indeed in all civilization based games, there are often certain things you can build, or have so many of. MoO2 was very much like civilization. You had a "City" and no matter how big or how small your planet, every "City" could build the exact same buildings. So at the end of the game, the ONLY thing the made one colony different from another, was size and mineral richness.
Now in the MoO three, they changed things to "planet sectors" where the bigger the planet, the more things you could build. This made more sense and let you customize a planet. on a rocky mineral rich world, you could have 80% of all 'land spots' full of factories.
Unfortunately, as we know, That system was fuckered up by the horrible User Interface they had.
A better system was one I saw in "Galactic Civlization-II" where you had a similar "Bigger world = More open spots" but they had the spots spread across a sort of map with a random picture of a world behind it, instead of the mostly text spreadsheet you got in MoO3.

That system also let you customize worlds, and it also introduced resource bonuses. Instead of a WHOLE world being "mineral rich" or "mineral poor" (something I always thought was stupid) you could have bonuses to minerals or bonuses to farming in just a single slot.
Now another thing to consider is Planetary defense... The downside to the GalCiv system was building missile bases or Ground batteries used up the same slots as where you would build a factory or farm... On an important world you might wish to defend, space is so important that you wouldn't sacrifice it to something like that.
Instead of that, I see a separate "military and star base" set of slots you can use.
These slots are still bigger or smaller depending on planet size, but are in a whole different area. A small planet might have Three slots for planet side stuff, so just enough to build 1Missile base, 1Ground battery and 1Space Fighter station. However a BIg planet might have as much as 6 or maybe more.
Also along side the military slots or "Star Base" slots. In MoO2 starbases acted as both shipyard and defense platform. The smallest of starbases could still produce ANY size ship, but it didn't have much room for weapons and such.
In MoO3, shipyards and starbases where separated. You had to actually build a separate shipyard base facility for each new shipsize. Meanwhile Starbases became almost useless in terms of defending against ships because the fleets you could field were so MASSIVE.

Well imagine a hybrid of the two systems. Once again, imagine a starbase with "Slots" you can fill it with Shipyard parts, or Military Parts.
Your starting size could be two, so you could have one slot of military and one slot for shipyard. And as you got bigger starbases, you can fit more into them.
ANother thing, one of the reason why the bases were more effective in MoO2 than MoO3, was that you get the tech earlier.
Starbases were as powerful as a "Large" ship. Battlestations were as powerful as a "Titan" and a StarFortress was as powerful as a "doomstar"
Typical you start with starbase tech, and it takes quite a while before anyone is making 'large' starships. By the time they are, you can make Battlestions, and so on.

As for ship classes..
MoO1 had four.
MoO2 had five (plus Doomstar)
And in MoO3, well, they got a little carried away with things as shown by the following:

Lancer -- 50
Cutter -- 70
Corvette-- 100
Frigate-- 140
Destroyer-- 200
Light Cruiser-- 285
Cruiser-- 405
Battle Cruiser-- 575
Battleship-- 815
Dreadnought-- 1155
Superdreadnought-- 1635
Titan-- 2310
Behemoth-- 3265
Leviathan-- 4615

Personally, I am thinking SIX ship classes plus Doomstar might be a good fit.
In keeping with "Everything built around the Four Stages" rule. You could have Two ship classes per stage, and then Doomstar would be obtained when you get to the final "Galactic" stage.

If I want to get snobbish, in truly grand space opera, planetary fortresses are literally covered with weapon installations. So I'm actually content with the idea that there's a tradeoff between economic productivity and defensive strength on the grand scale- at the point where most of your individual economic decisions are being made regarding whole sectors, individual planets are the "new" functional equivalent of the patches of land on individual planets that you concerned yourself with in an earlier epoch.

Crossroads Inc. wrote:Another concept I have is "Slots"
In all of the MoO, and indeed in all civilization based games, there are often certain things you can build, or have so many of. MoO2 was very much like civilization. You had a "City" and no matter how big or how small your planet, every "City" could build the exact same buildings. So at the end of the game, the ONLY thing the made one colony different from another, was size and mineral richness.
Now in the MoO three, they changed things to "planet sectors" where the bigger the planet, the more things you could build. This made more sense and let you customize a planet. on a rocky mineral rich world, you could have 80% of all 'land spots' full of factories.
Unfortunately, as we know, That system was fuckered up by the horrible User Interface they had.
A better system was one I saw in "Galactic Civlization-II" where you had a similar "Bigger world = More open spots" but they had the spots spread across a sort of map with a random picture of a world behind it, instead of the mostly text spreadsheet you got in MoO3.

Having a mechanism like this for the player's mode of interaction with the concept of building things in their empire is good, (Ascendancy, which was the space 4x, has a similar system) but you need to have it work at multiple levels to avoid exactly the problem of overmicro at endgame that we originally started talking about.

So, in the "planet" phase you would be involved in building things on planets in exactly this way, you would have planets which would have a certain number of slots, with some that have specialisations, where you would build factories, research, farms, habitation, and social/governmental structures (more on this in a minute), and you would use that interface to optimise your small civilisation, but when your civilsation reached a certain spread and tech level you would bump up to the next interface, where you would still be building things in slots, but instead of having a planet full of slots you would have a whole star system full of slots, and the things you put in the slots would be "industrial colony", and "mining platform", etc, and you wouldn't even be looking at planets full of slots any more, you would be dedicating the whole resource of a planet to a task with a single click and it would give you the exact equivalent of populating the "slots" of that planet most effectively for that task.

Likewise when you had a certain reach in that phase you would step up again, and your slots would be in a sector, and your slots would be whole stars, black holes, nebulae, etc on which you build dyson spheres, ringworlds, hawking radiation harvesters, etc.

That would give you the real sense of space opera scale, "this system is best suited for living space, best chuck down a dyson sphere, whereas that one's better for mining, build a von neumann swarm to disassemble it"

In terms of fleets you would start off by designing ships in the "planet" phase, but when you reach the sector phase you would only maybe design the top few classes manually, and the smaller ships would just be a component of them because what you're actually designing isn't a ship but a whole fleet, and you wouldn't be directing combat because that would move to a more grand strategy level.

The aim is to give a wider sense of scale to the late game rather than just "infinite fiddling with planets", because even with a really well designed system that gets tedious when you have more than about 15 of them.



Now, back to what I was talking about with social structures, because this is how I think you should address the biggest problem of this type of multi-phase game, which is how the earlier stages really affect the later (see: Spore, how does being a microbe really affect the space stage?).

In the "planet" phase there should be various space, energy, and resource tensions which cause the player to have to make decisions on whether and what facilities of government they want to build (rather than picking government from a list, alpha centauri style, they should be things you have to use up planet slots on if you want them), which move you along a couple of axes which show, say, your social cohesion, social welfare, and militarism, so a low cohesion high welfare society would turn into a federation of planets (disparate and individual but happy and co-operative), whereas a high militarism low welfare society would turn into a ruthless empire, exploiting its proles at the expense of their wellbeing for the good of the few and the pursuit of empire. Once you go beyond the planet stage that sort of thing is locked in, and determines how you will interact with the rest of the galaxy at large. (the planet phase should bring contact with no more than two other alien races, and how you deal with them also affects and is affected by your social axes, whether you dominate, assimilate, or co-operate)

Yeah, having social change result from the things you do, rather than the things you want to have happen, is a fun thing. You can have the Endless Leader try and push things in a certain direction, but it should be very difficult to swing the political spectrum around like that.

I would also be interested in seeing some concept of what the player really IS. Either you go for pure Game or you dabble a bit more in simulation. Simulations either require changing leadership, or the player needs to be some kind of immortal creature/AI that runs the show. Or at least manages the show and has to deal with temporary spans of leadership of various controlling factions.

