Megastructures

Halo?

Space Empires IV and V had them. Dont know of other games or the previous titles of the Space Empires franchise, as I only played those

Indeed.

Though, it's not so much that they weren't implemented well, it's that the method they chose wasn't executed well.  They had an alright idea that probably would've been good if done right, but balance and coding issues kind of ruined it.  That, and the structures were useless in anything less than an almost worthless system because it was necessary to remove all celestial objects from a system before such a structure could be built, and the resulting structure was often less useful than the worlds and other features that had to be removed to build it.

The only other game that really came close was MoO2, with its Artificial Planet tech, where asteroid belts and gas giants could be transformed into (apparently) hollow spheres on and in which a population could live.

Space Empires overcomplicated and poorly executed it to where it was worthless...while MoO2 made it work, but it was so simple and powerful that there was almost no circumstance under which you wouldn't find away to blow all medium and smaller, and non-terraformable toxic planets, to bits to rebuild them as large barren worlds you could eventually make Gaia class.  I'd very often turn over whole star systems to the enemy after scrapping everything, only to send a Doom Star with a Stellar Converter to blow all but one world to dust and then rebuild them better.  Not terribly unlike the MoM "raise volcano/change terrain" exploit on tundra.

I think Space Empires had the better idea, but should've taken more care in working out the kinks.  It's perfectly reasonable for them to have required worlds be destroyed to make room, or at least all worlds along the "path" of a ring.  The resource investment also was not terribly excessive.  The process was clunky though, and it was tedious to build ships and reload them with the needed parts constantly because of the massive resources needed.  And it all had to be done manually.  It wasn't possible to set the ships to do it all automatically.  It required micromanagement every single turn.  Though, in a way, it was somewhat preferable since instead of having a particular limit on how fast something could get built, it would build literally as fast as you could get the equipment into place yourself.

I think something based on that, but a bit more well-balanced and less clunky in use, would be viable.  Have three new additional constructor modules...one for building a ring component, one for building a sphere component, and one for disassembling worlds and such to make room for the ring/sphere, and gaining appropriate resources as a result.  Colonists would be "held" in unattached colony pods, providing no benefit (and being untargetable), until completion.  send constructors to the "build-point" using rallying and auto-command, and you get the investment, and the reward, with the right time put in without the tedium.  And hopefully, less clunky.

I also think that certain stellar phenomena should be convertible into stars, and thus build rings/spheres around those as well.

I think the idea of mega structures is one that has merit.  i don't think, however, that dyson spheres and rings are appropriate for the scale of a galciv game.  They seem to me to be end of game, jump to next level of existence type features.  I do think that extremely large scale structures could have a positive effect of GalCiv3.  The structures, also, don't have to be physical structures.  They could be the creation of an organization.  Examples:  Obsidian order / kardashian / ala deep space nine.  A variety of societal 'structures with varied affects on the civ / and its interactions with others.  Oh, on second though, maybe the human led crusade from the future could originate from a dyson sphere?

Moving along...

The Terran crusade is the fleet that sealed itself away in a pocket dimension when they "imprisoned" Earth to protect it from the Drengin.  They're now returning from that dimension.  Sure, maybe they could have built a sphere in there, but there's not really any point.  Why build that, when they could just build an even bigger fleet to bring with them.  They can't bring the sphere along, after all.

GC tends to get pretty extreme in terms of the technologies they imply to exist in the game.  "Black Hole Guns"?  Any civilization that can throw a small black hole in ship-to-ship combat...can probably pretty easily build a great many Dyson's spheres.

As for organizations in place of megastructures, that's really something else entirely.  Creating an "Obsidian Order" isn't really any different than anything else in the game since it would just be an improvement on a planet...or perhaps cumulative effects from multiple planet improvements.  Maybe there could even be further effects from a specific ship module, and star base module.  But ultimately, again, that's not really a megastructure in the context of the idea for this thread.  It's not a bad idea, and it's certainly interesting...but it's not a megastructure.

