FreeOrion

How about calling it "Economy"? "Commerce" strikes me as a bit too capitalist-centric...

It doesn't matter how much food you have if you have nowhere to live due to low (or zero) population limits on unterraformed planets. Similarly, it doesn't do you any good to have terraformed planets if you have no excess population (due to lack of high growth, partly due to lack of lots of food) with which to populate them. IMHO terraforming and farming are a good combo...

A mostly thematic link imho, which I declared unimportant (thematic, not mho). You're free to disagree, but I'd suggest you do so explicitly. And terraforming is only really development in this sense in the same way that population growth would be development, which isn't really a convincing argument for lumping terraforming with trade (since trade isn't lumped with pop growth).

*A planet worth colonizing.

No sense dropping a bunch of well fed healthy colonists on a planet they won't be able to reproduce on anyway.

Terraforming isn't involved in horizontal growth, but it is involved in vertical growth. And giving the big negative penalties on unsuitable worlds for your race, there's not much use in horiztonal only growth.

I think "development" is a telltale too vague category... at least in name. Arguably anything in industry or farming would be "development" as well. I can sort of see a distinction between terraforming and growth/food (though not enough to convince me to split them up). However even if terraforming wasn't with farming/growth, I'm not convined there's any good reason to put it with with trade/commerce/economic stuff. You've suggested a (weak imho) thematic link, but the "development" isn't a sufficiently specific or exclusive relationship between the two subcategories in question to justify their being together.

Reasearch would go into my Information Processing category. The category would cover the collection, storage and processing of information. So reasearch would fit well here.

Also I think maths is a category in past moo games, so it wouldn't really go anywhere, though research would go in Information Processing.

Agreed that "development" is a bad name. Need a better one.

Here's what the category represents, in my own little head:
roads, space elevators, slaughtering hostile native lifeforms, clearing a forest to make way for a mega-starport, stripmalls, corporate headquarters, damming up a river, irragation, launching a array of mirrors to reflect sunlight away from the planet, thermal boreholes tapping into the core, the power and communications grid, primary schools.

Notice that none of the above directly creates a starship or Wonderous building (Production), a bug-eyed alien baby or a nascent colony (Growth), a grand unification theory or a well-staffed university (Learning), a system of government or a spy agency (Social). It's the stuff of the Construction meter, the Economy meter, and Terraforming.

We "terraform" the planet a little each day, making it more convient to live on by paving roads, irragating dry lands, and sticking dams in front of rivers. In game, a terraforming project would in fact be hundreds of thousands of little projects that culminate in a new enviroment. (all abstracted as a single project in the eyes of the player, of course.)

In short, I don't view Terraforming as a biological process. Sure, a few trees are planted and a few native lifeforms released into the wilds. Maybe some dark algea is planted at the polar ice caps.

Terraforming is gross changes are made to the properties of a world though various means, not just biological. You aren't going to turn a Radiated world into a Terran paradise through biology: you'll need some sort of star trek-ish b.s. super science.

I'm saying Terraforming *can* fit into the construction/trade category. Maybe it could also fit into the Growth category, but it should go into construction anway. Without terraforming the construction category is sparse compared to the others. With terraforming, I believe that all the categories I listed will have about the same number of techs.

It sounds to me we are moving towards a SMAC like system with only a handfull of catagories Explore/Discover/Build/Concour ect.

If we have 4-6 catagories for all non ship building based tecnology for now and reserve the remaining catagories for all military equipment then that will work out well. Lets finish up and get some catagories nailed down I feel we are almost at a consensus.

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Fear is the Mind Killer - Frank Herbert -Dune

Well, I think we should have at least 8 categories.


I don't think we are at a consensus yet. Everyone has there own proposal, pretty much. I do think we should try and nail it down though.

How are paving roads, irrigating dry lands and damming rivers terraforming? Irrigation is part of farming (for most races), damming rivers is a very tenuous connection to environment change and is mostly related to colony growth and farming (irrigation reservoir). Paving roads has nothing to do with changing environement types.

Terraforming is more about large scale changes to the environment, by changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere industrially and/or with biological methods, changing the solar insolation by solar shades or mirrors, changing the surfacea albedo, gradually building up ecological systems by introducing new species and so forth.

See EP wheel thread for discussion about how terraforming actually works in game (rather than theoretical stuff above). I wrote stuff here, but moved it there, and edited it out here as off topic. http://www.freeorion.org/forum/viewtopi ... 4936#14936

Whether terraforming is a biological process is really a thematic consideration. So while I can see your point and am inclined to agree (re: terraforming != biology), that isn't really a reason not to put it in the same category as growth and farming. IMO they're still practially related, and thus should be in the same category.