In the "planet" phase there should be various space, energy, and resource tensions which cause the player to have to make decisions on whether and what facilities of government they want to build (rather than picking government from a list, alpha centauri style, they should be things you have to use up planet slots on if you want them), which move you along a couple of axes which show, say, your social cohesion, social welfare, and militarism, so a low cohesion high welfare society would turn into a federation of planets (disparate and individual but happy and co-operative), whereas a high militarism low welfare society would turn into a ruthless empire, exploiting its proles at the expense of their wellbeing for the good of the few and the pursuit of empire. Once you go beyond the planet stage that sort of thing is locked in, and determines how you will interact with the rest of the galaxy at large. (the planet phase should bring contact with no more than two other alien races, and how you deal with them also affects and is affected by your social axes, whether you dominate, assimilate, or co-operate)

My only issue with that is I LIKE having options open.
I am not sure what to think about making some small choices early on, and finding myself a tyrant Dictatorship for the next 1000 years.
My view is that the type of government you have Grows with your Empire. The bigger you get, the more options you have. And that you could have different governments on the Sector, system and planet sizes.
I do like the idea of changes early making things happen. Perhaps you do not pick your first planetary government.. Perhaps the games creates one based on the choices you have made during the planet phase. You could be put on a certain path where you could still Acquire other types of government if you want, but its easier to go the route you start,

So, if at the end of the PLanet phase, you wind up with a military heavy dictator ship, then the "shape" of later government policies match up with that. You CAN 'research' say, an egalitarian paradise if you wanted, but it is just harder to do so.

Also as far as colonies go. I like the idea that a colony goes something like:
Stage One => Land mass based micro manage colony.
Stage Two => Single planet based colony (all factory, all farming, etc)
Stage Three => System based colony slots (all planets in system are X, or... All planets in this system get X bonus)
Stage Four => Sector based "colonies" and stellar constructions. Making Ring Worlds, orbital habitats, factory planetoids etc.

HOWEVER, for me, I'd like the "choice" of being able to go back if I wanted to.
If it is the Galactic phase, I may want to 'tinker' was some planets back on the stage one phase, if just to have a more "personal" feal after going super sized on everything else.

Covenant wrote:That's actually a very clever idea. We're both pre-dated by games like Civ that break it into Ages, like the Stone Age and Bronze Age, which are themselves pre-dated by reality... so I think we're on firm territory, I suppose.

If the step between the two is a bit obfuscated, and requires a little bit of effort (like trying to move from tribal identities to a national identity takes a lot of effort and idea-generation) you can have a transitional stage where people have reached a large Star Empire and don't yet know how to administrate it, so you've got a troublesome period that is like "Late Solar Age, Early Sector Age" technology. Then you can have the cutoffs nicely, where people can advance to as far as they can go in a certain era, but can't fully realize the jump.

If you have it so moving to a new Step is a bit of work, then maybe people DO want to keep their loose Stellar Confederation arrangement, since it makes their species happy to have that degree of autonomy, despite the huge lack of efficiency. You may be able to advance to a new level of technology without ever increasing your infrastructural capacity from the Planetary Stage, so you end up as a technically advanced but insular species that lacks the ability to create and maintain an Empire.

Empire Infrastructure techs would probably be the ones that lead to things like bigger hulls, better colony stuff, and some of the other nice gizmos that is not necessary just for fun. It's like... your Empire's version of an Apollo Program. You are doing something laborious to enable you to expand your sphere, but you're not sure if you can do it, or what the result will be, or what techs the effort will unlock. The player might, but that's an interesting idea.

An interesting game to look at in relation to this idea would be Crusader Kings 2. You have serious ability to devolve authority and have regions manage themselves so you only really have to pay attention to your more powerful vassals. However this streamlining makes your vassals more powerful. So there's an awkward stage where you can't bring your more powerful vassals to heel if you choose to without serious problems. The amount of territory you personally administrate is relatively constant, but as you gain larger titles, it abstracts away territory to keep similar numbers of vassals.

Crossroads Inc. wrote:
HOWEVER, for me, I'd like the "choice" of being able to go back if I wanted to.
If it is the Galactic phase, I may want to 'tinker' was some planets back on the stage one phase, if just to have a more "personal" feal after going super sized on everything else.

The trouble is that most of these colony management systems are trivially solvable for optimised output, and once you've solved "how do I get the most X from initial condition Y" once every single other colony you build is just repeating the same very simple rules and therefore not interesting.

The idea is that once you pass the planet stage, when you drop a colony of X type on a planet it gives you the equivalent of a 100% optimised version of that planet, so there is absolutely no benefit to going and fiddling with it. You've got new things to fiddle with and optimise now, but using essentially the same interface to solve a new set of conditions.