I like the Artificial planet idea. They would have to figure what can and cannot be built here, or maybe this kind of survival also require barren world colonization along with the techs to build this. This would at least give me something to do with the class 0 planets.

There is always an option of building the star to make an dyson sphere by blasting lizuid nitrogen with lasers from as many angles as possible. . This would at least be a smaller scale. Did you know we made a planet 10 foot in diameter in a labratory. Maybe they can expand on those concepts, or instead have the option to make small planets and stars.

Starbase is the closest thing we can get, especially if we remember SoaSE variant (government housing).

So I don't mind if we will be able to build something similar to Torus from X-series. No need to tell me how it all ended.

I was just thinking if we know how to build stars and planets today. What do you think we will be doing tomorrow. I think the specifics on planet building should be looked up to make this as realistic as possible.

Judging by humanity history I say we'll be blowing some stuff, killing other people because they have something we want/don't have something we like in the name of something...

No disagreement (I don't have much knowledge on planets' creation), but in the meantime I would be interested in either terraforming on our planets, or on some tech allowing creation of dditional building cells. I know we already have them to some extent, but I'd prefer it to be explanded a bit. Maybe underwater domes (or not just underwater - for use on polar caps), or artificial islands. They are also, to an extent, megastructures. They could have certain limit of buildings that could be constructed here (obviously no spaceport underwater :))

And I don't mind if we would be able to create huge orbital, or not orbital space stations, resembling planets of small class, but still usable. Certain infrastructure already could be built-in, orof those structures are acting like artificial moons, some bonuses could be transfered from planets they are orbiting - like embassy, or entertainment system. They could be excluded from taxes, to make them attractive to live, since they have little entertainment there by default and we can't build stadium there. I see them as dedicated R&D/Manufacturing add-ons.

Probably I need to play X-series less, sorry.

The idea of megastructures brings to mind something I'd like to see in GC3: Multiple solutions to a problem. Considering the idea of a Dyson sphere, even if you're building it around a smaller red dwarf, you'd still need several hundred time the mass of our own solar system to physically construct the sphere, in this case the approaches would require different tech levels, depending on the specific approach.

The first approach might be what a software engineer would call the naive approach, which would be to deconstruct tons of planets and asteroids until you have enough mass to complete the "Galactic Wonder."

The next approach might be to develop appropriate technologies (e.g. matter conversion, tractor beams) necessary to deconstruct stars, as well as planetary bodies, which would reduce the number of star systems needed to build the sphere.

The "ultimate" approach might be, once technologies appear granting the ability to create black holes, another technology might create white holes, allowing the civilization to "spray paint" a Dyson sphere into existence.

When you really break it down, this particular task is really "get an inconceivable amount of matter so we can build this thing." The multiple solutions would just be ways of getting that matter.

The Iconians could change energy into matter with their replicator technology. They just need to find a lot of energy.

Iconian Replicators are not the same as Star Trek Replicators. They are simply factories manned by robots, who turn raw materials into whatever goods the Iconians need.

There is a certain coolness factor to mega-structures like rings, or spheres.

Wouldn't the first step though be for space-habitats? We have space stations in GC2, but not really habitats.

Maybe arcology space stations, growing and growing until they have populations to rival that of planets and can do many of the same things. Invest enough modules in them and they become planets in all but name/shape.

Most rings/spheres are depicted as having shells that are far far thicker than the diameter of most stars.  That is what makes them so resource intensive.  Such a structure with a shell only a few hundred meters thick, would require far less.  Between super-materials that outperform even graphene and carbon nanotubes, and field systems capable of reducing and properly distributing changes in load stresses, the shells of such structures can be radically lessened.  Since only the most advance of species would even attempt it...such technologies are a bit of a forgone conclusion.

Almost any protoplanetary system would actually have more than enough to construct a small Dyson's Sphere.  Since most such systems occur within stellar nurseries, the surrounding nebula can easily make up any deficit of material to build larger ones, if desired.  Fleets of EM ramscoop harvesters could spiral their way out from the protostar and collect material packing it into solid blocks and launch it in-system toward the construction site.

