It's a good point PC. A nice stardate or something would do just fine here.

As to Civ4, you could just mod your game to always be in AD. Change the start date to 0, and voila, you've got your own calendar

Or just "tick 35.1922 after contact". Granted, the short form "35.1922AC" would read somewhat like the output of a power supply

Who's contact? The Drengin had enslaved the Torians before the humans made contact with anyone. The Iconians created the Yor. I can only think of one event that happened simultaneously for all races. The game should start at 0AH. "After Hyperdrive" Or Post Hyperdrive, or 2AH if you want to count from the time the humans sent the hyperdrive schematics, or whatever. This is probably the same timeframe that you were thinking of, but I think this would be a more precise term for it, given the imprecise nature of first contact I just mentioned.

Not only is that the most major thing to happen to most of the races in recent times, it's the only thing that lines up with all the other races. It's the start of a whole new era, much like the discovery of atomic energy. While I don't think that AE (Atomic Era) numbering will overtake the use of AD any time soon, that's an indication of the kinds of things that societies will set their clocks by. Most fleshed out SF that I've read base their years on years since man left Earth, or a more recent major event (founding or fall of a major empire, etc).

We can argue that not all the races would be using the same definition of a year, but since we were all in contact with one another electronically it seems (otherwise, how did the humans give everyone the hyperdrive?), we may have found time to agree on what a galactic year is for inter-species communication purposes. Or, you could just use a floating point number for the time and each race has a fixed floating point multiplier in the 0.5-2.0 range that modifies it. Of course, that means that one race's 10AH could be another races 40AH. Floating point years or stardates or whatever you want to call them would also avoid the idea that all races break down a year into 12 divisions with 4 subdivisions within each division.

In the end, though, you have to admit that this is a minor asthetic issue.


On the other hand, if you go with 50 "weeks" per stardate "year", you never need more than 2 digits after the decimal point, making them look a little less awkward. It also gets us out of the trap of "We did WHAT in 161 hours total!?!?" The week/year is no longer defined in terms of anything we can measure against, so we don't have a frame of reference for how long it took to do something.

I'm not that worried about it. The "no longer defined in terms of anything we can measure against" is in terms of we 21st century humans. We have no frame of reference, so we don't know if going from stardate 1.00 to 1.01 took an amount of time corresponding to what we would think of as a second, day, year, or century. No more arguments about "completely taking over a planet in a week is impossible" because we don't know how long a tick of the clock is. A tick could have been a decade, though at that point I think we'd be dealing with sublight ships



So I'm not saying that the year wouldn't be based on the orbit of a planet, the decay of a radioactive isotope, or whatever. I'm saying that without knowing which planet, which isotope (and by what level), etc, we can't say that X stardates = Y weeks of real time. On the other hand, if Stardock doesn't want to get away from that issue, they could say that a stardate year is slightly shorter than a terran year, and by remarkable coincidence, a 50th of a stardate is exactly 7 days

Suggestion, define game turn as "The Time needed for One ship with One standard hyperdrive to traver One sector".

one year as the Time needed for One ship with One standard hyperdrive to travel Accross the galaxy (game board).

Speed and Time are the samething anyway.

Why is the game in English at that point?

We can assume that the entire game is being translated on the fly for human players and that the date on the screen is actually in whatever alien format you want.

Avatar Tandis, excellent point! Why don't you put all the game text into Lojban then? It would make an excellent choice. Then the Lojban community would be a natural sale, and they could localize the game to all major human languages for StarDock! For Free! Can't beat that deal!

You really need to work on your sarcasm. Changing those aspects of the UI would add to your customer's immersion into the game. For most, that means they'll have more fun. Remember, fun is why your customers play the game.

BTW, your premise that it is all being translated to fit the human players fall down. We know the game is already being translated for us. It's all in binary after all, and aside from a handful of old school geeks, no one else would be able to even have a chance at understanding all those "01101110011101010110110101100010011001010111001001110011". So just go ahead and translate it for the Alien civs. Or make it easy on yourself and just got Turn 1++. For most code structures that I'm familar with, it would be a trivial change, a mere 2 or 3 lines of code in C, after all. The big deal is finding the time to bother making such a trivial change when there are more important gameplay issues to be worked or addressed.

Please remember: be very careful of being sarcastic about/to your customer base where they can see it. One such comment will often destroy all the good impressions of ten other Avatars postings. People notice the bad, nasty, and sarcastic much more then the good, bright, and cheerful. It's just how humans are wired.