Aurora 4X Terraforming

[Ragnerov]

What i dont think people really understand is that realistically a race would NEVER colonize a planet that cannot support life, a race would only establish a small colony (lets just say around 10k-100k people, but it really depends on the race) for scientific or mining purposes or maybe to suppress the local inhabitants if their was another race inhabiting the planet. Terraforming should be a must for any empire that really wants support a large pop unless they are already really tolerant. you should only really be able to support large amounts of pop on planets that can sustain your races life, the game should force you to ever expand rapidly wide(highly spread out empire) or rapidly tall(terraforming) or a combination of both to sustain your pops and prevent overcrowding. It would make for interesting game play and add more tension to multiplayer games as it will not only add the desire to expand but the need for it as well, or you could suffer rebellions etc from overcrowding. However my main concern about this is that it may get to the point where it just becomes tedious and annoying.

 

[CptWilly]

The more Paradox takes inspiration in terms of complex systems the better, as far as I'm concerned. Especially since many complexities can be tucked away out of sight behind smooth, easy to use interfaces. Simple (and attractive) interface married to complex, deep, gameplay with a nearly infinitely variable gamespace. That's the grail as far as I'm concerned, and the closer they are willing to nudge Stellaris to that, the better.

 

[Strager]

Aurora is a whole level of complexity deeper than Stellaris. I don't want THAT level of complexity.

That being said, I really think that planets should have atmospheres of various gasses (Methane, Oxygen, etc.) and you should only be able to colonize worlds of the same type at first. This is in addition to other factors like planet type.

 

[aruon]

That being said, I really think that planets should have atmospheres of various gasses (Methane, Oxygen, etc.) and you should only be able to colonize worlds of the same type at first. This is in addition to other factors like planet type.

all 3 of these are already confirmed.

 

[Sabouts]

I wouldn't mind seeing some serious in depth complexity to an extent. It doesn't need to be ruined by a nasty UI. If you find a good balance it can be done correctly, and honestly, I think EU4 does it right in so many ways.

Aurora 4x is an awesome game. The UI is difficult and the whole game can be daunting to navigate. But they did it right on the level of complexity, depth, and replayability. I want my games to have more depth, I want them to have multiple factors to monitor. I enjoy feeling immersed in the experience, like I'm really managing an empire or race of people. I feel a lot of 4x's today hype up unique gameplay, depth, and replayability. But when there finally released it leans more towards the same cookie cutter that has always been the 4x genre. Basically same mechanics under a different mask. Stellaris seriously has the chance to bust straight through that mold with a 4x/grand strategy combo that could finally be the space empire game we've all been imaging in our heads for a long time.

 

[safe-keeper]

Stars! 4X let you set your race's tolerance to gravity, temperature and radiation when you created your race. You could simply let your race thrive on any planet, or make it so that only 1 of 100 planets were inhabitable to your race. Then you researched terraforming techs throughout the game, but in the end-game, you could still have many planets be uninhabitable to your people. You could colonise them, but planets with a negative "quality" would kill colonists every turn.

 

[trajan]

Terraforming is my favorite system in Aurora. I've said before that I'd like to see Stellaris take some inspiration from it although I think it could be a happy medium. I want something more complicated than the old MOO2 progression from Barren to Gaia but I don't think it needs to be quite as complicated as what's in Aurora. Maybe just have "climate" and "atmosphere type" as options that can be slowly changed/modified instead of using greenhouse effect/albedo/pressure like Aurora does.

 

[Safehold]

I think Aurora 4x took that joke about Eve Online being spreadsheets in space... a bit too far.

 

[Dessic]

There was an old tabeltop RPG called Alternity that had five characteristics to describe a planet's environment; Gravity, Radiation, Atmosphere, Pressure, Heat. I could see Stellaris having that kind of medium-complexity terraforming system, wherein technologies could directly affect one characteristic, but also have secondary effects on other characteristics. Pumping greenhouse gases into a planet's atmosphere to increase the temperature will also have an effect on the atmospheric pressure of the planet, while the additional gases could have the effect of reducing the amount of radiation that penetrates to the surface. To directly reduce the radiation a planet's surface gets, an advanced race could augment the planet's magnetic field (or even create one somehow), but doing so might cause such intense polar aurorae that the average temperature goes up. Changing a planet's gravity would be more challenging, but let's say you could do it by reducing the effective mass of a planet (insert techno-babble here). It would have a smaller gravitational pull, but its orbit around its primary star would get larger, resulting in reduced temperatures and radiation.

