Nebula expansion.

[tanny]

Hehe… welcome to one of my ideas, many of which useless. Now, I’m gonna talk about Nebulas.
What if we could colonize it?

The nebula people can build habitats with additional bonuses on Nebula. The nebula provides a new Ether resource which could be used as food to feed various space creatures AND your nebula pops. Late game, you can also use this Nebula ether to cultivate more Nebulas terraforming the systems. Several options exist such as fertilizing the Nebula with food helping grow space creatures even more (old and new) (Tiyanaki feeders on gas giant habitats and amoeba feeders on space coral system for example.) Add a few species of spaceborne nebula creatures as well as creatures feeding on the new Ether resource. Late game, a megastructure known as the ionizer exists which could cause SPACE STORM slowing down enemies massively.

 

[3ishop]

We already can build habitats in systems with a nebula and coloniseable worlds can appear in them.

And as they are space based there wouldn't be a species living in it that would work as a pop in game as they'd be a space born creature. Habitats are sealed environments.

We can mine nebulas already to get some minerals and exotic gases.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

To compare/contrast: Civilization has a lot of "your civilization thrives in <terrain>" abilities (jungle for Brazil, tundra for Russia/Canada, desert for Mali, etc.). That makes sense for them because they have a wide variety of terrain types and they have an interest in having in-game civilizations mimic (thematically) their real life counterpart.

Neither of those are true for Stellaris.

There are no real life counterparts, though tropes do pop up in fiction, but the incentive is nowhere near as strong to mimic those themes. For Stellaris, that's one trope among thousands that can be mimicked instead of one country that has to nail a particular theme, for Civ.

There also aren't a lot of meaningful geographical differences. Civ will have a large deserts or swathes of tundra that other civs will avoid expanding to, but which the civs suited to those environments will gladly take instead. There's no such setup in Stellaris. Everyone wants every system they can claim (for the most part), and systems are largely uncorrelated with adjacent systems. There's no situation where you look at a large swathe of neutron stars and say "let's expand in another direction" while your neutron-star-loving neighbor happily takes them.

What would gameplay look like for this feature? If it's an origin: If you don't start near a nebula, restart. Otherwise, play a normal game, but only get your benefits when building on a nebula, so you cram everything into a few systems. If it's a civic: adopt it if you're void dweller and start near a nebula, else ignore it.

The game is not yet ripe enough for such things. We need to have interesting galactic geography before you can have origins or civics that interact with it.

 

[tanny]

To compare/contrast: Civilization has a lot of "your civilization thrives in <terrain>" abilities (jungle for Brazil, tundra for Russia/Canada, desert for Mali, etc.). That makes sense for them because they have a wide variety of terrain types and they have an interest in having in-game civilizations mimic (thematically) their real life counterpart.

Neither of those are true for Stellaris.

There are no real life counterparts, though tropes do pop up in fiction, but the incentive is nowhere near as strong to mimic those themes. For Stellaris, that's one trope among thousands that can be mimicked instead of one country that has to nail a particular theme, for Civ.

There also aren't a lot of meaningful geographical differences. Civ will have a large deserts or swathes of tundra that other civs will avoid expanding to, but which the civs suited to those environments will gladly take instead. There's no such setup in Stellaris. Everyone wants every system they can claim (for the most part), and systems are largely uncorrelated with adjacent systems. There's no situation where you look at a large swathe of neutron stars and say "let's expand in another direction" while your neutron-star-loving neighbor happily takes them.

What would gameplay look like for this feature? If it's an origin: If you don't start near a nebula, restart. Otherwise, play a normal game, but only get your benefits when building on a nebula, so you cram everything into a few systems. If it's a civic: adopt it if you're void dweller and start near a nebula, else ignore it.

The game is not yet ripe enough for such things. We need to have interesting galactic geography before you can have origins or civics that interact with it.

Well, to contrast a bit more, I designed it so that people can terraform everything...

Some (even more geography-specific) mechanics already exist, the cordyceptic drones have a special building they can build in 3 systems.
I choose nebula for a reason. Nebula is correlated with adjacent system, making a strategic choice more worthwhile.

Maybe near the galactic core and near the edge, the terrain could be slightly different too?

 

[tanny]

To compare/contrast: Civilization has a lot of "your civilization thrives in <terrain>" abilities (jungle for Brazil, tundra for Russia/Canada, desert for Mali, etc.). That makes sense for them because they have a wide variety of terrain types and they have an interest in having in-game civilizations mimic (thematically) their real life counterpart.

Neither of those are true for Stellaris.

There are no real life counterparts, though tropes do pop up in fiction, but the incentive is nowhere near as strong to mimic those themes. For Stellaris, that's one trope among thousands that can be mimicked instead of one country that has to nail a particular theme, for Civ.

There also aren't a lot of meaningful geographical differences. Civ will have a large deserts or swathes of tundra that other civs will avoid expanding to, but which the civs suited to those environments will gladly take instead. There's no such setup in Stellaris. Everyone wants every system they can claim (for the most part), and systems are largely uncorrelated with adjacent systems. There's no situation where you look at a large swathe of neutron stars and say "let's expand in another direction" while your neutron-star-loving neighbor happily takes them.

What would gameplay look like for this feature? If it's an origin: If you don't start near a nebula, restart. Otherwise, play a normal game, but only get your benefits when building on a nebula, so you cram everything into a few systems. If it's a civic: adopt it if you're void dweller and start near a nebula, else ignore it.

The game is not yet ripe enough for such things. We need to have interesting galactic geography before you can have origins or civics that interact with it.

To compare and contrast further. In Stellaris, you're incentivized to at least put outposts everywhere so you have more options of the best choice. In civilization games, you can expand everywhere and at some points it becomes a tradeoff between spending resources on expanding and developing your cities and everywhere else is empty for people to take, just maybe not worthy.

In Stellaris, the theme is more expansion-heavy. Expansions are top-down instead of bottom-up, meaning you can easily spend resources to expand later, meaning a "tall build" is usually just delaying expansion for the ideal time, not skipping them.

Also, you can terraform every planet here... so...