I usually try to suspend my disbelief when presented with game "galaxies" having only 100 or so stars by rationalizing that there are really are a lot more stars out there, but the ones shown are the only really "important" exploitable ones, either strategically or economically. All the others are essentially useless and therefore not shown. But lets face it, there's no way we're ever going to get anything approaching actual realism here, that would require somewhere around 400 billion stars or so. I dont really have a problem with abstraction as long as it either makes sense or serves a vital game purpose and in this case the purpose of keeping the star numbers manageable for good gameplay is pretty vital.
Some great points and some valid concerns in my book. I like that you've tried to solve the problem by thinking of elegant solutions outside the box rather than increasing the size of the box.
I think I like the idea of having many stars because I don't like the endgame too much, which feels crowded (all useful planets occupied) and boring (all planets look the same). If there are many stars, you could have core worlds and rim worlds, and lots of unused space around it all, and you could still have empires interacting. If there is some "scarcity" element introduced (as discussed in the respective thread), e.g., if population growth is very limited and its more a question of distributing your homeworld population among a few great planets, combine it with mining outposts to make the whole empire-thing work, then, you would indeed develop cores / rims and could live with leaving most of the galaxy untouched. So I guess my position on this is: as many stars as are necessary to leave many of them unexplored or at least unused when the game approaches the end. If that is a 1000 stars, then so be it, but if it can be implemented with 200, just as fine with me.
Matthias, this is exactly what i am also hoping for. Slow pop growth, a few core worlds on the rare gem planets that can harbor life (Earth like) and a dozen mining colonies on other mineral rich worlds, and a bunch of worlds left over. With 10 empires each having about 10-15 star systems under their control, and 20 minor races that would be about 120-170 star systems in use, out of 1000 star systems available. If you had a 1000 star systems, they would effectively become background graphics, but could be used to hide secret fleets and spy bases. Reconnaissance ships would be able to scout (in a low level way) several neighboring star systems a turn. If something interesting is spotted, you could go to that system and scout it in more detail. Better space telescopes from later tech could scout more systems in a high level detailed way.
I guess in the end, what many of us want is to relive/replay in such a game is a Star-Trek-like (or pick any other, similar show if you prefer) experience: Exploration of the unknown (the final frontier!), but also empires, big and small, interacting. Or, alternatively, its like the (actual) age of exploration, just in space, with lots of "here be dragons" regions left, while empires fight about the best parts of the discovered world (funny to think we have reached the boring endgame of the age of exploration in today's world ).
Standing room only. That is one way I would describe the later stages of Moo2. To use a more terrestrial analogy, you had cities and suburbs with no countryside. The design of Moo2 pretty much dictated that this was inevitable. While less of an issue at the time, today it is hard to accept. The question then becomes if this can be addressed without resorting to a drastic increase of the map size. Personally I think this depends largely on other mechanics found in the game. Mechanics related to population growth, industry growth, terraforming capabilities and effects, etc. I'm somewhat stubborn in my belief that all problems have a solution and it is usually more simple than we think. We have become so sophisticated in our thoughts and capabilities as a species that we tend to overlook the obvious at times and go straight to extravagant and complex solutions without first examining the simple ones. I'm also quite pragmatic. This means I understand that no matter what solution we look at the elephant in the room is the map size, there is only so much that can be done to address the problem before this fact will act like a stone wall in our path. Hopefully we will find that enough adjustments can be made to other areas of the game so that we can get some countryside (outer rim) without an increase in the map size or at most, a minor increase only
The problem with increasing map size is most clearly apparent in a game like Distant Worlds. DW is a great game, one of my favorites, but if you make the map too large (1400 stars) then even extravagant automation wont save you from having constant important messages bombard you like rapid machine gun fire. They come at you so fast that by mid-game or so, the scrolling message window literally cant scroll fast enough and never catches up, just getting further and further behind for the entire game. As the area of the "known universe" that the player interacts with increases, the number of important events that really should be handled by the player rises exponentially fast. This can be partially solved by making the game turn-based (DW is pausable RT). It can be further addressed by adding extensive automation which eventually has the very undesirable side-effect that the game feels like its playing itself. But make no mistake, if you keep increasing the number of stars, eventually nothing will save the game from becoming a completely chaotic, frantic, unplayable mess. By us poor, limited humans at least. Sadly I think concessions to reality must be made in any good game design to account for the fact that humans are only capable of dealing with a certain limited volume of information per turn or per second. Too much and fun turns into work, add even more and dealing with it all just becomes impossible for anybody.
What can I say?, short, concise and straight to the point. I agree with this and perhaps we should look at this from a different angle, specifically what you refer to in your previous post when you cite rationalizing that the map represents only the important stars. A neat way of handling a smaller map is similar to BotF and IG2. They both used the strategic fog of war concept meaning that you did not even know where the systems were until you scanned for them. This concept created a lot of good things. Allowed ships to enter, occupy and have combat in any square, not just those containing a system Extended the exploration stage and added a new layer to it Caused a small butterfly effect and paced the game more Negated the feeling that 100 systems was small as you had to search for them. I think something like this could benefit any game where the map is noticeably small.
Is the first post here still relevant to how the star types and other bodies work? I've been wondering on how to prioritize the exploration part. If it is then it would be great to be added to Steam as a guide so people can get a real taste of the depth in the exploration phase.
