Recreating Trantor

[Don_Quigleone]

The most recent dev diary discussed building habitats in order to make it easier to go "tall", but wouldn't it be even better if you could "urbanize" and so lift pop limits in a limited way?

Let's say you could convert tiles on a planet into "cities", cities having buildings for specialists a la Civilization that produce anything except minerals or food. Starting planets would contain 3 or 4 such tiles (allowing your starting planet to have much higher population capacity initially). These cities would take a fairly long time to build, but over time you could build a planet to have many multiples of pops than it started with.

However, you'd still be limited on food, so you'd have to import food from offworld colonies.

Eventually maybe you could build a Trantor, which is ENTIRELY city, and needs 20 other planets to supply it with food imports.

 

[RossMorris]

Some of you youngins might refer to Trantor as the "Real Coruscant".

 

[apocalypse06]

YES. I love this idea. It makes a lot of intuitive sense as well. Tiles outside of "cities" would be your farms, mines, and power plants (as it is now), and inside the city you can produce energy or research, or have specialist buildings that can only exist in cities, be that a research institute or military academy or whatever. It should not be easy or cheap, but a Trantor planet should be totally doable if you have an empire that can support it.

A suggestion: maybe a city tile can have bonuses that the player can develop. Every-time a new tile is added to the city, the player gets a chance to specialize it further (adding extra research, or perhaps adjacency bonuses to the tiles surrounding the city, or border extrusion).

 

[Shermanator]

But that would imply your planet wasn't already covered in possibly hundreds of cities before hand.
The tile system has always bothered me. Instead of a planet full cities (at least in your homeworld's case) it makes it fee like the entire planet is just a village, with and each structure is just a single structure.
This really needs to be addressed, the planets should feel like actual planets, not a village with a collection of farms, powerplants, and mines. Like really, a visitor center, which sounds like a single building you would find on a city block, takes up a 16th of the land on my planet?

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

But that would imply your planet wasn't already covered in possibly hundreds of cities before hand.
The tile system has always bothered me. Instead of a planet full cities (at least in your homeworld's case) it makes it fee like the entire planet is just a village, with and each structure is just a single structure.
This really needs to be addressed, the planets should feel like actual planets, not a village with a collection of farms, powerplants, and mines. Like really, a visitor center, which sounds like a single building you would find on a city block, takes up a 16th of the land on my planet?

I'm entirely willing to use my powers of imagination and abstract things a little.

The Visitor Centre, given its function, is quite likely more than "a single building" if it boosts habitability and attracts migrants of other species- that sounds more like a sprawling spaceport complex with a wide variety of habitats included inside itself, possibly housing various recreations of other species' homeworlds as well as the bureaucratic infrastructure to support immigration and customs for various wildly-different alien species.

 

[Paulus Leto]

Perhaps we could get late game techs to increase the number of tiles, or add usable layers such as underground/ground/atmosphere/orbit? It could be limited to the capital to make a 'Jewel of the Empire'.

 

[Don_Quigleone]

But that would imply your planet wasn't already covered in possibly hundreds of cities before hand.
The tile system has always bothered me. Instead of a planet full cities (at least in your homeworld's case) it makes it fee like the entire planet is just a village, with and each structure is just a single structure.
This really needs to be addressed, the planets should feel like actual planets, not a village with a collection of farms, powerplants, and mines. Like really, a visitor center, which sounds like a single building you would find on a city block, takes up a 16th of the land on my planet?

In the case of homeworlds they would start with several cities at game start (earth equivalents would be New York/Tokyo/Beijing/London etc). On new colonies maybe your landing site would start as an "undeveloped" city. Urban development would take a long time, and it might take 100 years+ to have cities on colonies equal in size/infrastructure to cities on the mother planet. It would also make diplomacy/conquest much more attractive, as developed planets (like other homeworlds) would be significantly more valuable then uncolonised worlds.

You could imagine at end game you might have an in game equivalent of Trantor, with half the galaxy feeding food and other resources into it. You could also have certain fallen empires have a Trantor, and be very keen on buying food from player and AI controlled empires. You could end up economically pulled into a fallen empire's orbit (much like Trantor in the Foundation series, even after the empire started to decay).

Right now most planets are too samey. Urban development could really change this. Planets would be much more of an investment.

 

[Shermanator]

Hey good ideas guys, and I didn't actually mean that I think this is a bad idea, I just think that it should be more like "super urbanization" that you develop, rather than the game saying your builging a city here, because you should already have cities there.
In other words Current day earth ---> Super cities everywhere ----> Trantor.

 

[Don_Quigleone]

Hey good ideas guys, and I didn't actually mean that I think this is a bad idea, I just think that it should be more like "super urbanization" that you develop, rather than the game saying your builging a city here, because you should already have cities there.
In other words Current day earth ---> Super cities everywhere ----> Trantor.

Yes. Planets as a whole would be: Uninhabited-> single colony-> dispersed population doing resource extraction->dispersed cities-> Current day earth -> Super cities everywhere -> Trantor. Your starting planet should be waaaaay more important.