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Humm, you're complicating. Each race has an ideal planet type (5%), and then 2 that are confortable (4%), 2 that are marginal (2%), and 2 more that are hostile (1% pop growth) - adequate (3%) is not currently used. Don't forget terraforming, where planets will shift type towards better inhabitability. Rogue counts as Jungle BTW. So you've got 2 Jungles, 2 Terrans, and 1 Desert - plus all the minors.
Planet type also depends on orbit, which is not easily quantifiable, so you can't really run statistics on this.

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Terraforming isn't in the game yet, Sheva. But we intend that it will physically cause planets to change class in favour of the terraforming races preferences. So since the Federation Ideal is Terran, they will terraform towards Terran planets. The Cardassians on the other hand prefer Desert planets, and so will terraform towards Deserts.

Planets that already have bonuses may lose these bonuses (Food, energy) if you terraform them however. There is also the fact that you will lose - or gain - access to specialist structures that require a specific planet type when you terraform a planet. So for instance if you have Wind Turbines on a Barren planet and you terraformed it, you would lose the Wind Turbines and therefore the +50 energy bonus they provide. I'm not sure if the building will be automatically scrapped in such situations, but it would make sense if it did.

To prevent situations where galaxies end up with only one planet type, we *may* impose conditions such as allowing a maximum of 3 terraforming events per planet as well.

The position and number of particular planets types is governed by another table like the one you reused from my post, Sheva. Systems are not simply random collections of planets, they are generated based on probabilities so that generated systems appear logical and realistic.



The numbers are modifiers that tell the game how likely a planet type is to appear in that position. So the position number runs down the columns. Position 0 is closest to the star, whilst position 9 is furthest from the star. Negative numbers in the table reduce the likelihood that a particular planet type will appear in a given position, whilst positive numbers increase the liklihood that a planet type will appear in that position.

If you wanted to change the availability of certain planet types, it would be the information in that table you would need to change. But doing so would itself unbalance systems - they wouldn't be as realistic or logical as they currently are. I therefore would not personally support such a change to the game files.

Don't you mean Cardassians will Desertform a planet?
Guess we better not go there. It would only get confusion.

Well, 3 terraforming events is enough to make any planet inhabitable (Hostile->Marginal->Confortable->Ideal)...
Besides, it makes no sense to be able to terraform say Pluto or Mercury to a Terran world. The inhabitability of a planet depends on a lot of factors (and I'm glad you finally found the tables! ).
IMO a 1 step increase in inhabitability would be enough. I think it would have been interesting to have Uninhabitable *rocky* planets in the game, instead of Moons. Uninhabitables would be terraformed to Hostiles, increasing pop in the system. No need for a Moon Colonization structure (and all the associated confusion), and the "tech req" would be the empire's ability to terraform.

I only used "3 events" as an example. 1 event is obviously more realistic. As for uninhabitable rocky planets instead of moons, see what Mike says about it.

Actually, Hostiles would be prime candidates for "uninhabitable rocky worlds". They're hostile, right? So current Hostiles could move to Marginals, Marginals to Adequates (actually making this category be in the game), and the rest remained the same. Sounds kind of logical.

@Mike:
Slightly related. Could Pluto be removed from the game, and the orbit limit be reduced to 9? It's not a planet anymore, right?
Sol is really annoying because of the number of planets - these show very small in the system panel, and so does the star. The smaller systems look so much better. Just a thought.

We could always just rename Pluto as Sedna or Eris if you're going to be picky...

Which are also planetoids / dwarf planets, one that's 2/3 the size of Pluto and the other one a bit larger...

Anyways, you seem to have "missed" the real point of the idea... or not.

Pluto's equatorial diameter is 2274 km. Eris's is about 2400km and Sedna is about 1800km. Eris is the biggest, so i'm turning Pluto into Eris to see how many people will notice.

even in a designview i think Pluto is a must, even if they say now it´s no planet even more. When they recheck again we will have 15 coz they find some others or what ever. But that´n only my opinion. I think it belongs to our system even if it´s not scientific anymore.

Okay for the terraformingthing. Maybe it´s possible to implement one or two more or more levels of terraformation. Let´s say "hardly lifesuporting" and "paradise" just for example. Then terraforming would be much more fun and gives more depth to the game. Having much more variety in the galaxy. Coz we have a lot of species which have the same planetaffinity. When we can appoint other levels to differnt species which could terraform there planets there is more diversity.

Again, the Pluto thing was just MoE showing he can use Google, and not really doing a good job at it. Like I said above, the objective was to reduce the # of planets in Sol, so that those planets (and in any other large system, 8~10 orbits) would show bigger in the system panel. And the star would show bigger too. Planet and star display size scales to system size, and large systems *IMO* don't look as good as smaller ones. That's all I meant. The Pluto comment was mainly to justify that it wouldn't really be totally incorrect scientifically.
Also, Sol is the best homesystem in the game, not only the larger one but the one with 4 Gas Giants (40 Deut/turn). And with the wider variety of planet types - and the structures that that entails. It not getting the Artic bonuses could actually be a balancing factor. The pop reduction would be negligible, but also a step in the right direction towards balancing homesystems.
If we really wanted to go all scientific, then the whole concept of *Moons* would have to be reviewed...