Younger stars or even protostars would be preferable, as gravity projection and EM projection systems built into the interior surface of the shell can more effectively artificially regulate the star's processes and keep it stable and efficient throughout its (likely vastly extended as a result) lifespan.

That would be the bare-bones beginning to such structures.  Fully realized civilizations would have the capability to convert energy directly into mass of whatever form they desire.  Any kind of theoretical artificial "White Hole" would likely be a combination of technologies exploiting the Casimir effect, and those exploiting the Higgs field to drastically alter the properties of all mass within its functional zone.

- - - - -

What's most interesting is the derivative effect of such technologies.  A civilization at even the beginnings of such an endeavor would have access to ships nearly capable of safely passing the event horizon of a black hole, with materials that exploit currently unknown traits of electromagnetic and nuclear bonds to the point that they can largely resist on their own, the "spaghetti effect" of the tidal forces within a black hole.  Let alone the systems necessary to protect the crew within the ships.  Only the most destructive and powerful weapons would even be a threat, weapons capable of almost literally unmaking reality in a local area.

The most advanced of such species would be capable of literally forming ships on the fly, outfitted in any way they choose.  Destroying them would be nearly impossible even with universe-ending weapons, as essentially they'd be powered and supplied by a kind of self-contained micro-universe of their own.  On the off-chance you managed to damage such a vessel, it would almost instantly reform the damaged section.  Their weapons would be equally capable of rewriting reality to their whims, as it would unmaking it entirely.  The "ship", would really just be a novelty to protect the core, albeit still a necessary one.

I imagine the pinnacle would be a point where such a system is broken down to nanoscopic parts capable of interacting remotely, such that an individual would have trillions of the little machines integrated into their own bodies, responding directly to their neuroprocesses.  They'd be limited in their capacity and scope, but a single individual would essentially be able to do anything they want.  A large, or even a small, group of them would be able unmake or remake whole swaths of galaxies or more.  An entire civilization (billions or trillions or such beings) working in concert could probably birth a whole new universe equal to this one.

However, any similar civilization could do the same, and could do the same to another such civilization.  The only upshot is that while the forces involved would be god-like, its effects very likely wouldn't extend beyond their targets.  Collateral damage would be almost nonexistent.  They'd basically "will" each other out of existence (and back into existence, in the case of allies) until one side got enough of an upper hand to deal the final blow and be the last civ standing.

Well that rather digressed from the topic.  I apologize...

I have to say it would be harder to make a universe than a dyson sphere. So the Iconians don't have those kind of replicators. Then it can be an option for a tech tree, You could use some of the energy from a star to make the dyson sphere. I think it would be more feasible to make a big ball of frozen nitrogen, and blast it from every direction with a laser to make a small star. Then build a Dyson sphere. I do agree this would give someone a extreme amount of energy.

In any case, I'm going to assume you meant hydrogen?  Which, couldn't really be frozen at that point anyway, it would be far too massive even if only Earth-sized.  The pressure from its own weight would heat it to a gaseous state, but the pressure would also force it to remain liquid.  Impart enough energy evenly throughout the sphere, and turn up the pressure a bit more with some gravity generators, and then it should ignite...though it would be best to have the area shielded first since ignition will cause an effective omnidirectional CME.  Kind of a waste not to catch as much as possible and impart it back into the system.

But, that doesn't really affect constructing the thing.  If using "conventional", though highly advanced, construction techniques; it would still be necessary to harvest the construction material from somewhere.  If instead using even rudimentary energy -> matter conversion, it would take most of the star's output for a very long time to finish the sphere.

In any case, in game terms, the first ring would be in the upper-middle part of the tech tree, I think?  Then the sphere adaptation in the middle-upper sections.  All things considered, I think they should be resource intensive enough that only the one ring (heh...to rule them all) should be built, then expanded into the sphere later.  GalCiv really hand-waves resource scarcity, but hand-waving the requirements of a Dyson's Sphere is just much too far.

