[dogscoff]

I had an Idea about the colony dome thing Last night, What if you could just build more "domes" on a planet that is unbreathable? just put it in the construction que or have another colony modual land on the planet. Or perhaps a new type of modual, There are three types already, rock gas and ice, how about a 4th, "Domed", or make that a smaller thing you have to use in combination with the three colony components.

I've suggested somethiong along these lines before. I'd like to see planets with zero default population capacity, and all planets of each size given the same number of facility slots regardless of atmosphere. It's up to the player to decide how much population the planet can hold by building "habitat" facilities. (Colonisers would have one of these habitat facilities built in.)

This way you could have lots of mineral miners on a planet but hardly any population to run them, or lots of population and only a few miners - or anywhere in between. With careful balancing of the population-based production bonuses some really interesting decisions would be necessary.

The clever bit is that "domed" habit facilites would give less population space per facility slot than undomed ones. This way, domed planets have less potential for population growth, but the player can choose to counter this by building more domed habitats (at the cost of other facilities).

The other advantage is that you could have both types of facilities on the same planet at once- then you could have a planet that holds up to 500 million oxy breathers AND up to 60 million domed breathers at the same time - this would solve the problem caused by a minority of non breathers (ie one million) doming a planet that already has 150 million native-breathers on it.

Also, this system could introduce realistic population damage effects during orbital bombardments/ ground combat/ random events: Destruction of a dome or habitat facility would cause the death of millions in a single strike (or it might cause an overcrowding crisis in the other domes- see my suggestion earlier in this thread about allowing overpopulation/ refugee crises). This bit might be a little more complicated to implement than I describe here, but the foundation would be in place for a really effective damage system.

More efficient/ durable habitats could be researched, and if the whole thing was handled as abilities, it could be modded too. Imagine what Proportions mod cultural centres and cities would look like under this this system.

A similar system to the above could be devised for ice/gas/ rock, so that in order to put humans on a captured gas giant, you have to research and build special platforms of some kind there first.

Finally, I always assumed that on ice planets the population was below the ice (ie underwater) rather than above it. In the Star Wars example already mentioned, I would say Hoth was just a very cold rock planet. Some of Jupiter's moons are ice planets in this sense, and some speculate that there might be life under there. (Europa? Io? Can't remember off hand.)

SE5 needs a better icon, why is SE4 icon an SE3-like star?

I like the icon, but get David Gervais on to it anyway! Maybe the installer could give the player a choice of a new icon or the old one.

[ February 24, 2003, 16:20: Message edited by: dogscoff ]