Planet types are all well and good, but I'd love to hear about variation in stars, especially now with the announcement of the Galactic War stretch goal meaning we'll see a whole bunch of different stars. Quirks of the stellar lifecycle has been referenced with discussions on black holes, binary stars and supernovae, I've even seen neutron stars brought up. While the star in a system may seem incidental to gameplay if it isn't blowing up, in a lot of ways a star can really be thought of as a reflection of the system you'll find orbiting it, and its parameters. A young main sequence could usually be found with a higher density of asteroids, in an accretion disc not yet collapsed into planetoids, for instance. A large red main sequence star, late in life, would typically have fewer planets than a young one, having engulfed its nearby rocky ones earlier. In other words, rather than picking a star, the kind of system you generate with sliders like "number of planets" or "asteroid density" or what have you, could average out and determine the hue and size and intensity of the star that would most likely have those features. [[EDIT: Of course, when I say all this, a lot of the rules for procedurally determining star type based on orbiting bodies could be arbitrarily invented, given the limitations and amount of guesswork in our current knowledge of exoplanets, let alone stellar formation, but food for thought!]] Stellar variation could have gameplay implications, too, the most obvious being a means of having handicaps on the utility of solar for certain maps. Slower solar collection for everyone could entirely alter the pace of gameplay, and you'd have an adorable little dwarf star to shake your fist at for the adversity.
This isn't something we've talked about yet, but yes I do agree different star types have the potential for all sorts of gameplay changes. I don't think it's our intention to be especially dependent on real world physics for how different stars would actually effect a system so we can bend some rules there for some purely visual differences. However, this will be something I'm sure we'll experiment with.
That's roughly what I'm hoping for, two-way generation. Like if you're setting up a custom skirmish, your settings could indirectly influence the star properties as a suggestion (but could be manually overidden so as not to be inflexible), but in a galactic map it'd generate the stars randomly first, then use that as a guide to propagate diverse kinds of systems. Random stars/satellites would be cool too if it didn't fit into the procedural stuff elegantly, I mainly just want to see some deep red cooling giants and dwarves among all the main sequence yellows
Yeah this is a good way of applying whatever kind of system-wide effects are warranted, or interesting. Having localized anomalies limited to planets, and simultaneously star anomalies that affect every planet in the system allows for a tremendous diversity of different battlegrounds with very little complexity.