Perhaps it should also be necessary to have access to certain trade goods as well, or something of that nature, trade goods that are not part of the megastructure tech path, so that you have to research both separately to actually guarantee that you can build one...or else be forced to negotiate with other empires for what you need (because they'll be so willing to help you build an empire-sized star system).  So you can take the risk of not having what you need, or pass up the chance to research other useful techs.

Ultimately though...this idea really just makes me wish resource depletion were part of the game.  There's no elegance to any "strategies" (such as they are) in the games.  Brute force in whatever medium, Influence, Economy, Diplomacy, or Military, is pretty much the only thing to do, and that makes sense when everyone knows that nobody will ever run out of anything.  It's annoying...like watching very weak but very smart apes smash things with clubs rather than come up with better ideas, only because there are an infinite supply of clubs.

Oh well.

Club mine... So... ambiguous. Especially for our mine disappretiation club.

As for resource depletion, I wonder for how long you suggest us to exploit resource deposit before depletion, weeks, months, years, decades? At single session scale, resources depletion seems to be very distant event.

There were games with finite amount of resources and I'm not sure they are better.

Dark colony has finite amount of Petra-7 deposits, moreover, exploiters (local "harvesters") were accumulating damages for, well, exploiting. Here you could met situation when every mobile unit is lost and all you got are bases (immovable, can't sell them), "turrets" and mines. Stalemate.

C&C series to an extent had finite resources. But you could try barrel roll and sell base for final assault.

Settlers-like games generally have resources depletion, and IIRC depletion occured quite fast, yet only minerals (and rocks) were depleting, so in game like Knights and Merchants you really could end up with people whacking each other with clubs, lances and bows (so to speak), because metal has been depleted to make more advanced weaponry... Well, until you have gold, that is, to hire new recruits. After that, you doomed. Unless, of course, your opponent also lost all soldiers and resources to create them. Then game will be naturally endlessly peaceful, because no one will be starving - food is replenishable, and since there is no one to ruin the buildings, your empire could prosper. Stagnate, actually - you can't expand because there is no rock to construct buildings, and no gold to hire new people.

IIRC Hearts of Iron had limitless resources but constant deficit of rubber. Slightly different example, agree, but at the end there was little effect on game.

Older X-universe games had limitless resources, X-Rebirth got limited yield asteroids. Well, in theory - my mining ships refused to work, and, because my manufacturing plants weren't working (and I couldn't even build my refinary, because my freighters could trade), I can't test how that supply chain work, but in recent patches (where something, apparently, working, at times) there is already a bottleneck due insufficient resources. Giving crazy building patterns of AI-controlled stations...

Why don't we do a fairly simple calculation? How about we assume that we're talking about a 1-meter thick spherical shell around a star, and we'll give it a diameter equal to the average orbital diameter of (a) Mercury and (b ) Earth, and we'll assume that this shell is made of a material with a density of 1 kg/m^3 (which, I might add, is less than that of air at sea level).

In scenario (a), our Dyson Sphere requires about 4.2X10^22 kg of our wonder material, which is equivalent to about half the mass of the Moon. This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a small amount of material, and this is for a material which is lighter than air. In scenario (b ), we require about 2.8X10^23 kg of our wonder material, or roughly two-thirds of the mass of Mercury.

If we change our assumptions about the wonder material such that it now has a density similar to that of steel (about 8000 kg/m^3, variable depending on type of steel), scenario (a) requires a mass of 3.4X10^26 kg, which is equivalent to about 40% of Saturn or 3.4 Neptunes. Scenario (b ) requires a mass of about 2.3X10^27 kg, , which is about 1.2 Jupiters.

Regardless of which of the above scenarios you want to look at, you're looking at an extraordinary amount of mass even with an exceptionally generous set of assumptions about the size of your Dyson Sphere. The largest ships in GCII are roughly 2km in the largest dimension, so let's assume that we can manufacture a 2km-side cube for moving the material from wherever we make it to wherever we need it. This cube has a volume of 8 cubic kilometers; let's assume that all of that is used for the material. If we can transport material at a density equivalent to that of uranium (19100 kg/m^3), then in the most generous scenario (diameter equivalent to that of Mercury's orbit, density of 1 kg/m^3, shell thickness of 1m), we'll need enough material to fill 276 million of these cubes. This - by far - exceeds the apparent capabilities of the species and factions as seen in GCII.