If you do allow optimisation by fiddling with individual planets beyond that phase of the game you bog the game down in endgame micromanagement. This is literally the single biggest problem with the whole 4x genre, the build interface is only interesting and relevant very early in the game, but automation of the build mechanics never uses an optimised build so you are basically required to continue fiddling with it and make the game tediously slow.


As for the social system, the intent is that the social path you follow in the "planet" phase is essentially the equivalent of picking your race in MoO2, or at least making your custom race. You end up with a set of conditions that are fixed for that game based on how you actually played not some boxes you ticked. There might be new conditions arising in the later phases that let you refine your society, but your social character should be tied in with what you made it in the early stages.


(There would need to be better handling of defensive war than has ever been in a 4x, so that you could distinguish between "met aggression directly in the early phase and defeated it" with "engaged in aggression as a conqueror", which would also mean that the AI should be less suicidally committed to war if it attacks and fails, in most 4X games the AI will keep attacking even if it fails a thousand times because it simply cannot recognise that it is failing. The AI should also use what it knows of your industrial capacity to decide on your military strength, because 4x games still just use your current military to decide whether to pick on you, not what you could do in two or three turns if you suddenly switched to military production)

Some interesting ideas here. Perhaps a split to some sort of "Space 4X brainstorming" thread so that this drift from the initial topic of "winning" MoO3 is out of the way?

Anyway, I was ruminating on the whole division of ages that has been bandied about here, and that got me to thinking about what a "planetary slot" would actually represent, when it hit me. Those slots more or less represent major countries, when you work out their scale. When you are operating on that scale then there should be a degree of autonomy once out of the settlement stage. So pushing this on, you get the idea that the construction slots in a current age are the organizational units of the previous one. So you get something like

Country->Planet->Star System->Star Sector->Galaxy/Galaxy Segment/whatever

So during the planetary stage you are say in control of one of the major nations on a planet and start settling the other planets in your system, putting down various colonies. There are competing nations sending out their own colonies and you are also vying for supremacy of the homeworld. You grown and research and collect resources and all of that fun stuff, moving towards the top of the planetary stage tech tree. Once at the top you start opening up major projects and find that the techs for the interstellar stage are hugely expensive, but that the projects allow you to switch administrative units. So you might have something like Planetary Unification that allows you to treat an entire planet as a single administrative body and gain massive boosts to your resource production, allowing you to start playing around in the next age. There could be a variety of different ways to achieve this sort of thing, like the basic Military-Cultural-Economic-Scientific win condition of other 4X games, and bonuses to the completion of your project if you have already achieved certain conditions.

You could also have certain preferred government and economic types based upon past behaviour, especially as you start moving through the ages. Like if you say can refine your government based upon past experience with similar ones. So say National Democracy->Planetary Democracy->Stellar Democracy sort of thing, but if you want to change over to say a dictatorship you will get a big hit to your efficiency because the last time your culture tried that sort of thing was when they had National Dictatorship and thus they have a bunch of organizational trial and error to do to catch the social model up with current conditions. This means that while you can completely reformat things if you think the pain will be worth it, it is much more efficient to stick to a general family of socio-economic models and work on refining them out with certain behaviours (like peaceful trade gives you a bonus to researching in the Free Market and Democracy families, while conquest gives you more in the Military Dictatorship families sort of thing).

And I have more but I just realized that my brain is in the midst of rebooting, so maybe that will be enough to encourage further discussion.

Ye gods Aca, Every time I see you posting I know it is going to be something AMAZNG!
Your lay out, of speaking about the "planet Phase" in terms of individual nations at first. Well you could ALMOST actually tie that into a Civilization game. I mean can you see it? A game like civilization, you play through 4000 years of history on a planet, and then, then when you have conquered the world and unified it, it goes to the NEXT Game!

I like you idea about changing over to another government, but taking a huge hit in production and efficiency. That dovetails with my idea about being set along a certain path, and still being able to research other paths, but having it being harder to do.

As far as the "Country Phase" Well, in several Space games there are start options along the lines of "Start normal or start advanced" where you start with more tech, a few have a "Start pre-warp" option, where you basically research the tech you would normally start with. Perhaps your country idea could be like? An option along the lines of "Start in Country mode" where you play a mini civilization game, struggling to conquer or unify your world before going into space.

That Said...