Races could avoid terraforming almost entirely if they were able to research technology to alter themselves to handle different environments, but doing so would be more limiting to them overall -- someone genetically engineered to live on a high gravity planet will not do well anywhere else. Going this route might make colonizing planets easier, but might limit the race's productivity or economy somewhat because individuals within the race would be more limited on trade and travel between different planets.

 

[machinekng13]

One interesting way of combining terraforming with the planetary grid system and the science system would be the ability to find pockets of gas or other gas-rich strata that one could exploit in order to more rapidly affect the planet. For example, perhaps it would be possible to find a methane bubble under the surface of a tundra planet, allowing it to be released in order to help warm up the planet. This could also be worked into a climate change event, where activities could unintentionally affect the planet's climate, like releasing a methane strata on a temperate world.

 

[leviathan172]

The only thing that bugged me a lot about Aurora 4x's terraforming system (unless they have changed it recently) is that it adds the same amount of atm to a body over time instead of an amount of volume over time. Essentially what I mean is that terraforming Luna, Europa, Titan, etc. took about the same amount of time as terraforming Mars. Not even mentioning the fact that those moons lack of a magnetic field, no starting atmosphere, and very low gravity; sure some of those things increased colony cost but that has no affect on terraforming ships that most people use(d).

On top of that the terraforming system in Aurora 4x somewhat needlessly adds micro to the game for little actual game play benefit by making you choose how much of what gas to be added into the atmosphere. I hope that Stellaris' terraforming will be similar to EU4 coring, with various factors adding into the cost of it such as starting atmosphere, gravity, etc. hopefully having to build actual terraformers. There could also be events such as polar caps melting or a hidden gas pocket being found to decrease the amount of time it would take. Could be an event on somewhere like Mars that fossil fuels were found and used to rapidly increase the CO2 added to the atmosphere, etc.

 

[Kadanz]

The only thing that bugged me a lot about Aurora 4x's terraforming system (unless they have changed it recently) is that it adds the same amount of atm to a body over time instead of an amount of volume over time. Essentially what I mean is that terraforming Luna, Europa, Titan, etc. took about the same amount of time as terraforming Mars. Not even mentioning the fact that those moons lack of a magnetic field, no starting atmosphere, and very low gravity; sure some of those things increased colony cost but that has no affect on terraforming ships that most people use(d).

On top of that the terraforming system in Aurora 4x somewhat needlessly adds micro to the game for little actual game play benefit by making you choose how much of what gas to be added into the atmosphere. I hope that Stellaris' terraforming will be similar to EU4 coring, with various factors adding into the cost of it such as starting atmosphere, gravity, etc. hopefully having to build actual terraformers. There could also be events such as polar caps melting or a hidden gas pocket being found to decrease the amount of time it would take. Could be an event on somewhere like Mars that fossil fuels were found and used to rapidly increase the CO2 added to the atmosphere, etc.

In the end it's still a game, meaning that at some point a line has to be drawn between realism and gameplay. Here's a pic after I fully terraformed venus:

Spoiler

 

[cedi]

I would like it if the planets had stats like gravity, temperature ranges, atmosphere, water/land ratio, trace chemicals, radiaten... and your race had stats correspondng to these, though the races's stats are provided as ranges.
For example: a race might tolerate gravity from 0.6G to 1.5G with a perfect gravitation of 1G. While the race could still tolerate plants that are on the extrem sides of that range, the population would grow slower, be less efficient and suffer from more bad events.

Some tecnology migth then increase the acceptable ranges for your race or even change them all together for a sub race. This would make the whole subrace thins for colonisation much more interesting than just a statement like: This race likes arid worlds and the other one frozen worlds.

 

[PAwleus]

[...] ON TOP OF the standard Ice/Water/Terrstrial/Gas planet types. [...]

There is a great planetary typology created by John J. Lumpkin (that happens to be a leader of Long War mod team) for his The Human Reach series (BTW, one of the best and realistic military space opera I've ever read, based about 120 years into the future) - as you see planet types could also be much more interesting.

 

[Invader_Canuck]

So Dwarf Fortress IN SPACE?

Not an apt comparison. If Dwarf Fortress was completely unplayable, and absolute micro management hell, then you might be close

I've played Aurora a lot. You don't play aurora. You fight it. Every single action you take in Aurora is a struggle. From navigating menus, to controlling your task groups. Nothing is easy. Nothing is intuitive. You fight with a god awful interface, in the hope that something cool can be pulled out of the experience.

Dwarf fortress is extremely simple to play by comparison. It has a clunky, but usable hotkey driven interface (aurora has virtually no hotkeys). The game screams along on a modern computer, runs well, runs fast, isn't a micromanagement nightmare once you set things up.

Aurora isn't a game, it's a chore, and it's a shame because underneath that struggle to play, is probably the greatest 4x ever.