Artificial moons and planets seem more reasonable, and space stations with sufficiently large populations to matter from an imperial tax revenue perspective (and possibly a research and industry perspective, rather than just the bonus given by certain types of stations to nearby worlds) seem to me the most reasonable mega-constructions suggested here.

To some extent, it's just a distinction of means, as even Star Trek replicators are just rearranging matter rather than creating it. For that matter, Iconian replicators are fairly likely to be much more energy-efficient than the Star Trek ones, though I can't say that Star Trek seems to be particularly concerned with energy efficiency on Federation starships.

I have to opt out on this one. I can't fathom a Dyson sphere. Unless I create a small star. We are most likely not talking about steel, but currently nonthing would work.

I envision something less like a set quantity, and more like a system of production/waste/recycling.  As long as your available resources combined with your recycling capacity are equal to or greater than your production/waste combined, you don't "use up" anything.  But just like in our world where we have perhaps a century of viable rare materials and fossil fuels remaining, overuse will deplete them.  Early techs would all cause significant depletion no matter what the player does, aside from keeping production low.

Basically, the idea is that the numbers of constructions that have existed in the GalCiv games, far exceeds the materials that would be available on the worlds that exist in the games.  Even if every planet were made of solid metal, you couldn't build that many ships and bases.  And less than 1% of any given planet is actually useful minerals. Nearly all of it will be common forms of stone and soil, water, and (assuming humans, a mostly nitrogen, CO2, and Oxygen atmosphere.  Sure, water and atmosphere can make for highly useful fuels, and are eminently abundant even on uninhabitable worlds.  But metals and the like are decidedly more rare...and the most useful ones are the rarest of all.  Carbon would be an ideal substitute, being more common than any metal or mineral variation, and also much better suited to a much wider variety of structures.

But ultimately, even many carbon planets wouldn't provide enough material to build the kinds of militaries seen in the average GalCiv game.  Obviously, this is hand-waving so that people can do as they like.  And to a certain extent, because of the abstraction of the game, it's necessary.  But I think it goes too far.  I think it's ok to double or triple up on the availability of resources in the game compared to reality.  It would account for the many more planets that likely exist in the star systems, compared to what's "visible".  Then there are the various debris fields in and around every system that are not really represented on the map.  The quantities of these are much greater than that of the worlds we see on the maps.

Ultimately, I realize it won't ever see use in the game, largely because too many people prefer the wildly swung blunt instrument approach to "strategy", but almost as much because too many times has it been implemented poorly by programmers who don't seem to understand exponential growth and its economic effects.

As for "wonder material" I'm not sure what the problem is...since we're talking about it all in the context of a game which abstracts stellar and galactic scales to the point of total absurdity, hand-waves resource scarcity into nonexistence, and MacGuffins in technologies that simply "work" for no good reason.  So, in a universe with unlimited resources, where scale is essentially meaningless and technologies exist or not at the whim of the developers...what point exactly are you trying to make here?

In real life, you're quite right...though I'm sure the "wonder material" wouldn't be all that wondrous and would probably be closely related to carbon nanotubes and the like.  It would very probably take far more carbon than is available in our entire star system to construct the thing, but since it would take generations to build anyway, it's the perfect excuse to take a slow boat to nearby systems to gather additional resources.

In reality, the density of the material will probably be on par somewhere with one of the heavier varieties of silk, judging by current carbon material examples, though I couldn't tell you what that value might be.  Frankly, it's irrelevant, as the mass would come from a wide variety of sources, and the overall construction would still necessitate the removal of every body orbiting the star, other than the star itself of course.

