A mod I am thinking of doing...

[geoschmo]

Colonizing asteroids is a good idea. It's fairly easy to do. It does cause minor problems in that you can't use them to make planets then, cause they already are as far as the game is concerned. You sort of need to keep a seprate class of asteroids that are not colonizable so that if any planets are destroyed by natural or other means the game has something to change them into. Those could then be formed into planets, or even colonizable asteroids.

I have always thought that planets of the wrong aptmosphere type were too restrictive as far as the amount of cargo storage available on them. I can see lower population because of the domes, but why do weap platforms, or units which can function in a variety of environments need to be stored in the domes? I would suggest raising the cargo capacity of domed worlds.

Geoschmo

[AeoN2]

I don't think I will do anything game-changing when it comes to asteroids.

The possibility to add different abilities to stellar abilities are interesting though, but it will take a lot of testing to see what will work and what won't... I can imagine things like discovering an ancient sentient computer on a planet, generating 200 or so research points, etc...

Raising the cargo capacity is actually a very good idea, don't know why I didn't think about that when I looked through the planetsize.txt file...

[AeoN2]

Also when looking through the files I saw something called a "Stellar Balancer" ... I haven't encountered this in a game yet, is it deactivated or have I just not played enough SE4 yet

[AeoN2]

I have worked out some statistics out of the secttype.txt now that might be interesting to people (formatting isn't possible here though):

ROCK
----
(none/methane/oxygen/hydrogen/carbon)
tiny 3 6 6 6 6
smll 3 7 6 6 6
medm 3 6 6 6 6
lrge 3 4 4 4 4
huge 3 2 2 2 2

ICE
---
(none/methane/oxygen/hydrogen/carbon)
tiny 2 4 4 4 4
smll 2 3 4 4 4
medm 2 2 2 2 2
lrge 2 2 2 2 2
huge 2 2 2 2 2

GAS
---
(none/methane/oxygen/hydrogen/carbon)
tiny
smll
medm 2 2 2 2
lrge 4 4 4 4
huge 6 6 6 6

Now unless someone says otherwise I will assume the planets in the secttype.txt file has an equal chance of being chosen (since systemtypes.txt as far as I could see always chose random size and atmosphere except moons).

I then calculated how many facilities each race would get if all planets are equally represented (and no extra colonization tech):

ROCK:
-none: 475
-meth: 551
-oxyg: 543
-hydr: 543
-carb: 543

ICE:
-none: 292
-meth: 308
-oxyg: 316
-hydr: 316
-carb: 316

GAS:
-meth: 480
-oxyg: 480
-hydr: 480
-carb: 480

The most interesting fact is maybe that Rock/Methane is slightly superior to Rock/Oxygen (because there is one extra small Rock/Methane planet) ... looks like one small/rock/meth should have been ice instead...

Any comments to my finds?

--
AeoN2

EDIT: tried to improve formatting

[ June 17, 2002, 18:27: Message edited by: AeoN2 ]

[geoschmo]

As far as methane having an advantage, that depends on how the game actually chooses what particular planet goes where. I had always assumed that it decides first the size, composition and aptmosphere of planet, and then refers to the sectortype file to select from the available planets that fit those characteristics. In that case there would be statistically no difference between the Rock worlds of any of the four aptmoshpere types (Not including the none aptmosphere. That would have a slight advantage due to the moons)

If however as you seem to think the game goes to the sector type file and Groups all the "any" type planets together and randomly chooses from them, then yes I suppose Methane would have a slightly higher chance of occuring.

The way to tell I guess would be to do a mod with only two types of planets in the sector type file and a lot more of one than the other and see how many of each get picked.

Geoschmo

[ June 17, 2002, 18:41: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[AeoN2]

hmm... yes I didn't actually consider that... It does make more sense if it selects type at random and then finds a matching planet in secttype.txt... but if that is true then none atmosphere planets shouldn't be any rarer than others (unless there is special code again involving no atmosphere)...

Also you must consider that secttype and systemtypes are the only files that contain the different atmospheres, and I think that it's possible to add new atmosphere types here? If this is true then the new types wouldn't get selected at all if a special routine selects atmosphere...

--
AeoN2

[geoschmo]

I believe if you try and add a planet to the sector type file that is not a valid aptmosphere type you will get an error. Although I am not sure about that.

Do you believe that None aptmosphere planets occur less frequently in games (Not counting moons of course)? If that is true then it would certainly seem to prove your hypothesis. I had not noticed that myself

Geoschmo