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 Thinking about planets 
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Unread post Thinking about planets
I'm beginning my own edit with a careful look at planet specs. To gain a better understanding of the default settings, I took the spreadsheet I've been using to work up my new planet specs and made a similar one for the default Gold planets. As you can see, the total production and per-colonist production varies wildly. A couple planets stand out, and a few others are decent, but most are essentially worthless.

I want players to have reason to colonize most of the planet types, rather than only two or three of them. For example, one planet will have the best production value per colonist, while another will have the best total production value. One will have the fastest citadel construction, while another will support the most fighters and shields.

Standard Planets

My question for everyone is, what should the ranges be? For example, it adds no value for one planet to support twice as many shields, if nobody ever maxes out the shields on the other types. Similiarly, I'm thinking it's not much of an advantage for class O planets to support 100,000 colonists, because (in turn-limited games, at least) that population level is probably never approached.

Then again, I could be wrong. What do you think? How many colonists do you usually keep on your PT/SDT planets? What about fighters and shields? Have you ever approached the ore limit of a class H?

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Wed Sep 21, 2011 11:33 pm
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Unread post Re: Thinking about planets
Good luck with this. I can't come up with any good strategy for planet development. All I could do was try and give each planet it's own special niche.

Planets develop things. 4 things to be exact. Fuel, Ore, Equip and Figs. There's only so many different ways to carve them up. A good share of the planets in the game now I believe are just fluff planets. The game only really uses 3 or 4 of them. the rest are best used to pop for experience, lol.

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Thu Sep 22, 2011 12:54 am
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Unread post Re: Thinking about planets
That's kinda what I thought, too. I thought I'd start with planets because they're simpler than ships. Turns out they're not! There are so many different aspects to planets.

One way of comparing them would be by total turns to reach the minimum requirements for citadel advancement. The colonists are obvious; you could assume twarp colonizing in an ISS and figure out how many turns the colonists represent. But the materials are less obvious. If they're not on a mixed corp, early blue cash will be from PPT. So you could estimate how many turns it takes to get the money to buy-dump the required products. I haven't compared the stock planets this way, but it might be interesting.

Although I'm trying to make all the planets useful, some of them would probably not be the best choice for a first citadel. The one with the most shields and fighters takes longer to build, and you won't be able to fill it up in the beginning anyway. And the one with the best citadel interest rate has barely any defenses of its own. Since these are going to be late-game planets, I might make their construction cost a lot more.

I have a bunch of other ideas to keep things interesting. Like, the planet with the best per-colonist production value is going to have a really harsh environment, so the colonists will tend to die off. :mrgreen:

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Thu Sep 22, 2011 1:22 am
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Unread post Re: Thinking about planets
Too bad we can't involve the Ferrengi in this. Random invasions where they hold the planet up for product or credits, lol

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Thu Sep 22, 2011 11:37 am
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Unread post Re: Thinking about planets
The only method I can come up with to make all the planet types relevant is to start a game with the planet limit nearly reached by scattering random planets all around the map, and then somehow make it impossible to get GTorps. If people want to colonize planets, they have to do it where they are, and some might find it useful to build citadels on useless planets simply because others might not expect to find someone developing it.


Tue May 28, 2013 9:48 pm
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