About the Planet Screen

I've Got an Idea

from GalCiv3 Forums

I heard that there's going to be a major overhaul of the planet management screen before the final release. I'm not sure what the plans for that are, but if it's not too late I've got an idea about it.

Taking the place of the existing map, the actual spherical planet would be the interface. Like in Google Earth or Star Chart rotating the planet would be the way get to different areas of it.

Instead of hexagonal tiles where one building can be placed. I'm thinking there should more organic boundaries between regions, where regions are more than just one hexagon on the planet and those regions can have/build more buildings than one at a time. (The hexagons would probably be smaller)

Lastly, it might be cool to have these "organic" regions grow and divide as the planet's population grows. Also, now that the actual planet would be the interface the player would see and interact the regions from orbit instead of tiles with building icons.

I'm not sure what modifications like these would do to the gameplay, but I think it would make planet management more fun and realistic. Adjacent bonuses could be replaced by having certain buildings in the same region (where regions have a limited number of buildings) and players might make choices between surface usage or population density (where higher population density allows more buildings in a region and surface usage creates more regions with lower building limits).

What are the plans for the planet screen by the way and what do you think of this idea?

6,847 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

A nice idea for GC4+.  Probably beyond the scope of the GC3 AI.

This could be the First Compromise in (new) 4X game design: How do we make it tractable for the AI?  Hex connectivity with adjacency bonuses is already an interesting and challenging problem, and I'd like to see Stardock solve that first, and then use that new expertise to branch out into other hex-map games.

Me, I would love irregular region boundaries ... because then we could model the Znutar from Awful Green Things from Outer Space :') .  But such a map becomes a general 2D graph, and then your AI must embed a graph reasoner.  That sounds like a decent premise for a young game company: start with a graph library, graph-crawling algorithms, maybe pattern recognition via subgraph isomorphism, ..., then see what kind of kewl game you could build on top of it.  Tactical RPG with varying-size groundprints for different creature sizes?  Frame dragging close to rotating black holes?

First you'd hire a couple of Lead Mathematicians.  It's such a deep idea that you really can't do it justice as a graft-on or secondary thought within any simpler infrastructure.

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I agree that planet management needs to be overhauled. The post idea might work. Here's my idea. You could use a city screen as a colony screen maybe bigger size for a range a classes. Use citizens like in civilization to represent population. You could build buildings more like they do in civilization where you can get a 3d view of your colony. You could have your citizens work tiles, specialise, or work buildings. Class could dictate what kind of resources you have to work and population cap. 

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