I'm not sure what the advantage would be. Each race alsready has its own prefered planet type. The Klingons for example prefer jungle, and Terran for them is simply Confortable, not Ideal. The # of planet types and the # of inhabitability levels is already streamlined IMO. More of them wouldn't really add anything new. In fact, like I said above, there is still one empty slot, Adequate, which is not currently used. Basically because it'd make the system assymetrical.

i ment when there are more level then it´s more interesting to terraform or have say two level of terraforming. And i didn´t point to the major races but to the minors. There the preference could be set to additional variety. If these planet-types bring any advantage i don´t know. That´s in the hands of the programer what is possible. I know this is additional texturing and stuff. Just a thought.

I suggested the name change instead of planetary removal because the fact of the matter is that the size of the planets and stars is hard-coded into the game. They aren't flexible based on the number of planetary orbits so simply removing...the 9th one...would have no effect on the sizes. Mike would have to physically implement programming changes to the sizes of the displayed graphics. Increasing the sizes of the graphics would have no effect because the game just resizes them to the required dimensions. And before you say anything .Iceman, I know this both because because i've tested it, and because Mike has told me so. Removing...the 9th one...would simply result in people asking questions as to why or complaining about the population and/or buildable structures reduction. Besides, if the relative sizes of the planets changes simply because of the number of planets that orbit a star, we would likely get flooded with questions about giant populations in systems with seemingly small planets.

The way the planets and stars are displayed is a stylistic compromise. Yes, the sun is thousands of times larger than the planets and yes, Jupiter should be many times larger than the Earth. But there isn't the room to display that. But no one has ever asked for total accuracy in that respect. People never complained about it in BOTF, in fact so many people liked the system that Mike decided to emulate it in Supremacy. It's a system people obviously both like and understand, so why change it when the suggested changes could just result in confusion?

The Deuterium bonus isn't as big as it sounds either. The Federation might start off with a bigger supply, but their ships are the least fuel-efficient so they need the extra supplies in the first place. In that respect it ultimately balances out.

And as for the extra buildings, they still need to be built in the first place. Any time spent building a bonus structure is time taken away from perhaps building more essential buildings like food production. Now obviously players will avoid starving their people, but that will likely mean more system management to ensure such occurences are minimised. And more construction time may mean slower colony development, but it means mid-to-late game bonuses. I therefore believe that everything ultimately balances out in the end.

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Viceadmiral, the minor races DO have much more variety in their planetary preferences, although this is obviously becauase there are so many more of them. In fact, I know that there are some minors that prefer Barren and Volcanic planets.

Creating additional, default planet types is a programming matetr and something that Mike would need to do. There are plenty of candidates for potential planetary type additions though; I actually did some research on it for Mike a few months ago. It's much easier to mod in special, one-off planets into the game though - I in fact added these textures for T'Khul, Andoria, and Ferenginar to the game, as well as giving Mars a better planetary texture than the existing one. All you need to do is specify the name of the planet in the CustomPlanets.xml file and add in a correctly-named texture image to the planets image folder. The game will then automatically use that image when it generates a system that happens to have the same name as the planet texture.

Maybe that's why I specifically appended a @Mike in there?



Have you checked the sizes of planets and stars for a small system and a large system?
I get the feeling that once again you're not reading, and we're talking different things. I said, the *displayed* image of planets and stars. Are you talking about pop sizes? Because stars have no pop sizes...



?! Maybe Mike will understand me when he read this.



Some real confusion here... What on earth are you talking about? Planet sizes? Graphical display sizes? I'm obviously talking about the latter. removing the *10th* orbit would scale the gfx up by 10%, making the planets and star a bit larger.
And the game is in alpha, yes? Why would people complain?! And like I said above, the pop reduction would be negligible, nd hence the # of structures too. Did you read that? It's a Tiny planet, not a Giant one... You really have to read stuff.
Giant pops in small planets?! man, you *are* confused.



There you go straying from the issue... Again, and please try to read carefully, it's not about relative size of system components, it's about scale in small vs large systems.



Hmm?! We're talking about a Tiny Artic planet in a specific system, Sol. Why are you generalising?! It doesn't happen in any other system... We're talking Artic structures, did you check the impact?

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Here's what I meant with the removal of Pluto. Unfortunately, since Pluto is a tiny planet, the improvement is not all that great...
Conmparing with Romulus, which has 6 orbits. Check the size of the Tiny planet in Romulus with that of Pluto. Also check the size of stars in both systems.

BTW,
the Artic structures are
Charge Collectors, cost 700 +100 Energy, Ene/Con 1
Ice Breaking Stations, cost 6430 energy 15, +7% growth rate, Ene/Com/Con 5
The 1st is not crucial in the early game in Sol, as there are other options, and takes a while to build. The 2nd is useless, and mid-game.

Fuel efficiency is actually a relative thing. The thing is, Fed ships may cost more Deuterium than anyone else's, but due to the weird way things are implemented - and I'm refering specifically to Fuel and Range kind of overlapping and even contradicting each other, like I already mentioned a good while ago - this does have a positive side. With more fuel, they can go farther out from their range limit. The Klingons for example, may have cheap ships in what comes to Deu, but it also hampers their strike range.
So, efficiency...

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...What happened with your posts here guys? Want me to delete them for you or have you reserved them for a purpose? Or did you decide to hide the evidence of something that happened during my internetless absence?

I'll admit that I hadn't noticed about the stars changing size. I play the game less than I mod it. But I also misunderstood what you were saying anyways so I doubt I would have noticed the change even if I played, so thanks for the images.

If you think things are implemented wierdly, or particular structures are useless compared to others, then please make suggestions on *how* they could be changed. I'll have a go at doing so once the editor is up and running. (Or sooner if it's a change that doesn't require use of the editor)

...I was thinking the exact samething . what does ... mean?

Two more than .