The Exact Meaning of the Class of a Planet

The quality of the planet is somewhat mutable, it simply refers to the current number of usable tiles. Terraforming will improve the quality of the planet. It's quality will also change if a civ. with a PQ boosting ability score gains control of it. Many invasion techs will reduce a planets PQ permanently. Finally, a planet can be reduced to a PQ of zero if you choose to destroy its colony.

As for the population relation, I'm not really sure if there's a maximum population outside of what you'd get if you built a farm on every buildable tile... but if there is one I doubt you'll ever hit it in Dark Avatar (I've never hit it myself). I'm 95% sure there is, but it's not something I have first-hand experience with. Anybody know for certain if there's a PQ related population cap outside of the food limit?

Hi!

It's not pop cap, but pop growth cap. Check wiki: Population. And OFC the ultimate limit 100 B pop, regardless of amount of farms.

BR, Iztok

Your people get pissed-off if there's more than 20B on a planet anyway, without some SERIOUS money sunk into morale, so... yeah.

Iztok Bitenc, seems I learned something today about low PQ worlds and the thing I thought was a population cap. From now on I'll just send people over to those friggin PQ1-5 worlds to get them up to 6billion.

Things that can raise the PQ of a world: various terraforming (as you mentioned), Drath's Biosphere Modulator, the PQ race bonus, initial colonization ethics choice event, events that double planet PQ or add some PQ to an area of planets...and there is the letting of the Dread Lords take your planet and they will eventually make an uber planet for you.

Things that can lower PQ: various invasion styles, Korath's Aul Incinerator, initial colonization ethics choice event....and I can't think of any others.

One thing is that the class of a planet is often wrong. At least it is in DL v1.4x perhaps this has been fixed in more recent versions.

The planet class usually seems to be correct for planets that you originally colonize but for planets that you conquer it seems to be all over the board. I've had PQ9's with only 7 tiles and as many as 14 buildable tiles. There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to it.

What is consistent is that whatever the planet listed PQ is that is how it behaves regardless of actually how many buildable tiless are on the planet. If the planet says PQ11 then you get the 10% high PQ planet approval bonus even if it really has only 8 buildable tiles. If the planet says it's PQ9 then you don't get the 10% approval bonus even if it has 14 buildable tiles. Same with the population growth limit.

This makes it difficult to manage planets dependent on class because it's really meaningless. In my gigantic games dependent on how many morale resources I have I would like to control most planets at a pop of 13B but with enough buildable tiles you can manage a pop of 20B. If planet class were a dependable guage of how many tiles are on the planet then you could use class to determine which planets you want at 13B and which you want at 20B. But planet class isn't a reliable guage and so you have to examine each planet independently.

In some cases I've taken to renaming planets with a PQXX prefix so that I can sort by name and thereby sort by how many actual tiles are on a planet but this is a pain in the butarski.

I believe class inconsistencies have been addressed in DA and also in the 1.5 version of DL. At least, I haven't noticed any.

Planets have population caps. See this article.

Any planet will stop growing poplulation when its approval drops below 41% so that may also be considered a cap of sorts. If the food is there to support it, you can add population with transports or colonizers and it will stick until the planet's approval drops below an amount that causes population to die off, I think that would be 21%, but I don't recall off-hand. In any case, population limits are often more about approval than anything else. Once a planet approaches 30B in DA, you can't build enough entertainment buildings to keep population growing, even with all the approval bonuses you can get in the game. That's because of the exponetial relationship between population and approval. In DA, there's also a cap on the overall approval bonus rating. In other words, you can get to a point where special projects and galactic resourcs don't improve morale anymore. You can achieve higher pops in DL because it doesn't have that cap.

Thanks to all for an informative discussion. However, my basic question was never answered, about whether the number of buildable tiles is immutable.

Let's say Planet Arcturus II shows Class 14 the first time you come to it. You colonize it and find 12 green tiles to build on, plus one yellow tile that needs hatitation improvement, and one orange tile that needs terraforming, making a total of 14 potentially buildable tiles. The other 58 tiles have no colored borders, they are unusable. The question is, will that planet retain the exact same total 14 buildable tiles and 58 unusable tiles throughout the game regardless of any techs or wishful thinking or whatever you can do to try to change it?

Thanks for your replies.

AFAIK only the green tiles are counted. So in your example the planet would be class 12, and increase to class 14 after you terraformed those 2 yellow and orange tiles.

In DA, the Altarians' second planet Wisp starts out at Class 3, and become Class 18 when fully terraformed. At least it did for me, I'm not sure if there's a random element to the number of extra tiles that become available with terraforming techs.

Apart from terraforming, there's nothing you can do on your end to increase the class of a planet once colonized. Class being the number of green tiles.

There are some mega-events that will increase planet quality (class). I've experienced a few of them and they're usually something to the effect of a precursor artifact find that has changed the class of all planets in a certain radius from zero to some number. I haven't experienced all the mega-events related to class upgrades so there may be other variations.

During game setup, you can put bonus points into planet quality that can increase a planet's class upon colonization, but I don't put points there. It's too expensive and and the points can be put to better use elsewhere.

Prior to perfecting Xeno Ethics, you may be presented with a colonization question that can increase the class of a planet. Usually, it's an evil choice.

Note that the non-green tiles don't appear until you have researched the right terraforming techs. If you see a planet that only has one yellow tile, it will almost always have an orange tile and a red tile, but they won't appear until you are at least capable of terraforming the yellow tile. Most planets have one tile of each, meaning you can increase the class by 3 in most cases.

You can also skip terraforming too. Even if you can't see orange, if you grab the 2nd level terraforming tech, you'll see yellow, red, and be improving orange tiles now.

There's also an event in which a Precursor artifact doubles the quality of a single planet.

If it says PQ14, and you have no terraforming techs, then there should be 13 buildable tiles upon colonization as the initial colony eats up 1 tile.

If you have terraforming techs, then the number you see prior to colonization is incorrect, same with invading a race that doesn't have as high of a terraforming tech as you.

As I said earlier though, in TA, the Drath get a building that will, on avg, add 3 tiles to the planet upon constructing it. It's a 1 per planet improvement too.

Actually I would never put points here either in a gigantic galaxy game. However I've lately started picking the +10% PQ ability for 3 points in my Metaverse League games. These games are limited to medium galaxies and below and I find that in the smaller galaxies there seems to be a greater premium of getting a good colony rush.

In gigantic galaxies getting 20 planets or so and stopping the colony rush early so that you have time to develop your planets before the AI finishes their colony rush is a viable option. Many times I have no problem taking over an AI that has 50~60 mostly undeveloped planets when I have 15~20 mostly developed planets in a gigantic galaxy, however this isn't really an option in a tiny or small galaxy where the only way to get a good advantage over the AI is to have more (and higher PQ) planets than they do. (Actually it's not the only way but it is the most straightforward way out of a more limited set of options than you would have in a larger galaxy).

This is particularly true at the higher difficulties because the AI bonuses seem to be magnified by the scarcity of resources. That 10% means one extra tile on PQ10 and above. The big difference is for PQ10's. Getting every PQ10 to be PQ11 gives you that extra 10% bonus directly to approval that makes a big difference starting out.

the answers that followed your question above also followed your original post, so i'm not sure if you'll be satisfied yet (assuming you caught the info about terraforming).

"is there a way to use the other (non-green) tiles?" in the base game, terraforming and the other methods described so far are the means to do so.

if were you interested in going beyond that via modding, it is possible. it'll still require terraforming or selection of the PQ bonus at the beginning of the game (in DA--more options exist in TA). if this is what interests you, i'll look up the file name and relevant info when i get home later.

PS: oh yeah, you can also play in cheat mode, highlight a planet and press ctrl+P to boost its quality.

I am more than satisfied, I much appreciate the time and thought that has gone into all the answers to my questions and discussion of the broad topic.

My question as stated devolved into: If a planet has 14 usable tiles counting green, yellow, orange and red, i.g. all colored tiles, and 58 unusable tiles, is there any way to change those numbers? The answer I got was "no."

the answer is "no, not without modding or cheating."

one of the things i did in my "tinkering mod" that i liked was to increase the effect of terraforming. in other words, it meant that planets came with more yellow, orange and red tiles. it was equally fair to the AIs as to me. FYI, that can be changed by increasing the value in the "EnhancementPotential" tag in PlanetDescriptions.xml for each type of planet.

With the exception of an oddball mega event going off (you have no control on these though...so I digress) or have the tech for the Drath's Biosphere Modulator and are able to make new tiles that way, but that is only in TA.

Yea, I always forget to mention that I mostly play gig/abun so my prespective is always skewed in that direction. I play a small game every once in a while and strategy can be quite a bit different in those. Also, I haven't played TA yet and I'm sure that game is going to be quite a bit different as well. I'm actually a bit reserved about the learning curve involved.

Tell me about it, I haven't even played DA yet.

Still waiting for a standalone install. One's been promised for "revision 2" although when and even what that is, I'm not sure.

The learning curve isn't bad, it's more than offset by TA's sheer, unadultered awesomeness.

I understand your feelings about SDC, I share them as well. But, if it's a matter of getting updates and expansions, I'll cave. SDC isn't all that bad, it's rather convenient, believe it or not.


Yea, from reading the articles in the news and journal sections it looks amazing. Calling it an expansion is an understatement. They could almost call it a whole new game. Because it's so different, it's going to take a while to master it, which is a good thing really. I have my key and I keep tempting myself to download the beta, but I'd rather wait for the finished product. I don't want to get used to something that hasn't been nailed down yet. From what I've read, TA is going to be "finished" when it's officially released and that's good to hear. I've been dismayed with major changes in minor updates in the past. From what has been stated in the journals, TA is going to avoid that sort of thing.

I've had bad experiences with Steam and Direct2Drive so I wasn't very keen on SDC. However I've found it to have a PITA factor near zero

i'm beta testing (albeit not very dilligently) because i want the chance to have input on the tweaks they'll be making. but beyond that, i really doubt you'll get used to TA before its final release.

but in response to your real point, honestly, i don't think i'd take me months to 'get used' to TA. each race is so different that i think it'll seriously be months before i even have a single particular race down. it's of course a matter of your personal tastes. my bigger incentive to not play TA too extensively yet is that the AI needs a lot of work. i'm not sure what's happened, but i'm seeing some odd AI behavior that hasn't been around since early DL, and this is tending to make the games a little unsatisfying for me at this point. the net result is that i find myself messing around in TA games, rather than truly pursuing a glorious victory of any real sort.

Yea, I could go on for a while regarding my dislike of Steam. It's a prefect example of extreme DRM punishing the customer. The problem is not that it installs evil drivers like some DRM schemes, but it requires you to be online at all times to play any game even in single user mode. Also, to work, it requires open access to all of the unprivelaged TCP ports on your computer which is a firewall/security nightmare. It's too bad their games are so highly rated. That's one company I wish would fall off the face.


I think there's a lot of people playing the beta so I don't feel my input would be missed at all. I'd rather play the game when things are not changing all the time. I'm just not very flexible that way and have been irritated by off-the-wall changes made to DL and DA in the past.