Just to keep up with the original 'Plot' of this thread. The War with the Silicoids has bogged down. I am currently in the "Elbow" of the two main parts of the Silicoid Empire and am fighting through a knot of systems. There is no single chock point and I am having to fight about four or five battles each turn just to hold ground. However they are fighting a loosing battle. the production scale of the Dalek Imperium at this point is such that soon I will have doubled my standing fleet and I will be able to just Leap Frog over them by sheer force of numbers.
Not much else to report right now, although I will give some highlights to a recent fleet engagement in which I was able to actually HAVE A fleet engagement!

It started with an assault on one of the most heavily fortified Silicoid Planets.

Aside from their fleet, there was a total of 12 Battlestations I was facing in orbit.

A group of "fast attack" strikers that are normally used for soaking up missiles leapt ahead and got trounced by their system fleets.


I counter with that age old wonderful Tactic, MISSILE SPAM!!!


It took three volleys from my remaining Armada to smash their defense, but in the end, Victory is Mine!

Country mode is basically Colony mode, in a simplistic sense.

Colonies are self-starting independent nations, and should be treated as such. That allows them to develop a national character, manage their own affairs, lead rebellions, and possibly even share space on a planet with people they don't like very well. This is way more interesting at a planetary level, and let's ask ourselves a serious question here: how often is a colony of actual meat-beings going to be the way you, as an intergalactic civilization, expand your empire?

My guess is not often. Colonies are valuable because colony structures allow for intra-empire political and social functions that these games are otherwise devoid of. I'm not saying I need every Star Empire to go all Game of Thrones on itself, but divisions and rivalries and so forth give you a lot of interesting things to do with diplomacy and social machinery that a lot of games scrap or ignore. Building it in as a core feature makes it justified, and it makes the idea of managing an Empire more real. Space Rome is more interesting than, well, Space Civ.

Because colonies are common early on, you'll expand and develop an Imperial character through your early colonies. These are your interesting core worlds, and they'll be population centers. Once you move past the planetary era you'll be able to tap resources without population centers, and the age of colonization effectively ends. The legacy it leaves is the social machinery of your Empire which, as we so often see, will dictate the kinds of policies your people will accept.

This saves us from having to deal with a giant population horde across a billion worlds, and lets an Imperial Senate act at a level that is interesting without being overwhelming.

It also allows us to solve the whole "planet size" question, which was always nonsense. Huge worlds are not better than small worlds, and even small worlds like the moon can be mined out to create astounding living areas. O'Neill colonies can do the same. If we stop treating planets like Lebensraum and more like large rocks that can, sometimes, have an atmosphere that allows for residential zoning... then we actually reduce our overhead, create fun game aspects, and make the game feel more Sci-Fi.

Covenant wrote:Country mode is basically Colony mode, in a simplistic sense.

Colonies are self-starting independent nations, and should be treated as such. That allows them to develop a national character, manage their own affairs, lead rebellions, and possibly even share space on a planet with people they don't like very well. This is way more interesting at a planetary level, and let's ask ourselves a serious question here: how often is a colony of actual meat-beings going to be the way you, as an intergalactic civilization, expand your empire?

My guess is not often. Colonies are valuable because colony structures allow for intra-empire political and social functions that these games are otherwise devoid of. I'm not saying I need every Star Empire to go all Game of Thrones on itself, but divisions and rivalries and so forth give you a lot of interesting things to do with diplomacy and social machinery that a lot of games scrap or ignore. Building it in as a core feature makes it justified, and it makes the idea of managing an Empire more real. Space Rome is more interesting than, well, Space Civ.

Because colonies are common early on, you'll expand and develop an Imperial character through your early colonies. These are your interesting core worlds, and they'll be population centers. Once you move past the planetary era you'll be able to tap resources without population centers, and the age of colonization effectively ends. The legacy it leaves is the social machinery of your Empire which, as we so often see, will dictate the kinds of policies your people will accept.

This saves us from having to deal with a giant population horde across a billion worlds, and lets an Imperial Senate act at a level that is interesting without being overwhelming.

