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[Sir Pseudonymous]

You can place a colony on any floating rock, and the only restriction to populating those colonies is gravity. Temperature and atmosphere aren't a hard boundary, but get even .1% outside your species' tolerance for gravity and it can't support anyone. :/

Now, temperature and pressure can drive up the colony cost so high it becomes effectively impossible to colonize, but there's not a hard limit saying "if it's hotter than X, you can't settle there". Both temperature and pressure can be changed through terraforming.

Not that I ever got that far, before finding the game so obnoxious and poorly designed that I stopped playing, but I did go through the tutorial, at least.

[MrWiggles]

Well, from an aside comment made by Steve, you don't have artificial gravity on yer ships. Go figure.

Also, the sensor dont sent out gravity pulses, but is sensitive to something like higgs boson or something like that. You need EM sensors to detect active sensors.

[Paul]

You can build small bases (PDCs) and put troops on worlds outside your gravity range, they just can't support large colonies.

But, like I said earlier, the gravity range is easily changeable. Default tolerance is between 0.3 and 1.7, but you could easily change that to a range from 0 to 2, or even 0 to 1.7 if you wanted to keep the high gravity limit in place. Or maybe 0.1 to 1.7. All you have to do is adjust two numbers and presto.

[Sean Mirrsen]

The problem is that it's a percentage, making finding the necessary range needlessly difficult. Also, kills some of the possibilities for odd races - that, for example, have their ideal value close to an extreme for that parameter. Or races with physical limitations. For example, a theoretical race of ice golems. Their ideal temperature is -20, that allows them to still have flowing water if it's needed. However, they can easily live without supporting infrastructure in any temperatures below zero, up to and including absolute zero. Above just five degrees though, it's lethal for them.

[Areyar]

Even an icegolem will have a serious problem with absolute zero, unless its metabolism centers around superconductivity and doesnt require movement or body fluids etc...well hydrogen and helium will be liquid at zero K.

Well sir Sean, I challenge thee to come up with a race generator algorithm that will be able to create races with the wide ranging parameters you desire as well as standard races.

...maybe a new class of extremoxenos is an idea. (extreme pressure, heat, cold, no atmo, radiation, water, etc)
A problem I can see with that idea is that the systemgenerator almost only checks for aliens at earthnormal planets, adding all these others has the potential of overpopulating the universe, as well as potentially ruining gameplay by removing the lebensraum motive for aggression. 

[Sean Mirrsen]

You still have terraforming or biodomes for temperature/atmosphere, and only high gravity really matters in most cases.

As for an algorithm... what algorithm? If you want sufficiently alien races, just randomize the ideal values and the plus/minus margins. I remember a short story by Isaac Asimov where Jupiterians (yes, creatures living on Jupiter. On the solid surface of Jupiter, under the atmosphere) decided to attack a human colony on Ganymedes as soon as they realized they were there, just because they weren't like them.

[Areyar]

Weren't you the one agitating against the fixed tolerance spread?

Or that Kevin Anderson epos, with those ancient elemental alien alliances.
The Hydrogues (on the face of it) attacked without provocation besides a bit of atmospheric mining.
Did so by opening the airlock of one of their ships in the palace of the human hansa league IIRC. ><

[Paul]

Sean,

It's a percentage when you start the game, but ingame you can set the actual values under the Environmental Tolerances section of the Race Details screen. Starting a basic game sets you to the human race, so it's assuming you're at least similar to human tolerances. Start as an SM race and then you can create more races with whatever tolerances you want.

For instance, heres an example of the extremes you can put on creatures:

Code: [Select]

Breathes: Methane
              Min   Max
Gravity(G):    0     1
Oxygen(atm):  .1     1 (it says oxygen but in this case its methane)
Temperature: -500    0
Pressure (atm): 100
This crazy critter is easily made using SM mode. It breathes methane, can live on anything from no gravity to earth gravity, needs anywhere between 0.1 and 1 atmospheres of methane, can live on worlds as cold as -500, but above 0 they require infrastructure. And they can live under up to 100 atmospheres of pressure (Venus? no problem, just need to replace a bit of the nitrogen or CO2 with 0.1 methane - although in this case that would be way too hot, but you get my point).

[Micro102]

I was thinking, could you play with multiple people on the same computer? Make more then one race player controllable then switch back and forth?

[Paul]

I was thinking, could you play with multiple people on the same computer? Make more then one race player controllable then switch back and forth?

Yea. You can. You'd kinda have to be sitting there together, though. Either that or have agreed upon turn lengths or something, but then a policy on interupts would be needed too (otherwise player Y passes time while player X's ships get blown up by precursors without orders). If you're together you could just watch the SM mode logs in order to watch both of your events and when something happened for one player they could react to it then start passing time again.

Playing against eachother might be hard, though - since you'd see everything the other guy is doing.

You can create as many races as you want. You can even make more than one race on the same planet. There are AARs on the forums where people have made a bunch of races for different Earth countries and played it out like that. Or even two races on different moons orbiting the same gas giant, with wars going back and forth as they launch missiles from world to world trying to kill eachother.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Why is it that you essentially have to turn on cheats to have fun in this game?

If race generation is available to Spacemasters, why not make it available in normal games? Ditto for choosing start locations.

[forsaken1111]

Why is it that you essentially have to turn on cheats to have fun in this game?

You can play the game just fine without using SM mode...

[Sean Mirrsen]

I know that. Or maybe not. I can't get fifteen minutes through without it CTDing on me, even without SM mode.

[Micro102]

That sounds more like a system requirement type of thing. Something must be incompatible with the game.


Also, are ICBM's useful at all? I started out on conventional and looked at their stats. The chance to hit was 0 all the way. They are so slow too. I'm guessing this is just RP due to the world getting ready to nuke each other, but then why is the PPV so high?

[Areyar]

I was thinking, could you play with multiple people on the same computer? Make more then one race player controllable then switch back and forth?

Yes.
Hotseat is the only MP type supported.
PMEM would be problematic with mailing the entire (rather big) database back and forth, but is possible.
   
Have a SpaceMaster (ie dungeonmaster) who creates the campaign, sets up the various PCR for the players and locks the various races with a password (as well as the SM password).