Bay 12 Games Forum

The map of my latest game is turning out nice. Lots of interconnectivity and plenty of branches with unexplored jump points. Only part that's really off on its own is the lower right one. Two NPRs were genned while exploring too, in the Yuris and Sarikavak systems (named Yuris Kingdom and Sarikavak Kingdom, I renamed the systems once I established communications). So far they are both proving fairly friendly, Sarikavak has already granted me trade access only a year and a half after discovery. Neither of them have travelled to my systems yet though (I have a bunch of deep space tracking stations in San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Miami to monitor things).

Spoiler:  Galactic Map (click to show/hide)

How do you get your galaxy map so grid-like? More importantly, how do you get it to stay like that? Whenever I move systems about, close the window and open it again it goes back to horrible overlapping And what does extended orbit and picket do?

Nowhere near viable, unless something unusual's going on in your game and you can tolerate the low gravity. You could try orbital habitats, but Mars/Mercury/Titan/Venus (in that order) are better, as you can terraform them (personally I just see colony viability as how easy it is to get to 0 colony cost, minerals can be handled through auto mines and mass drivers regardless of other factors).

Can I not just slap down a bunch of infrastructure? I don't really get how colonising works

Random fluff question - what do you guys usually call your empires? I try to come up with a new one each game. I tried the Imperium, but the game bugged out and all my colony ships got stuck on Earth so I had to scrap that

Quote from: Chattox on August 28, 2011, 07:11:30 pm

So, as I understand it, playing with Real Stars unchecked randomly generates the entire universe. What are the advantages and disadvantages to this? I hear there's a bug to do with deleting systems.

If you delete a system, there is a bug where every system you discover or generate after that will have the name of the system you deleted. So in one game I had 11 Proxima Centauris. But if you delete the system and switch to Real Stars, the problem is resolved.

Why would one want to delete a system?

Quote from: Paul on August 28, 2011, 11:51:19 am

What is with the planet numbering in systems anyway?

Looking at a system now, it has: planets A I, A III, A VI. What happened to II, IV, and V? Did the Death Star come by when I wasn't looking?

That happens, I think, in the event that there are multiple stars in the system. Those orbiting the first star get A slapped on, the second B, and so forth.

I haven't seen it in action yet, but that's probably it.

I don't believe this is the case. I just made my first ever jump ship, went through a JP and the system had 6 planets, however the names went I, III, IV, V, VI, VII with only one star and no sign of the second planet. Is the galaxy generation system anything like Dwarf Fortress worldgen? If so, it could've been destroyed/gone rogue during generation, perhaps?

Where can I find exactly how many of each installation I have on a planet?

It's used for producing things. Each construction point (or research point, or shipbuilding point.... etc) costs money... I think it's 10 points = 1 spacebuck but I'm not really sure.

so the more factories you have, the more your expenses. The more labs you have... etc.

Edit: when it runs out you just produce slower, the deeper in debt you are the slower you produce, so it's sort of a self correcting problem after a while you produce so little you break even and just hang there deep in debt.

Ooooh, I thought construction/research/etc points were naturally produced over time by their facilities, I didn't think they actually cost money for some reason.. I shall have to factor that in, thank you!

So what is wealth used for exactly? Is it spent building ships? Funding research? I don't get it.