The ability to reconfigure the map is a lot of fun and it opens up so many interesting strategic possibilities! I've been doing things like dragging all my captured Eaxax planets off to the end of a long chain to see if I can get them far enough away from everybody to make them happy (yes, finally), and relocating all my Chato worlds to bright suns, and boring new starlanes to suddenly invade enemy territory from their secure backfield (bwahaha). It's great!
A few thoughts I had to improve things even further:
- It would be really handy to have a system option to automatically rename planets when they're moved to a new star. I don't really care about planet names except as an indicator of where they are on the map, so if I move Hawking III from Hawking to Calafia, it can be Calafia-something now. Would this be possible? I was reading something somewhere else that seemed to suggest that renaming things after galaxy creation was undesirable...
- New starlanes are great fun, but they often don't end up where I really want them. I thought of two ways to improve their placement, and I think that both should be fairly easy to implement, and that they would be viable together.
- Rather than building the shortest starlane with a Starlane Bore, what you really want most of the time is the starlane that gives you the best improvement in travel time. Using the network distance between two stars, you can calculate it as:
There are two ways to think about this. First, you say, okay, I want the biggest drop in travel time, which is old minus new. However, that has the problem that if you're at the edge of the galaxy, a big long starlane that runs along the outside has a very large absolute improvement. So you divide by the new length to downweight building really long starlanes. But you also don't want to build little bitty short starlanes that just shorten a path that wasn't all that long in the first place, so you also multiply by the old length to favor starlanes that shorten long paths. Equivalently, you can think of this formula as picking the starlane with the best combination of absolute improvement (the difference between old and new) and relative improvement (the ratio of old to new).
Code: Select all
(old - new) * old / new
(There's a further elaboration where you could calculate the total improvement for each star and all their immediate neighbors, but that's a lot of extra work and I don't think it would give you a different answer very often.) - It would also be great to specify where the new starlane should go by hand. I think the best way to do that would be to reuse the Planetary Beacon. It makes sense in terms of game lore and it's easy for the player to understand, because both uses are very similar. It also makes development easy, because it can leverage existing code and assets. And it allows for some interesting strategic scenarios, like needing to get a stealthy ship with a mobile beacon on it into the heart of enemy territory to open up a new starlane to their homeworld.
If the beacon doing double duty, it probably needs a more general name. Maybe something like "subspace beacon". You then likely want to make it a prerequisite in the tech tree to both Planetary Starlane Drive and Starlane Bore. You could give it to Gravitronics, and make that a prereq for PSD (shifting PSD one tier later). Then Gravitronics is even more overstuffed than it already is, though, so I would shift Scrying Sphere to, say, Mind of the Void to compensate. (Might wanna do that regardless, honestly.) Alternately, if you want to leave PSD where it is, you could put the beacon with Interstellar Lighthouse, change the name and description of Interstellar Lighthouse to be something about gravity waves or subspace radar, and make it a prereq for both PSD and Gravitronics. - A little bit of UI enhancement: once a Starlane Bore is in the queue, it would be nice to see a dotted line on the map showing where it will be built. There are some possible strategic elements here: if other empires have sufficient detection to see buildings on your planets, then they could see the dotted line, too, and possibly respond! This would give another case where planetary building stealth is interesting and useful. It would allow for a scenario where an enemy could see the Starlane Bore under construction and deploy a mobile beacon to redirect it at the last minute.
- Rather than building the shortest starlane with a Starlane Bore, what you really want most of the time is the starlane that gives you the best improvement in travel time. Using the network distance between two stars, you can calculate it as:
- The Starlane Nexus is pretty keen, but I was disappointed when I built one in a system that was sticking out into the middle of a ring-shaped galaxy and it didn't span all the way across the middle. I guess there's currently a distance limit on the new starlanes? Hopefully the suggestion in 2a would make it easier to handle cases like this; I think a sudden set of new lanes spanning a big gap would be really interesting.
Anyway, I had a couple of ideas about the nexus concept that I thought were interesting. I haven't thought deeply about these, so they might be a mess, but I wanted to share them in case they caught anybody else's attention. The first is that instead of building the new starlanes all at once, you could have the Starlane Nexus build one new starlane per turn until it runs out of available connection points or its owner shuts it off. Could make for some interesting situations. Another idea is what if instead of building new starlanes, the nexus redirected existing ones to itself? It would be interesting if the effect of a nexus was to force all traffic between stars within some radius (say 100 uu) to pass through the nexus. Or maybe if it built new starlanes to every star in range and then destroyed any existing starlanes that crossed. I'm not at all sure that would be more useful than what it currently does, but it would definitely be interesting!