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[Aklyon]

I knew that was the joke, I was saying they could turn it into its own effect instead of just stability, because spaaaace. An effect that involves losing stability anyway

[Kot]

Cause fake comets over planets with non-space faring civilizations just to fuck with them.

[Loud Whispers]

Bah! Superstitious nonsense!

[Catastrophic lolcats]

Stop looking at the sky!

[sambojin]

But that's where Jesus lives. He's having a bbq with Papa Nurgle this weekend.

[Orange Wizard]

I hear they invited the President, so we need to make sure he gets there on time.

* Orange Wizard cocks a gun.

[sambojin]

By god, you'd better hope he's got a successor first.

[Teneb]

It's that day of the week again.

[sambojin]

Thank god. We almost had nothing to talk about there.

Hmmm. I understand the idea of efficiency bonuses, but in power stations, that's almost the opposite of the way it works currently irl. Kind of. It would be easier to get fuel resources to the plants, and even establish the infrastructure needed for them if they were all grouped together, but the losses of transmission would outweigh that efficiency for a planetary wide system.

I guess with large scale use of room temperature superconductors for transmission to the site of use it makes sense. Or other forms of transmission.

I'm probably over-thinking it. Since energy is literally a resource in the game, it's probably best to think of power plants not really making electricity at all. Just "energy". Which does stuff.

I guess we'll hear more in coming weeks.

[Shadowlord]

XCOM also uses adjacency bonuses on power (and labs, and workshops).

I'm not sure if there's any reasoning behind it in either case other than to make the player want to consider carefully how to arrange their buildings for optimum efficiency.

[Culise]

Yep.  Energy sounds a lot like they were inspired by SMAC's use of energy in like fashion, which covered facilities like Energy Banks or Thermocline Transducers, but was also altered through facilities like the various Labs and Tree Farms.  The adjacency bonus may be meant to represent economies of scale in part, grouping large numbers of similar (but indeterminate) production facilities together, but that's likely a post-hoc rationalization of what was primarily a gameplay decision.  XCOM was actually my immediate thought on similarity, too. ^_^

[sambojin]

I got M.U.L.E, but with pop instead of game turns being the base resource for that land/building type combo, and extra efficiencies based on building adjacency. I wonder if they'll have an improvement in economic buildings over time (people get better at doing stuff if they've been doing it, or producing that stuff, longer)?

Food/minerals/energy/pop is a fairly tried and tested system for 4X games, no matter the individual takes on it. Could be good, could be bad.

[Majestic7]

I was kind of hoping for generic resources and super rare strategic resources, so we'd have reasons to fight wars over otherwise useless shitholes (cough Arrakis cough). Something like wormholes requiring unobtanium, warp drives grimdarkium and so forth. It would work as an organic limit for how many ships you can build at the same time as well.

[Teneb]

I was kind of hoping for generic resources and super rare strategic resources, so we'd have reasons to fight wars over otherwise useless shitholes (cough Arrakis cough). Something like wormholes requiring unobtanium, warp drives grimdarkium and so forth. It would work as an organic limit for how many ships you can build at the same time as well.

They did mention how they'd talk about rare resources next week. Maybe the spice can flow.

[RadtheCad]

Looks like fun, but I'm keeping my expectations low in case it disappoints.  Christ, can't someone just make a version of Aurora that's not in VB and that has some user-friendliness?

[Long-winded rant]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It's sad to me that that's the only space 4x game I've found that portrays space on a really cool scale, what with having each body (asteroids inclusive) in a solar system be 'rendered' and binary-star solar systems, for example, being MASSIVE to the point that it can take months to years for a ship to cross one.  I'd much rather a 4X game with 10 in-depth solar systems that each feel big than what we have now, 100s of them, but nothing about their scale stands out and getting from one to the next is trivial; there's no proper sense of scale.  If the game starts you off in our solar system, you don't feel like Pluto is hugely far away, for example; and also, so many single player 4X strategy games feel like...  well, poor man's multiplayer matches.  All the AI races are just like you, in a big race for resources and stuff.

I'm hoping this game will have something of a representation of the scale of space like that, given paradox's grand strategy titles. Example:  in Vicky 2, there exist weak and, at the start of the game, uncivilised African nations, who are at a massive disadvantage and who clearly aren't on the same playing field as the other groups.  They're not a serious danger to someone playing, say, Britain, but they add spice to the game and make things more interesting.  I'd like something like that in a game like this...  things that aren't just conventional 'other players races', real anomalies that are an anomaly in gameplay as well as fluff.  There's plenty of weird shit to draw from in Sci-fi...  Rorschach from Blindsight, for example, or maybe just a bunch of replicators who went lose in a system and turned its planets to grey goo, then went dormant (till you wake them up).  Something like that.  Things that are in the game, that can act, that can be massively important (maybe because of a toned-back number of systems) that aren't just trying to win the game.  /rant

I'm not actually expecting this game to be that, of course, and I'm sure plenty of people would hate it if it was.  I can dream, though.  Or just make my own, I guess.  I've nothing against soft, fantasy sci-fi games like this one seems to be shaping up to be, (I like them, too) I just wish there was something other than freaking Aurora on the hard-ish sci-fi 4X game 'market'.

(If you're going to take anything away from this heap of a post, then go read Blindsight.  It's free online, and it's pretty good.)