Welcome Star Legacy Development Group!

[MarcoPolo]

This sounds like an intriguing idea to planet and resource management.

What I want to know is whether a players empire will have autonomous and self sufficient planet resources, ie will they be almost like city states in CIV? What I mean is if a planet experiences starvation if growing faster than the infrustructure... then in Civilization there is little a player can do to aid one city over another, they basically are at the mercy of what the city micromanagement screen permits and will not help if the city infrastructure is maxed out. This kind of defeats the purpose of having an empire if you cannot stretch one city to its limits with the full support of the outlying colonies. Kind of like Rome, where all the riches can be hoarded to the capital from the provinces (which is what historically happened in Rome) to truly prosper and bring with it more wealth.

I always felt that it would be nice to allow the player the ability to push production in favour of having a larger capital or core planets with the support of outlying colonies being specialised to specific tasks. Like science (ie science moon colony) or manufacturing/production (asteroid refineries) ..so that a player can diversify and actually not just capture planets in order to just found more and more pointless colonies. Its wonderful to have alot of Earths to manage, but also making Earths not so abundant and having the choice of also settling rocks that are more geared for production than population would be interesting too.

It would open up other possibilities, and maybe even change the dynamics to waging war on an opponent (if say he has many many moons and asteroids that taking over 1 or 2 of his earth planets, will still not impact him since his production power lies in his control of the stars with huge asteroid and moon resources) Perhaps making moons and asteroids easier to colonies and less inefficient and specialised would throw a spanner in the works, from having to see countless 4X games in the past fall quickly into drudgery of many earth planets micromanagement.

Just my 2c

[Ed Kolis]

We are planning on having automatically generated "civilian freighters" used to transport population and resources about without direct supervision by the player. If this turns out to be too troublesome for pathing or combat, or too CPU-intensive, we can always fall back on a modified version of the "spaceport" system from Space Empires: if a colony has a spaceport, it can access the "global pool" of resources, otherwise it's limited to what it can produce locally! I doubt we'd go with a system where every colony is expected to be completely self-sufficient all the time!

[dumbluck]

Hmm. If you are planning on having the computer handle migration for you ala SE5, might I suggest Target Population Densities. It would just be slider bars for each valid race that you have access too. Don't want any aliens on the homeworld? Move the slider bar for your race up to 100%.

That brings up another question. How does SL handle non-breathable atmospheres? I'm thinking of a system where non-breathers suffer infrastructure limits. So you have 500M non breathers and 100M breathers on a planet? The 500M non-breathers would suffer an infrastructure limit (based on planet size), while the 100M breathers would work "outside the dome" and have no such limit.

So, if the non-breather infrastructure limit for the above planet, is, say 250M, then half your non-breather workforce would be without infrastructure. So you'd have 350M + (250M*10%=25M) = 375M production (assuming there was enough infrastructure in place for the the 250M non-breathers + 100M breathers).

Another thing to consider would be how having 500M non-breathers crammed into a 250M rated "dome" would affect happiness levels.