 

[MN121MN]

IMHO, it's a good idea, but too complex to implement in base Stellaris, given its direction. It would be better implemented in a Harder Difficulty mod, or if it's too locked behind hardcode, then as a future update.

 

[ponasozis]

What i dont think people really understand is that realistically a race would NEVER colonize a planet that cannot support life, a race would only establish a small colony (lets just say around 10k-100k people, but it really depends on the race) for scientific or mining purposes or maybe to suppress the local inhabitants if their was another race inhabiting the planet. Terraforming should be a must for any empire that really wants support a large pop unless they are already really tolerant. you should only really be able to support large amounts of pop on planets that can sustain your races life, the game should force you to ever expand rapidly wide(highly spread out empire) or rapidly tall(terraforming) or a combination of both to sustain your pops and prevent overcrowding. It would make for interesting game play and add more tension to multiplayer games as it will not only add the desire to expand but the need for it as well, or you could suffer rebellions etc from overcrowding. However my main concern about this is that it may get to the point where it just becomes tedious and annoying.

so i guess humans does not count as a race
and mars counts as a planet that can support life

because we are totally not aiming to colonise it with most of our space programs


...

 

[Harle]

I just want to point out that, given what we know about how advanced genetic manipulation will be in Stellaris, it will almost certainly be far more efficient to merely engineer populations to be suitable to various atmospheres, than to terraform.

I'm not sure that technology could ever get to a point where entire planets could be terraformed in a reasonable amount of time. It's not a problem of the process being complicated (though it is), it's just the scale of the thing. Planets are big. It'll never be a small and simple project.

Terraforming should still exist, to convert innately inhospitable places (with no atmosphere, or high-pressure hothouses like Venus) into livable spaces, albeit these should be extremely costly, longterm projects that are not taken on lightly. But creating earth-like atmospheres on other planets would probably take a lot longer and be a lot harder than merely reconfiguring some colonists to be able to breathe the atmosphere that is already present.

(I quite adore Aurora, and I love complex systems, but I genuinely think that bio-engineering is probably the eventual, economical solution to interplanetary colonization, not terraforming so much)

 

[safe-keeper]

On top of that the terraforming system in Aurora 4x somewhat needlessly adds micro to the game for little actual game play benefit by making you choose how much of what gas to be added into the atmosphere. I hope that Stellaris' terraforming will be similar to EU4 coring, with various factors adding into the cost of it such as starting atmosphere, gravity, etc. hopefully having to build actual terraformers. There could also be events such as polar caps melting or a hidden gas pocket being found to decrease the amount of time it would take. Could be an event on somewhere like Mars that fossil fuels were found and used to rapidly increase the CO2 added to the atmosphere, etc.

Yeah, something like EU's colonisation/coring mechanic would do nicely. I don't really mind having a range of factors to consider, with different factors having different effects, that'd just be cool, but a simple button saying "terraform" will do it for me when it comes to how to improve things. I don't need a number box asking me how many tonnes of oxygen I want to send to a planet, or to ponder whether to send a master botanist as part of the crew, and perhaps give my colonists space suits that can getting hit by sharp antennae. Just give me a simple "Improve" button next to each factor and I'm happy.

Then again, judging by the DD's, I'm sure the devs have interesting things in mind for us already.

Not an apt comparison. If Dwarf Fortress was completely unplayable, and absolute micro management hell, then you might be close

We might be very close, then . :ducks:

 

[RoboticManiac]

I'd quite like aurora levels of terraforming. I like detail.

Plus, having the issue abstracted away and turned into a simple button, not giving the player a choice in the type of planet they're making sounds terrible. What if I want to make a prison planet for a species that breathes methane, and I'm a no-good-dirty oxygen-sucking human?

Also, having terraforming being prohibitively expensive and thus relegated to the realm of power mad dictators and testaments to man's arrogance sounds fun.

Not an apt comparison. If Dwarf Fortress was completely unplayable, and absolute micro management hell, then you might be close

I've played Aurora a lot. You don't play aurora. You fight it. Every single action you take in Aurora is a struggle. From navigating menus, to controlling your task groups. Nothing is easy. Nothing is intuitive. You fight with a god awful interface, in the hope that something cool can be pulled out of the experience.

Dwarf fortress is extremely simple to play by comparison. It has a clunky, but usable hotkey driven interface (aurora has virtually no hotkeys). The game screams along on a modern computer, runs well, runs fast, isn't a micromanagement nightmare once you set things up.

Aurora isn't a game, it's a chore, and it's a shame because underneath that struggle to play, is probably the greatest 4x ever.

I can play aurora with a mouse. Take that DF.