Natural Catastrophies

I was going to say almost exactly this. Manipulating the environment by burning forests or nuking oceans would be great, but random earthquakes opening chasms under my army would be a big bag of bollocks.

All hail the absolutely controlled sterile ladder/tournament games!

But really, I'd love to have some optional randomness in casual/ai skirmish games. Perhaps a mode where the system goes through clouds of asteroids at random (but known!) intervals, lightly bombarding all planets on one side/hemisphere. Those sides are metal rich, and a building could survive if lucky.

I probably wouldn't like absolutely random stuff (like storms or floods on single planets that gimp one player), but things like that meteor storm mode, or sudden death, would be neat to have. Or if that's easily moddable/mapable, that would be fine too.

I can think of some rather interesting game modes you can actually make this way.

Imagine a nice juicy system with a large sun and some planets on it. Everyone starts on the inner most, big, planet which is being drawn into the sun in 30 minutes. It is just a race outwards to the edge of the system to be the sole survivor as more and more planets are drawn into the sun.

Fun! Sort of a race during your battle for domination.

I think we've all had that thought.

All I have to say about this "It does sound like a good mod", also mentioned by the devs.
Im pretty sure someone will create this.

well you dont even have to mod it, 15 minutes in the map editor and you'd be set.

I dont want to have Catastrophies in normal games, it would just be to "random".

All of these things should be at the hand of an opponent and all of these bad play styles can be just as easily punished by one. A player who puts all their eggs in one basket can get whacked by an asteroid sent by a player. I don’t want random game disasters to do my job for me and helping me win the match, it would be a very hollow victory indeed.

yogurt312 has it right here, people who turtle have plenty of disadvantages to be exploited by an opponent by having a lack of territory control, resources and being vulnerable to asteroid strikes.

To put it simply, I have nothing against asteroid strikes, forest fires and so on, but they really should be triggered by players.

That is a bit uncharitable not to mention inaccurate, you are equating competitive players as being the only ones who do not like randomness and that is simply not true. I normally play against friends, or with them against an AI so I would hardly call myself a competitive player for instance, but I am pretty well against the idea of randomness in a strategy game.

I agree on this note, and this is really what I am speaking out against.
I have no issues with people modding the most crazy things imaginable, the engine is being built from the ground up to be moddable so go nuts! On top of that I would really like to see a “Planetary Annihilation” or “Natural Catastrophe” game mode for instance where the starting planets are heading on a collision course, or both have asteroids heading towards them. That still allows for a game mode with natural catastrophes to be acting as an unavoidable disaster whilst not having them as a random entity which has the potential for frustration and hollow victories.