FreeOrion

When i was relatively new to the project, i created this topic on terraforming. Looking back, i think the idea was too complicated.

These are the basic rules for terraforming. It has been argued that something more complex should be put in place, but you can always add complexity later.

With the terraforming tech you can terraform a planet to any EP. However you can only terraform one step at a time. Functionally terraforming is like a building project. It has a rather high PP for each step around the EP wheel. Thus planets with an EP near your desired EP will be much more desirable targets because they can be terraformed at 1/4 the time and PP that would be required for the worst EPs. This is IMHO sufficient.

Once the step is complete the terraforming "building" disappears and the planet's EP is changed.

Some have argued that terraformed planets should be "fragile" and with some sort of attack could be reverted to their original form. However this only make sense with certain EPs. For instance if you terraformed an ocean planet into a barren one, it would make absolutely no sense for the barren planet to revert to it's former state for any reason. Since reversion doesn't make sense for all EPs it should not be included.

Tech tree:

Planetary Geology (30) + Planetary Ecology (30)

allow Terraforming (45) —requires colony on the planet. each step on the EP wheel requires

Nanotech Production (80) + Orbital infrastructure (30)

allows Advanced Terraforming (120) —faster and only requires a colony in the same system

Sentient Auto-factories (120) + The Living Planet (50) + Asymptomatic Materials (120)

allows Gaian Terraforming (250) —can add the Gaian special to any planet (which is better than a specie's EP)

Terraforming ships are another idea from the old thread, but that would require ships in the tech tree, which we don't have yet.

I should be able to figure out the scripting to add these to the tech tree.

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It may not be necessary to make more advanced terraforming cost less PP. Just being able to do it (much) faster is probably enough incentive to get the more expensive techs.

In your proposed new techs, do the later terraforming techs require the earlier ones?

The tech tree scripting should be trivial - just copy an existing theory tech or application that does nothing (there are a few) and change the stringtable entries and cost. Since there won't be anything to unlock and the techs won't have any direct effect, there's no complicated effects scripting to be done.

To make it possible to build a terraforming project, we'd need to add the capacity to add "actions" or "projects" or somesuch to the production queue. These would cost PP and take time to build, and when complete, would cause an effect to fire, probably for one turn. That effect would change the planet type (environment) in the case of terraforming projects.

Alternatively, something like the above could be hacked with the current system by making a building that changes its planet's type once, then does nothing in subsequent turns. I forget if there's a destroy effect, but if so, the building could destory itself after firing the terraforming effect.

(Aside: we might also want "ongoing projects" or somesuch, which cost PP each turn, but which also have effects that fire every turn...)

Also, FYI I've made (almost?) every tech cost 1 PP and take 1 turn to research in SVN. There's not much point in maintaining a pretense of balance at this point, especially when it comes at the cost of making things much slower to test.

Also also, there are ships in the tech tree now. You could make a tech that unlocks a nominal terraforming ship part, although it wouldn't yet do anything. See the techs in techs.txt that have names starting with SHP_ Unlocking is done in a manner resembling

Is Terraforming going to require PP to build or Food?

I kinda like the idea of having the game "remember" the original state of a planet. this way you can restrict terraforming to only changing environment by 1 or 2 steps(from native state) instead of changing it completely. (Stars! did something similar.)

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That would pretty much remove Gaian Terraforming as a possibility* since Gaian is always the best for your race, or it is a self terraforming world that soon ends up as the best for your race, I forget witch was decided on.

* Unless you were talking only about the earlier techs.

Although I must say I like the idea of war affecting a planets environment, while it might make little sense in some cases the idea has merit so we should at least have a discussion on it. My suggestion would be that rather than any drastic change from one environmental to another some weapons just create a temporary ecological instability planetary special witch makes the the planet count as an additional X steps away on the EP wheel for all races. X and/or the duration of the instability may increase on very terraformed worlds (except gaian) due to the increased fragility of the environment.


Another related possibility might be a partly terraformed planetary special that also makes a planet further away on the EP wheel, it depends on how expensive we want early game terraforming to be. there are numerous reasons why this might be realistic, massive terraforming inferstructure that is a drain on the economy until its finished and packed up. Sudden violent storms and floods as environment finishes assimilating the aritifical changes (or until the tech team irons out the bugs), it might even be semi-deliberate. Boiling off part of the sea would have serious effects on day to day life until the temperatures are back to normal.

Yes I meant the Early techs. But I was also considering the possibility of adding anti-terraforming techs. Like a bomb that causes a planet to revert either to, or towards, it's original state. Or maybe just move it away from it's current state. Or we could add techs for all three.

Gaian terraforming makes sense as a late game tech.

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I didn't suggest a lesser PP cost. I agree, being about to complete a terraform in (for instance) half the time would be a sufficient motivation to get the tech.


