How would you like to not just play with planets, but with the stars themselves? And create super-massive structures and weaponry out of them. First, I assume there will be 3 types of star present at the beginning of a galactic war. Brown dwarfs, yellow dwarf and supergiants. Check out the flow chart Brown dwarfs are failed stars because they did not have enough mass to start a hydrogen fusion reaction. So if you would like to make them into a yellow dwarf, just throw in one or two gas giants. Why would I do that, you tell me? Simple, the ends justify the means. And the rewards will be greater than one or two gas giants. Once you have a yellow dwarf, just like the sun, you can blow it up. The result will be first, total system annihilation and second, the birth of a white dwarf. A white dwarf is essentially compressed ball of carbon the size of earth. Its still glowing and very hot. Now the player would have two choices. Either you turn it into a black dwarf or you hurl the white dwarf into a supergiant. To make a black dwarf you need to cool down the white dwarf so the carbon can crystallize and your units land without melting. Now that's done, what do you have? A diamond the size of a planet. A planet impervious to future bombardment. And with a pretty high ratio for material extraction. Now, if you chose to throw the white dwarf in a neighboring supergiant, both stars will collapse and you will have two possible results, a black hole or a neutron star. And yes it will be another system annihilation. With a black hole you could build a Dyson sphere around it and collect super-massive amounts of energy. You have 3 choices with a Neutron star. 1)Build a gamma ray bomb: A onetime gamma ray burst in all direction that would destroy all units in several systems but leaving the planets intact. Ripe for the piking. 2)Build a gamma ray projector: kind of a sniper rifle instead of a bomb. You would be able to gamma ray single planets also leaving it intact. But it would be farther than the bomb. 3)Turn it into a Quark star. With a Quark star, you would be able to build a stable wormhole to anywhere in the galaxy. Able to attack anywhere in an instant. Sending hurls of asteroids into another players far away systems. Thanks for reading and check out the flow chart.
Sorry but I think such feature will blow the scope of the game. Also It would be really cost intensive to make it work for a game like PA. You would need alot of new units & mechanics, for example how do you move gas planets? They dont have a solid surface to build trusters on so you need first a working soloution wich makes sense from a player perspective. Then, when u finally managed to throw the planets into the brown dwarf to turn it into a yellow dwarf and then blew it up (which causes total system annihilation as u said), which means that not only enemy planets but also your own stuff will be killed... makes sense huh?^^ Well at this point it would be a draw unless u have another solar system. Ok then you need to find a way coming back to your white draw, since everything is annihilated in this system you first need to search a soloution for this... (no stargates ect.). Ok now you finally manged to arrive the white draw, how can u cool it down? It's still SUPER hot, u would need an infinite amount of energy to do this or something like "space magic". But I want to throw my white draw into the neighbours system. But it's so HOT, I cant touch it, so I choose space magic to throw it into my neighbours super giant. After I annihilated the system and getting a neutron star (I'm lucky) I build a super dooper mega gamma ray bomb out of it to absolutely annihilate everything... GG
They have already said that stars are just a background item. Nothing can be done with them, and you can't throw anything into them.
as far I know the rts part is limited to system level. therefore, most of the suggestions would be good strategies for self annihilation.
Your'e right, it would be very impractical for a small skirmish with a few systems. That is why I mentioned "at the begining of a galactic war". In a galactic war there will be plenty of systems to go around. And when you will be managing 20 to 30 systems at a time. The game will scale up. Yes, but it would be a nice addition and uniqueness to a galactic war. And if enough people want it, Uber's gonna make it. It could very well be a device similar to a Dyson sphere. Enveloping the planet and using it as a power source. Right again, but if you have the power to plung a gas giant into a star. Why could'nt you evacuate a system before blowing it up. Putting the planets you want to keep in orbit of another star. Right again!!! Then perhaps you would be better off building a black hole and a dyson sphere energy generator around it, before you try to cool down a white dwarf. You simply research the proper tech, could be yet another dyson sphere device. In a galactic war, the game is not over yet. They can modify this in a future update. So we can play with the stars.