It also allows us to solve the whole "planet size" question, which was always nonsense. Huge worlds are not better than small worlds, and even small worlds like the moon can be mined out to create astounding living areas. O'Neill colonies can do the same. If we stop treating planets like Lebensraum and more like large rocks that can, sometimes, have an atmosphere that allows for residential zoning... then we actually reduce our overhead, create fun game aspects, and make the game feel more Sci-Fi.

Yeah, I started thinking of it as "colony mode", but then I realized that for early game you could very well have your homeworld yet to unify and be working with settlement of planets within your own star system and perhaps the few stars nearby. Obviously that could be a start game option so that you can start unified if you want. I sort of worked out that there could be a scale transition of sort of Cyberpunk->Star Trek->Star Wars->Culture/Xelee/etc. Transitions between tech levels would also probably have you start looking at worlds differently. When you are dealing with colonies, you would want worlds that are most suitable for your type of life, with other ones being mining centres or the like. As you go up in technology though you might start seeing airless rocks as great places for population centres because you are already living in arcologies anyway and planets with actual biomes are best used as places for biological research and xenonature safaris. Eventually you are looking at star systems for the ease of energy collection and access to raw materials for the constructions of your ringworlds and Dyson spheres.

Before I start my next post, I wanted to offer the following link:
GO HERE
it goes to a fella who has done QUITE a bit of thinking about remaking 'Master of Orion' and trying to rethink the 4X Game design as well. Some of his ideas are good, some not, but his page is really worth a look. (I ESPECIALLY Recommend his take on ship design and how to use them in a 4x Game)

That said. On the topic of colonies and transiting between them...
Back in MoO2, there was something like 30 individual colony buildings you could construct by end game. Mostly they broke down into Production, Environmental (pollution reduction), Happiness and Defense. In that game, your early colonies grew slowly, likewise you researched buildings slowly. Typically you would build things bit by bit, and your early colonies slowly become big ones. But late in the game, building colonies became tedious because, especially if you had researched everything, anytime you build a new colony BAM! Suddenly you have 30 buildings you need to build, and even if you buy all of them, a Colony can build only one thing per turn. So each new colony immediately takes up 30 turns of basically going "buy building, buy building buy building" etc.

With the new system being discussed, the only place you would do that is your first colonies, perhaps those that form your first "Sector" that go on to become your "Core Words" Late games these are the ones that become your "Coruscont" or your Earth. later planet colonies would consist of just plopping down a single colony package with perhaps no more than four or five "Slots" that you use to augment the over all colony (IE, all industry colony, or all agriculture colony etc) And of course as tech maxes out "Anything" can become a colony.. You can mine an asteroid belt, or build a huge station to 'mine' rare gas from a Gas Giant. Or even build massive energy collection colonies around a star that doesn't have any sort of object around it at all.

This leads into the "Huge worlds don't have to be your best" way of thinking. because in the late game, a concentrated mining colony on a bunch of rocks, can outstrip a heavily populated planet.

Personally as far as the discussion on Colonies go, I think that really this is the best system so far.
Sooo... Allow me to enter a new topic of conversation...
DIPLOMACY!

Typical 4x Games as well as Civilization games usually have options like "make war/ peace,, Form trade/science treaty,, form non aggression pact/Alliance,, and give tech/money or exchange tech"
basically they are pretty basic and clunky, and the AI usually ends up doing things that baffle you. Leaving the AI aside for a moment, the choices that you can make I think should be a lot more engaging, that and rethinking the whole "orion Senate" should be something interesting. You should be able to offer up bills as well as just voting on random stuff. You should be able to strong arm others, or make factions of several races.. Not just an Alliance one on one.

Well, I was going to post quite a bit about the war with the Silicoid, and then the eventual assault on the Galactic core.
But well, at this point I'd figure I'd just skip ahead to the end...


Over 900 turns into the game, the Galaxy is "pacified".
There is only one planet of each race left.
Psilon, Silicoid, Etherian.
On turn 927 I sent a small fleet to bombard the last of them out of existence. And at long LONG Last the game is OVER!
And how does it end? What is my reward for almost 1000 turns of gameplay? Well, watch for yourself...



YUP Thats it! 30 seconds of bad animation of ships you never see in the game, followed by what amounts to "YOU WIN"

You know, in our discussions of how to make a GODO Galactic Civ game, better cinematics are going to be one of the main things to improve upon