I was thinking it should require the earlier version of the tech, though i didn't make that clear.

I've committed the first two terraforming techs, though the descriptions are rather quick.



Since it's a building it requires PP: unless someone makes a sufficiently strong case that it should require Food.



I don't see any "fun-ness" advantage to this idea. It's just more information that needs to be squeezed into the GUI somewhere. It's possible that we'll need something like this to balance the power of terraforming, but otherwise i don't see an advantage in this restriction.



I like the general idea myself. Elsewhere i've mentioned specials such as "exotic radiation" and "nanite swarms" as the results of certain kinds of weapons which would permanently harm a planet (unless they are cleaned up).

I like the idea that attacks or other events could harm or change the planet in some way... but it just doesn't make sense for that change to be movement around the EP wheel. Unless, of course the weapon is specifically some sort of late game "Genesis Device" terraforming weapon.

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Well the "funness" advantage is having an early version of terraforming that can do one level, later 2, later 3, and finally a version where you can terraform the full range from the original spot.

so it doesn't just increase the speed, it increases the range




Well I thought that was one of the ideas of a potential use of food (to keep it from fading in importance as technology improved)

Well, i agree that it's fun to gradually gain more abilities, which is different from marhawkman's idea of a hard limit on the range of terraforming.

I would rather have the practical limit based on the undesirability of the starting EP of the colony. For instance if you colonized a planet with an extremely hostile environment (for your species) in order to terraform it to your ideal, you would still have to deal keep that colony alive while it was in it's beginning stages. That colony is certainly going to be a resource drain until it is terraformed near to your EP. If you compare the cost and time of actually making that colony useful, compared to starting with a colony closer to your EP, it will be a rather impractical choice nearly every time (assuming there are other options).

We have later techs (environmental encapsulation) which i think should make it easier to live on non-ideal EPs, and thus easier to terraform them.

We also might connect the speed of terraforming to the infrastructure meter (at least for early terraform techs) which would increase the difficulty of terraforming the more unsuitable worlds.




Food producing tech improves, yes, but so does the size of your population which eats it.

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No.. it doesn't, population rises to the max and then stops.. and food production is basically proportional to
Population * (Tech +Focus Factors)

Consumption is proportional to
Population

As tech factors rise food becomes less and less of a focus.

With increasing Minerals you can also increase focus on Industry (essentially they are one usable resource produced by 2 seperate meters) and those PP are pretty much always useful...
same with Research (until Transcendance is reached)
Money... well we aren't really doing anything with it yet

but Food becomes less and less important as tech improves




As for the limit on how much you can terraform a world... I wouldn't go with Just a practical limit as opposed to a hard (tech determined) limit on the range [My idea was an increase in range of terraforming... in the ability to do a farther Range of terraforming like I'm assuming marhawkman's idea was (not that there would be a permanent lmit to the range)]

The practical limit should be there... the total change from Inferno to Terran should be longer and more expensive than the change from Ocean to Terran. However, the Ability to go from Inferno to Terran should also be later than the Ability to go from Ocean to Terran.

Food probably will probably require less focus as the game progresses, which is the intention, and there's nothing wrong with that. You expect a more advanced civilization to put less of it's total effort into feeding itself.

But the idea that tech increases food production but can't increase max population is groundless. We have techs like N-Dimensional structures, planetary Rings, and Environmental Encapsulation, etc.
Even if you didn't know about these techs, why in the world wouldn't we have something like them?

In addition, a thriving empire (i.e. one that's not loosing) will probably be more or less continually adding new planets through colonization and conquest.

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It's not really a hard limit. It's an alternative to automatically moving from step to step when terraforming. Since we're doing a "wheel" instead of a graded scale like MoO2 did, going through steps in sequence doesn't make as much sense. Especially since you won't necessarily be going the same direction each game. It adds two more things though. It lets you have limitations on terraforming and gives a reason to have and research multiple levels of terraforming techs. It also makes terraforming no longer strictly a one-way street. This approach greatly facilitates the usage of techs with negative consequences.

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Can we treat terraforming as strictly an increase in max population size? None of this EP changing stuff sounds very solid, and I really would like to have as few extraneous features as possible.

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If the only effects were increases in population limit, then we wouldn't really be terraforming, as the environment type wouldn't be changing, which is basically the definition of "terraforming". You can argue that there shouldn't be terraforming, in the sense of changing environments, but I don't think we should redefine the term.

Handling terraforming in a more discreet, abstract fashion has it's advantages. You can still have gaian specials and stuff like that, but the convoluted nature of the EP chart lends itself poorly to strict changes in the environment. The player shouldn't have much to keep track of, but failing that it should be predictable and simple.

edit: hmmm. I don't want to redefine terraforming, just the way it's presented.

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