Physics- not all supergiants are the same, some are the mass of the sun (i.e. old sun), and some are insanely massive, only the super massive ones become neutron stars or black holes. Ignoring the lack of known star crashing physics, well my educated guess is that you get a huge nova as they meet, fusion starts all across the impact zone and blows away a lot of mass, so you'd end up with less than the sum of both. If you decide neutron star is an outcome of star collision then black holes must be an option. Also, if you look at Jupiter compared to the sun, adding one or two would likely not change it much, a brown dwarf with a few Jupiter at best becomes a red dwarf, or a slightly bigger brown dwarf. And a dyson sphere around only black holes is silly, a dyson sphere around any real star is an insane amount of energy. These processes are over billions of years normally, you won't be able to jump start them over night (so millions of years instead? 1000x thousands of years? 1000000x). If we scale years to minutes, we're still talking huge amounts of time for these to happen in game. Gameplay- You seem to have a redundant number of system annihilation's in this set up... Also, this becomes a race to the superweapon game, and I don't want that. An exponential economy and weapon cost structure that would be needed for this to happen on any level of plausibility would make your units near meaningless or were talking insane numbers of them (I'm thinking 10k or 100k ranges min.), so we have a huge gap between unit combat and star doom weapon combat, which in the process, kills the commander... This is big, I like big, but I think it's not fleshed out enough and too jaring. It's like going from a game managing ant colonies and all of a sudden you're a giant mutant ant killing all humans. Actually... this reminds me of spore scaling now that I think about it...
I got my idea from a Thwacke consulting article, a consulting firm specialized in the science behind video games. They provide advice to video game studios about the science behind their game to make them more realistic/plausible. InExile are currently consulting them for Wasteland 2. The article is a superb read on how stars are applied to video games and the science behind it. Here's the article link. And the white dwarf, supergiant collision idea came from this; If I understand you correctly you feel the player would leap technologically way to fast from a Type#1 civilization to a Type#3 civilization. (YouTube link on what Civ types are) It's true that only a type#3 civ. would be able to do that. So the fleshing out would be to find tech and weapons of a type#2 civ. before going into type#3? As for the grand scheme of things. I don't know exactly how the galactic war is going to work. But if it is an ongoing clan war, as the sphere of influence of a clan grows the inner systems become relatively safe. So the clan leaders can begin major projects like building a gamma ray projector sacrificing 2 systems. If the whole process take a week, for an ongoing clan war, it's not that bad.
I had forgot in the case of a white dwarf it is technically a supernova, when gas giants/normal stars do that type of thing it's just a nova. My point was more trying to get at that you're making what seems to be the core gameplay meaningless after a certain point. It becomes races to build the interstellar superweapons and who can blow up the other commander in an interstellar first strike every match.
Playing with stars would be a great thing for mods to be possible, but it may be outside of the scope of this game. What I'd like to see, though, is some gameplay around unstable stars, where players can build devices to cause or prevent the star to become an expanding gas giant, a nova or a super-nova. But using more advanced star engineering than that sounds too exaggerated, even for this game. And there's the risk to irk people by not respecting some basic stuff. For example, cooling a white dwarf would be a far more difficult feat than blowing a star up. Naturally, white dwarf take far, far longer than the current age of the Universe to even begin to cool down, so accelerating the process like that would sound ridiculous. Also, the surface gravity of such an object would be something like 1000g, so units would probably not work there. It's not a carbon ball, btw, but a (very dense) iron ball. A minor detail is that if you throw two brown dwarfs at each-other, you obtain a red dwarf, not a Sun-like yellow dwarf, to nitpick. That said, I like the idea of using black holes and neutron stars as special places to build super-weapons (as long as they are another option, but not plain ultimate game-enders, those aren't that fun). Using them to cause X-ray or magnetic blasts, or throw relativistic jets sounds quite awesome. (And you linked to a video of Michio Kaku. You should be ashamed of yourself.)
I wanna blow up the sun, like any insane mastermind would do . These things are all robots correct? If the only acceptable outcome is the 'Complete Annihilation of the other' as in TA, and all things considered you have no chance to win, then blowing up the Sun and everything around it would do the job nicely. If not in Multiplayer then perhaps an answer to wipe out the AI once and for all in the Galactic War.
The Halo rings destroyed organic life... How are you going to blow up a sun? Throw a planet into it? Use a gigantic space mirror? The scale of a sun is obscene. It is obscene even for the smallest stars we know (like our own). An entire metal world death star could shoot at one, and all you get is a nasty sun spot. The only reason we don't bother with these scales, is because a real scale sun will blot out the interface. You wouldn't be able to see anything else. Hence, they're mostly cosmetic.