As for transporting materials...if we're going to go back to assuming the game...I'd pity the moron who didn't "jump" planets and whatnot to the site to be destroyed and utilized.  Who in their right mind uses traditional cargo transport for a project of that magnitude, especially in light of the engineering required to attempt it at all...in every way?  It's simply silly to make such an assumption of a species with the engineering know-how to design a functional such structure.  Their capacity to control gravity would, by necessity for such a project, be capable of vastly changing the manner in which FTL systems function.  I can't claim how they'd manage it, obviously.  But if I had the technology to make a Dyson's Sphere stable, it's impossible to conclude anything other than near total mastery of the interactions between energy, matter, and gravity.  It's simply irrational to make the assumption, within the context of the game, that such a civilization with those capabilities would "truck" their materials around like any common goods.  If they're building something that epic, they're GOING to develop an epic way to do it.  They'll warp/hyper jump whole worlds to be devoured and remade into parts.  And again, it would take generations.  Rather, dozens of turns, in GalCiv terms.

In the case of generators putting out almost infinite power, with converters turning that energy directly into usable matter, quantities and transportation become meaningless.  They would mosey along constructing sections of the sphere as they go.  Odds are, the planets' materials would still be incorporated in since they have to be destroyed anyway, but still.

At this point, I can only conclude you just wanted to show off your math skills.  Which is fine, and impressive...but you could have just said so instead of under the pretense of the topic.  The only other thing that could possibly be said would be that you can't say something is not justifiable in real life, and therefore not justifiable in the game...but turn around and say something in the game is justifiable solely because it's in the game, even if it's not justifiable in real life.  It can only be one way or the other, not both.

While assuming the possibility of 'super technologies', the classic solid Dyson Sphere and Ring generating their gravity centrifugally would suffer from needing a material beyond the density of Neutronium or tear themselves apart. The largest centrifugal ring using a matter based structure was, iirc, worked out to be 500,000 Km(300,000 Miles) at a max G load of 0.25.

Now if we use Dyson's actually proposed "ring of swarm objects" we have a system basically similar to the ring of communication satellites we have already established, except with a star as the center. 

Interesting system, I like it, and I think I remember games using something similar, but do not remember names. Could be wrong, but I think Kohan used system that is closest to it than anything I remember. For some reason I remembered Deadlock, but I think I'm wrong here - if I'm not mistaken, they had actual accumulation and storage. But they had logistic and transfering of resources from area to area too, and that's the thing I actually want to see in GC. Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander (even awful 2) used system partially based on the system you described, but still, it wasn't exactly the same. Anno and Cities XL are looming in front of "memory access port" , but I'm not sure why, probably because lack of certain resources could cause problems in functionality of built city, so, probably we should scrap that.

What actually rubs me the wrong way with traditional systems, is ack of auto adjustment of resources exctraction, to reflect their consumption. Overextraction simply led to waste of resources. Ironically, among few games that did adjustments was M.A.X. with infinite resources. IIRC all mining facilities and energy stations simply stopped should there be no more room in storage or consumers of power.

To be honest, to an extent Endless Space system may not be better (I'd simply call it "different"), but it adds certain flavour, with all that "Metallic waters" or "poor soil", even if on the long run it simply differentiates planets to help us determine most suitable for certain role. Like I said, it's not better than GC, but different from it. I like both, can't pick up favorite.

Within GC session a century of even excessive resources consumption would mean infinite supply, IMHO. And since we already have spacefaring races, that could their tech is more advanced than one we have. Including recycling and gathering of space scrap from after the battles.

Stone, soil and water? Think wider - cement!

IMHO for sessions that are going to occur on different maps, hence different planets, resources depletion factor would simply be irrelevant, due short term of actual session.

Plus, I wouldn't ignore factor of progress - many former/current deposits were/are abandonded because current methods of exctraction aren't effective. In theory, future development could give bonus to that. Of course, I don't mean we'll gain huge leap ahead, but from game session's perspective even 10 years worth resources would be significant.

*checks google*

Ok.Thoughs look cool,but don't the expansion packs have a free floating ring,and a sphere,though not as cool?

And I still miss read.Isn't that what an influence station would,almost,be?

I'm sure these calculations are possible if I understood the Dyson's sphere a little better. If he's using a machine it is actually less impressive than paper. If it was in the head like the one's I do I would then be blown away. It is quicker to do the calculations in the head though.