This may be too many planets...
 

Have you ever thought to your self any of the following:

I wish I could get more than 255 systems.

I want a quadrant so packed the game takes two minutes to generate the first turn.

I want an empire so vast it takes me a day and a half to do my turn file.

10,000 ships is easy, I want 10,000 colonies!


Well this may be the mod for you.

Ultra Quadrant Mod

I don't claim to have come up with this idea, but I don't think anyone has ever actually put it in a mod. I have a screen shot of what an ultra system looks like.


http://seiv.pbw.cc/ultrasystem.gif

Geoschmo

Re: This may be too many planets...
 

You, sir, are insane! Now go run a PBW game using 255 of these systems and bring the server to its knees! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/stupid.gif

You might want to scale ship movement down (for strategic anyways) a bit. Otherwise ships will cover dozens of systems in one turn. Just add some combat movement bonus to keep combat speeds stock-like.

EDIT:

Maybe a more reasonable setup would be 4 star systems per "system?" It would at least allow the systems to not have everything so bunched up.

Re: This may be too many planets...
 

A game with those systems would take years! Maybe we should make a PBW game with it http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif See if we ever finish it.

Re: This may be too many planets...
 

We'd need to migrate PBW to a rack server with one blade per game. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

The system movement thing was something I was thinking about. So far all I've done is setup the quardant and I wanted to let you all see the depths of my dementia. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif I'll probably put something like that in the 1.0 version. Would I have to totally rework the components for that? Or is it something simple?

Re: This may be too many planets...
 

Bah! Reasonable? I only stopped at 9 because I wanted you to be able to move between sub-systems without engaging everyone's colonies. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

IIRC the original idea had all the planets for each sub-system in the same sector with it's star. I think I like this better though because you can see each planet. ANd I think we tried that other way and couldn't get the star to show up on top, which looked a little wierd.

I will probably add a smattering of moons in a later version.

Re: This may be too many planets...
 

All you'd have to do is alter the ships file. To half the movement, simply place a 2 in the movement per point thingie. Of course, bonus points would mess all this up. You could just remove every other engine component to fix that http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: This may be too many planets...
 

Depends on how much slower you want system movement to be. For 1/2 speed:

Increase the engines per move setting for all vehicle sizes to 2. Edit all engines and divide the bonus movement ability values by 2. Do the same for Solar Sails. Next, add Bonus Combat Movement ability (the one used by Afterburners) to engines. The value of this should be what makes up the difference between what the combat movement speed with 6 of those engines was compared to what it is now.

For example, take ion engines. Now, they would only give a ship 3 movement points if you have 6 of them. This results in 2 combat movement speed. Before, the ship would have had 3 speed in combat. So, add 1 bonus combat movement ability to the ion engine components.

It is not going to be perfect, but it will be a fairly good approximation. An alternative method would be to introduce a QNP style movement scheme, but that brings the game farther from stock-like tech, so it might not be what you want to do.

Re: This may be too many planets...
 

I looks pretty cool, would simulate some sort of short-range FTL speed thing, where you could have a description stating that "a system is actually a cluster of smaller planetary systems pakced relatively close together, with warp points linking multiple clusters" or "each system is a Galaxy, with several planetary systems. FTL travel is possible to other systems (as explanation why traveling to a nearby planet takes as much movement as moving to a nearby system you could say you use interstellar spacetime folding drives you don't use in systems) but the intergalactic distances are too vast, so we need to use warp points to travel to other galaxies".

But what would you do with nebulae systems and black holes?

Re: This may be too many planets...
 

Nebulae and black holes would take up far more space than a few dozen star systems, so leaving them as an entire system seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Re: This may be too many planets...
 

Why mod the movement? Current movement would make for fast, long-range, deadly strikes.

(Downloaded immediatly. That doesn't happen very often) http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif