Ghost ships from long dead races??

Yeah, that needs to be fixed   Good catch!

Hmmm....the data object is deleted but I'll check to make sure that it's removing the graphical object. It wasn't in a save game was it? I found and fixed a bug yesterday where you couldn't select a planet in a loaded game that had been selected when the game was saved, so it could be related to that.

Edit: the code sends the message to remove the graphic object, so I'm not sure what's happening. If you have a save game that can reproduce this, that would be save me the time of trying to reproduce it myself.

This was a game I had played without reloading it. If I can just get to this point again, I will send you the saved game.

Instead of removing these ships, could they be turned into the little asteroids of GC1 and let a survey ship come along and hotwire them. However the cargo should be removed.

But that brings up another issues. Should a species that loses its last planet, but has loaded troop transports or colony ships truly be dead?

You could just make the remaining ships "defect" to another civilization as if the destroyed race surrendered.

But that brings up another issues. Should a species that loses its last planet, but has loaded troop transports or colony ships truly be dead?

I think that would depend on whether they could be considered captured, surrendered, or just drifting in space without anyplace to resupply resources for survival. In all of these cases, the race no longer has a viable government.

If the director of eduction is aboard one of those colony ships the government still exists
(Battlestar Galactica reference)

Until supplies run out, someone distroys their ship, someone captures them, etc. etc. etc.... Or even rescued. Hhhmmm. Makes for an interesting side item. Race xxx looses its last planet but the government manages to escape in a colony ship (rather far fetched, so the odds in the game that this would happen would have to be high), they get rescued by another race, start a government in exile, .... hhhmmm. similar events have happened in our real world.

*$64 million question*
But does it add anything of any real value to the game play.

If range is based on influence, and a race has all its planets conquered, wouldn't the ships, including colonies and transports, be stuck dead in space unable to resupply?

Range is no longer going to be based on influence, but on the distance from your nearest colony.

But star bases will be included in the game. So as long as a race has a star base, it has somewhere to supply its ships.

This means that technically, a race isn't eliminated from the game so long as it still has money and a range source (somewhere ships can be range supplied from). So, conquer all the Drengin worlds, and they are still dangerous. Until you hunt down all their star bases, or they can no longer pay the upkeep on their ships.

Would that add to the fun though? Most of the time, I don't think so. It would be a pain to hunt down the last few bases to stop some race that you have been smashing. However, there would be some rare instances where it would be fun. For instance, your ally is about to get their last home world smashed. So you give them a gift of one of your smaller star bases on the back end of your safe hinterlands, and some cash, to keep them around. Then you can keep giving them your older ships (to provide them a military to continue harassing your mutual enemies), and the occasional cash infusion (so they can pay for the upkeep of those ships). You find a few small worlds that the computer won't auto-abandon, settle them, and then give them to your ally. Presto. You've saved your ally and garnered huge "We love you!" points. That could be fun to do, every once in a while. But the cost is having to hunt down every little fly speck of your enemy's bases, rather then just take all their worlds. Every game.

Of course, the AI could surrender to someone, when all their worlds are gone. That might help cut down on the mop up hunting a bit. But the AI doesn't always surrender. So, I'm inclined to believe that it would be more unfun (doing more mop up) then fun (giving you opportunities to keep around an ally or at least friend to harass the others).

I forgot about starbases. Allowing a planet-less race to continue so long as it has a starbase is an interesting idea, and I don't think it would be bad; starbases are sitting targets just like planets, and since they require expensive constructors and maintenance, there wouldn't be too many of them. So long as a race cannot remain in the game through ships alone, I think allowing a race to stay in the game up to any other point would be fine.

Star bases are dependent on supplies just as much as ships. If they can't get food, they starve. If they can't get atmosphere (each to its own race's needs) they sufficate.

And again, how does this balance against the fun factor? It seems like such a small detail that can get overinvolved and interfer with the game play.

Star Bases do not depend on supplies just as ships do, Lucky Jack. For proof, note that star bases have 0 maintenance/upkeep in the actual GC design. That means they are self sufficent. They need food? They build a few farm modules to grow their own. Atmosphere? Not significant. Atmosphere is included in the set up costs, and then loses are so low that I doubt they need regular shipments. Unlike our primitive space stations... which have to ship up Oxy because we cannot clean and recycle our own internal atmosphere on the space stations, yet. But given a sufficent volume of green zoning, we could at our primitive atmospheric tech.

Since Star Bases don't actually produce shields, but rather enhance world based shield production, they are management and distribution centers with no governmental industry base to speak of. But they must have some local industry capability, just to maintain themselves.

Personally, I think star bases should be changed to being simple artificial worlds. You build a star base, and that constructor turns into your colony start tile. You can then expend some money/resources and build a tile of labs or farms or whatever. As your engineering techs go up, you'd raise the limit of tilage you can have per star base. And you could balance the whole thing out by giving each tileage a higher maintenance cost, so that it isn't economical to start building "flying cities" in space until a particular tech point or set of tech points.

The advantage of this would be that you could build space facilities which are focused on particular things. A culture base would be a star base which has plenty of culture/influence generators. A money generator would be a base purely with farms and banks. A military base would have all the military tileage facilities. A research base would be loaded with labs. Star Dock could actually reuse their planetary screens and AI/Governors for you to handle star bases. They'd have a cost, be subject to cultural and military takeover, and also could be targetted for destruction.

And you will be able to retask a starbase. That early starbase you built on the edge of your empire at the time to give you a bit of range to reach a minor and that was a military facitlity because you are planning on trouble with the Drengin just past that minor? Later, after you've conquered the Drengin, you can retask it to be a research base or a income generator instead.

Star dock then doesn't have to worry about "piling up" the bonuses like in GC1. And the AI can handle them much better, because it does better handling worlds. The AI would be able to do long term strategic planning... planning to build research bases (and add tax generators when it gets low on cash), and planning on building Culture projectors.

Of course, we would have to eliminate all of the alien's starbases then. They could have a couple of starbases out there, where one generates the money to cover itself and a stardock loaded construction base. Of course, that would take a long time to build anything (you don't get the high tileage count on a starbase as you do on high class worlds), but it would be concievable that a race could use that to leverage up via the invade minors then invade weaker civs. So a lurking threat.

The game could gain though... imagine that instead of just a bunch of random pirates get scattered across the map, that a pirate event generates one or two pirate starbases! The pirate "clan" could then get up to all sorts of trouble, and slowly build a space based empire that eventually would cause you to have to hunt them down. Or they might invade your worlds.

Other game events could be that a race's space cities rebel, and form their own civ (think space oriented fundy type events). Civil war anyone? New people to wheel and deal?

Just some thoughts of how having starbases treated like small worlds could potentially add to our fun. Once governors are implemented, they would then have the same minor amount of MM that most worlds have. Something to think about, isn't it?

I would have to agree fully with star pilots assesment. Star bases as planets, albeit smaller less capable ones would be a better direction for the game than just building annoying bonus modules.

That sounds more like artificial planets (for which there is a tech) than star bases. (There is also a tech for artificial satalites --- moons --- but in GC1 and GC/OS2 neither of these techs gave you anything except a path to another tech.)

I envision Artificial Planets tech as allowing for the construction of something much bigger in scale then a star base. In my opinion, a starbase may grow into a significant city (think Los Angeles or London or Paris), or even a mega-sprawl at the ultimate techs. For the mega-sprawl, I envision a network of related floating facilities in the same local region of space, mutually cooperating in the fashion that several cities in a region or small country do.

I think for game balance, star bases should always be limited to a max tileage "class" of say 8 or 10. So in the late stages of the game, your first bases have grown in their bit of local space to be a huge collection of space borne facilities with inter-related support and depedenance, and with your utlimate tech, it can provide the military, industrial, research, or economic capacity of one of your developed small world. Mind you, it isn't as massive as a small world. But its focused functionality can match that of some of your smaller worlds. Star bases should be just a bit more expensive to maintain.

This wouldn't mean that in the late game, you would drop a new starbase off on the edge of your empire, in and in a few turns, it would be a class 8 world (8 tiles developed with whatever). It would function just like any new tiled resource... meaning it is still building its first tile. You could rush buy, of course, but it would be expensive (rushing always is). There is already a built in limiter of space (only 1 Star base per x amount of distance), so you won't be able to just slime ever bit of your space with bases. If the terraforming techs are good and allow you to form up more then just a couple of tiles on most worlds, then even the small class worlds would still be a better use of player resources, because then you would be able to take a class 3 world and form it into a class 13 world, for instances. That would keep planets more powerful then what you build in space, but it would allow for a building strategy where a civ wouldn't have to world rush to have a chance, as it would be able to grow, albiet slower, through steady expansion into space. Especially if it takes until late game tech for the higher 'forming technology to appear, allowing small worlds to become more useful then star bases. It would add some flexibility to the standard "rush out all the colony ships until no more worlds, then start on actual strategy". With these sort of starbases, you would only need to grab the big jewels, rather then all worlds of class 2 or better (as it currently stands).

Again, it's just how I see the idea working. Low MM, high strategic options, improved AI. But I'm probably missing the down side. Like no more building +500% production multiplier for all my worlds. Or being able to build immune super powerful, totally immune Culture generators that just flip all my enemies to my side just by being around. you now, all the things that starbases do now.

With all of the tilage you want to put on star bases it sounds like you want artificial planets.

Building artificial planets (and artificial moon sized satalites) should take much more material than is ultimately contained in them. So where would you get all of that material?

I think they should be treated the same, to increase our fun and strategy, while reducing our MM. However, I do not think, I am not saying, nor am I evangalizing that Star Bases should be Mercury sized creations. They should not. I can see that Star Bases may grow to be the size of England or Germany, with sufficent time and technology and resources, but not something as big as, say, Mars or even the tiniest of our "worlds", Pluto. In my mind, structures that big would have a much different set of engineering difficulties then a set of mutually cooperating, politically/economically aligned, multiple facilities which maintain their own relative floating placements via station engines. Remember, a Star Base doesn't have to be one "building". It could just as easily be a chain of mixed facilities (or even mixed complexes), sharing common local regulations and participating in a local administration to oversee that "business" continues on. The main limiter to how many such facilities you could keep near each other would be the economics of maintaining the structure before the collected mass would want to collect together around their common center of gravity (ie, the cost of keeping them from falling together). That's the real point of differentiation for me. A star base can be just a small refueling depot with a big warehouse of spare parts located a mere 2km away from the main administration and fueling facility. Or it could be a huge, sprawling affair that is a collection of mega-hotels, theme parks, casinoes, night clubs, zoos, theatres, mega-malls, gift shops, and resteraunts, with all the local warehouse, shipping and receiveing, and all the ship and space structure maintenence facilities maintain it and to keep it all running. An artificial world will be designed so that it plans on, depends, and takes advantage of, being a world with its own mass. Whether thats something that is merely 200km radius or something 12000km radius.

As for actual material, in reality, according to current astronomy, we "know" that there are literally worlds of all sizes and types just flying about through space, tossed out from their birth system. The current best of our knowledge puts that at about 6 times the number of stars in existance. That's a lot of material. For a star faring empire, there is plenty of raw material which can be harvested or moved to a more convienent spot, for world construction. For simple star base construction, you wouldn't need to go to such extremes. The formation of a solar system is a messy thing. There's lots of asteriods, comets, and planetoids left about, even after more then half of what was born in that system is ejected or destroyed (current best planetary science). Asteriods of usable size and material can be collected and hollowed out or simply reshaped to whatever is convenient. Comets can be captured and harvested for useful material. Remember also that material can be harvested not only from deep in a gravity well (like, Earth), but from shallower gravity well sources (meaning, cheaper). Indeed, our moon itself would make a cheap place to harvest everything you need to make cement according to various NASA studies. It would be much cheaper then shipping it up from Earth, for instance. That material could then be used in space construction, both in orbit or luna-side (proposals made by NASA, JAXA, and India). Harvesting iron, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen from local resources in our solar system will not be a challenge for us, merely time consuming. For a civ with more advanced stellar travel then our own, it should take a lot less time for them to get around, which makes doing so much more feasible and economic.

Again, I'm *not* saying that a Star Base would be the size of a planet. It should never be such (for, most importantly, game play reasons). But consider, we don't use any significant portion of planets under the current GC2 tile plan. Each tile is just a complex with its own support stuctures (like company mining town). So it should be easy to place that same complex in space. Just more expensive to build and maintain. Consider, if we wanted to build a new Los Alamos like research mega-plex on a remote island in the South Pacific, we could do it. But, it would cost much more then building it out in Kansas.

since they require expensive constructors and maintenance, there wouldn't be too many of them.

Are you kidding? My friend and I were playing a game when we conquered every-single-square (big squares) with a constructor in each on medium difficulty.


We should be able to have some star bases that could be the last of a race. One starbase should be able to have as many things as ships, such as living quarters. An entire civilization could live off that for a few years before they either die or get rescued.

On GC1 it was unusual for me to construct my last star base for less than 8,000 bc.

On GC1 it was unusual for me to construct my last star base for less than 8,000 bc.

Starbases have been tweaked in the latest version of GC1 to:
- prevent every swuare to be filled with starbase
- increase the costs of new starbases, based of the number of starbases you already own.

I don't know what version Imtotolin was using.

When Imtotalin says

big squares

I suspect he is refering to sectors.

Star Bases went through several tweaks in GC1. Originally, they didn't cost you anything to build nor to maintain. Since all star base benefits stacked, this meant that the most efficent strategy was to cram ever square of your core world sectors with production enhancing starbases, so you could build the big ships faster... and your smaller worlds could build the constructors faster, which let you futher enhance your position faster. And once you've got constructors popping off every few turns to every turn, you can really enhance your position. In games of serious size, creating a "shipapult" sector where every starbase is loaded with the +2 move allowed players to quickly dispatch their big ships in just a turn across huge swaths of the map. If you stacked up your military bonuses, then even your excess colony ships were incredible war machines in your star based sectors, due to the high attack and defense bonuses. Interestingly, you didn't bother with loading all your star bases with culture modules, because if you did, the culture bonues multiplied per star base, rather then added (like everything else). So just 8 or 10 star bases in your home sector maxxed out were enough to take over the galaxy, regardless of map size.

Of course, telling all the constructros where to go was just tiresome. And picking out what module they were enhancing was just another pin stabbed into your fun. And it was very cheesy... building 15 star bases in your homeworld sector so you could build an avatar in 1 turn. So, Brad and friends started tweaking star bases, rather then just make it so only the biggest bonus from any base in a sector applied. See, the game needed to have production enhancement, to allow players to get the big ships in a reasonable amount of time. Large empire economics depended on you having trade routes, and star bases allowed players to enhance their trade economics so that they didn't have to find the maximum route, every time (this enabling players to employ strategic trading, or just not worry about maximizing every time). If SD had made it so only a single bonus applied, the game would have be less enjoyable to a lot of the customers.

Eventually, they came up with a growing cost to build NEW star bases, as well as a minimum distance between starbases, so that players could still have a few high production core sectors to get their big ships, but wouldn't be able to turn a class 10 world into one that could theoretically make 20 avatars a turn (but only made 1 a turn due to game production mechanics). SD could drop the set up cost completely, and still retain the same actual game play, as the growing cost is almost always offset by the trade enhancements players will stack up at concentration points. You might have to turn off your spending for a whole turn or two, but by then, you are making things so quickly, the computer still cannot catch up if you didn't produce another ship for 40 more turns.

Star Dock has told us that they are keeping the old star base system, and just making one change. They are no longer going to allow us to mix module types on our stations. So, resource mining stations can only mine. Production enhancers will only enhance production. Culture magnifiers will only do culture, trade enhancers will only do trade, and military will only be applicable on military bases. But, to make up for the change, they are going to give us research bases, which will presumably enhance research locally, as everything else enhance things locally. Of course, the actual effect is that player choice is being limited, and it doesn't take a pyshic to know what the exact effect of that will be. When players have to prioritze star base effect, that means that they will never have to make a hard choice. It is too cut and dried whats best, where, when.

It seems to me, that's just another sign that star bases are broken, and that Star Dock needs to toss out the old way and implement something that will be fun, require less micro-management, and allow for better strategizing as well as provide for retasking of a star base as your strategy changes. Since they are revamping the way worlds work, to make worlds more unique and allow for better strategizing by players, I think they should apply that to star bases as well. Then, every starbase will be unique, will have its MM cut down by the same system that handles worlds, and the AI should actually know what to do with them then. GC1's AI, while very good in other areas, is terrible at handling star bases. If the AI handles star bases much better in GC2, then that will be a better game for everyone.

Hhhmmm. Makes for an interesting side item. Race xxx looses its last planet but the government manages to escape in a colony ship (rather far fetched, so the odds in the game that this would happen would have to be high), they get rescued by another race, start a government in exile, .... hhhmmm. similar events have happened in our real world.

Does this remind anyone else of Titan AE? LOL.

Geez, Star Pilot, you just reworded my idea about starbases (that I posted weeks ago in another thread). Of course you have more experience with this game than I do, and it sounds a lot more in sync with the game than the way I put it. To be short, I agree that star bases should be considered "mini-colonies" and treated as such. And you are right about the gravitational effect, if anyone has any questions about that it's a fact that there are minimum distances that large naval vessels are allowed to approach to. If they get closer, they will succumb to gravity drawing them into each other causing a collision.

As far as production is concerned, yes they are Much smaller than a planet, however remember, they are built for a purpose. That means that fewer population is needed to operate it, fewer resources are needed to supply the residents, and everyone is focused on doing a job. Likely there would be far less in taxation as well as there is fewer people to tax, and fewer resources being bought and sold commercially.

I'm not saying that there won't be families formed or population growth now, but that the reason to build a star base is different than a planet. It's less "Hey, we're overpopulated here, lets find somewhere else to live," and more "It would be useful to have something capable of doing 'X' at this point in space."