erm, how come this ain't showing up in the GalcivII board but it shows up under my posts?? wierd boards...

For it to show up in the board, at least one comment has to be made on it. This had lead to the process known as "bumping" where the poster comments on the original post.

As to the stars, I think it's mostly eye candy (btw, there are stars in many colors, and while I'm not certain, I believe purple and green stars exist), but there's another purpose. As a general rule (I've run into one exception so far) stars that aren't yellow or orangish don't have inhabitable planets, unless some random even messes with the system (a new minor race showing up, and the like).

in another wavelength, maybe they'd look purple or green. As soon as I get the game, I want to get a mod for those stars and turn those green and purple stars into something more realistic, maybe blue or white.

edit: this board is also pretty slow in updating the number of replies

is there another really good GalCivII Unofficial forum?

although, I think I may have seen a class 27 or so planet that I colonized around a purple star in the Demo, I don't remember, but its a demo anyway....

In sandbox games, purples stars have planets of quality 26+ in orbit. all other stars with habitable planets are yellow.

in GalCiv1, purple stars typically had very precious planets as well, and they weren't visible on the minimap until you discovered them.

the rest of the colors for stars in a sandbox game never have habitable planets in orbit. it seems like they have the programming set up to make star color more important, but it's just not a particular dimension they've had time to sit down and think through. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be too hard to mod it yourself in the full version.

The different star colours are for a reason. If you have heard of the saying "oh be a nice girl kiss me" you'd know that stars a classed not only by there size but also their temperature. (OBANGKM) or atleast something close too that. Stars that are younger burn much hotter than during the middle phases of there life cycle, so stars that are white, green and blue ( I should think) would be less likely to have habitable planets while stars that are more in the main squence such as yellow and orange would seem to have more habitable planets. or atleast a higher chance. (our own sun is classed as "yellow") red stars are much older and are usally called "red gaints" due too the swelling that occurs in the latter part of the life cycle of a star, (less hydrogen is burt so helium becomes the fuel) since the star swells its probably distroyed most of the inner rocky planets, so again these stars would tend to have less habitable planets. (a fate that is possible for our own planet in the very distant future)

I know that thing about the star colors/types, its just that I find green and pirple stars unrealistic.

@ Saguinius: There are no purple or green stars.

@ moose (and whoever else may be interested): While roughly speaking that is all true moose, you should remember that for most of its lifetime, a star's color is dependent on its mass (as well as the amount of heavy metals in it, but we can ignore this for now). If we use the stellar classification that moose pointed out (though it is really O B A F G K M, Oh, be a fine girl, kiss me), then O, B, and some A stars are white or blueish white. Some A stars, F, G, and some K stars are whiteish yellow to orange, and some K stars and M stars are red.

This is all during the time that the stars are having hydrogen fusion occur it their cores; when they are on the "main-sequence." In this case, O stars are the most massive kinds of stars (~ 30 times the mass of the Sun), while M stars are the least massive (~ 0.3 times the mass of the Sun).

A red giant occurs when a main-sequence star runs out of hydrogen in its core, and begins to fuse helium instead. This releases much more energy and causes the surface of the star to expand outwards (hence the 'giant' part).

Anyways, all just a long way of saying that I don't know if they mean anything in the game, put green and purple stars *are* unrealistic. I believe someone made a mod to fix them to more natural colors; a search of the forum might turn something up.

and oh yeah, i like the purple stars. they look cool. i think they'd look much cooler if, instead of being purple at their darkest and up to white at their ligest in terms of the color scheme, they when from nearly black to bright purple or magenta. call it a 'dark star' or something. wish i still had photoshop or illustrator.

btw, did anybody else remember GC1 well enough to remember if purple stars were visible on the mini map? i only ever played the demo (didn't find it until two was almost done production).

Heh.
a green star, and i suppose a purple one too, are physically impossible. Our own star is actually mostly green, but appears yellowish white because a star is a blackbody, it emits and absorbs the entire spectrum of light.

I dunno guys, The Universe is a big place (the real universe) who's to say there's not atleast ONE Green or Purple star out there?....Unless your God....

Hell, who knows? Maybe there's a Magenta or Fusia colored star somewhere....