The fact that your categorization is imbalanced is, IMHO, insufficient reason to make an illogical (IMHO) grouping of terraforming with economic stuff. The two are still not related in any significant practical way... You don't need to terraform for economic benefit any more than terraforming (and more population in general) would benefit industrial or any other activity you'd do on planets...

And, I'm still not buying the thematic connection either. Terraforming is more thematically related to mining than it is to building office towers.

I had the same thought. We could stick with the effect of immediate change. This way you have to plan on the long shot when doing terraforming.

On the other hand we might want to use an alternative that allowes a more smooth environment change. In this case we have to use another representation of planet hability-value, on which base the displayed e-type is calculated.

We could maybe splitt the planet values into
1 - atmosphere (none,oxigen,methan,toxic, .....)
2 - temeratur (cold,warm,hot, ....)
3 - radiation (none,low,high,....)

in this case i don't know how to calculate if the planet is classified as Terran/Swamp/...

I like this idea because it adds much value to fo without doing to much trouble. It easy to realize. Races could differe on their planet preferences much more.

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Can COWs fly?

Each example on that list are ways in which the natural enviroment can be modified to better suit the needs of man.

Again, all I'm saying is that terraforming *could* be in a "Development" type category. After all, it is an artifical change wrought on the natural enviroment to make things more convient for the inhabitants--same as an office tower, a road, or a power grid.

It makes at least a little sense....good enough for me, since my Farming/Health category is already full. I'm trying to balance the number of techs in each category, etc. -and- think about how a player might specialize by researching heavily into a category.

Good health and farming bonuses offset bad enviroment to an extent. Splitting off terraforming into another category (with a different list of prerequists) gives the player a couple of different pathes to take. He can research great farming/health and live on crappy worlds -or- he can terraform those crappy worlds.

Terraforming could fit into some kind of environment category, farming can go there too. And the universe, galaxy and even maybe the inside of a space station could be an environment.

That doesn't make them terraforming. Power lines and office buildings wouldn't make it possible to breathe the air. I know there's a vague connection in the sense of modifying the world around you, but really, they're quite different undertakings...

That's debatable... we haven't put in any actual techs yet...

It would seem more logical to me to split up health and farming, putting farming in with environment. The main use of food is to improve the health meter, so you'd have two viable paths: either researching how to make your people healthy directly, or researching how to feed them enough that they are (or are effectively) healthier on their own.

"Health" stuff would be lumped in with "biology" (or something that would cover non-organic life), and would be the category that contains all the tech that improves your people/citizens/nanites from their "natural" state at the start of the game, without need for other resources. This would also involve biological warfare (offensive and defensive), as you'd have to genetically (or whatever) engineer you population to make them resistant to such attacks, as well as come up with vaccines and the like, which fits nice in with health, imo.

In terms of the tech tree, I believe the categories should be balanced to an extent where they are each "worth" around the same amount to a player. For instance, in Moo3, Energy had over 100 advances or some crazy number like that, and Economics somewhere around 30 advances. In that case it doesn't make it that hard for me as a player to decide what I'll research each and every game because I know that certain categories either:

a) cover a more broad/helpful area of research than others;
b) have more powerful advances than others

Personally, if I were to see a category controlling "ship design upgrades (weapons/defenses/propulsion etc.)", than something like "resource/production upgrades (farming/mining/industry etc.)" should balance it out. You can probably guess that I'm a fan of having fewer categories, but I don't really care. IMO everything should just be balanced.

Just my 2 cents .

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WSNBM/ONBP SLC 2K4

Just a heads up:

Sometime next week, I'm going to close this thread, summarize a bunch of different options, and then tell you all what to do. I mean find consensus. I mean overrule everyone. I mean : explodes :

Aquitaine
(from the 'loopy' category)

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Surprise and Terror! I am greeted by the smooth and hostile face of our old enemy, the Hootmans! No... the Huge-glands, no, I remember, the Hunams!

Sounds good to me, after initialy proposing a woping 16 catagories I have after reading the debates here come around to seeing the benefits of less is more. I would even go so far as to say a very small number of Abstracted catagories might be good.

Exploration
Warfare
Construction
Society
Knowlage
Growth

Just felt like exploring the minimalist end of the spectrum here we will likly have more catagories then that.

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Fear is the Mind Killer - Frank Herbert -Dune

As usual.

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Can COWs fly?

That's why i'm saying - don't spend time on unimportant issues and use a big open list of subcategories (open = new subcategories can be added in a process) to guide others in a process of creating techs.