FreeOrion

These techs have bothered me for a long time. This morning i finally figured out exactly why.

The concept is that these bio-techs modify your species so that it is compatible with increasingly foreign and hostile environments, until eventually you have bio-engineered cyborgs that can live anywhere.

However the game doesn't actually create a off-shoot species. It just lets an empire with a certain tech put any species in places where it couldn't live before (or in greater numbers).

What's the difference? Consider this scenario:

Green Empire has researched all the way to Cyborgs. Thus it was able to make a human colony on an Inferno planet Foo.
Orange Empire hasn't researched any biotech. It captures planet Foo. What happens to the theoretically super-adaptable cyborg humans on Foo? They die, because their new empire doesn't have the tech that allows humans to live on Infernos.

I don't see how it can be made to work? The concept of these techs probably needs to be totally revised so it is in harmony with the actual functioning.

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As there is a finite number of these enhancement techs, I would consider creating dynamically new species.

• After researching it by an empire, an enhanced version of each of the empire's species is generated.
• If an empire has this technology, it can build on any of it's planet a special project that would transform the species on that planet to the enhanced version (like Gaia transformation adds a special to the planet). This represents the tedious process of enhancing an entire population of a planet.
• A planet with an enhanced species can produce colony ships and bases with that enhanced species (that means, an enhanced species is treated as a separate species from the base species).
• A captured planet would retain its enhanced population and enable spreading it to other planets.

Alternatively we could assume, that the capturing empire does not have the technology base to reliably sustain the cyborgs (probably some alternative food, medicines or energy sources are needed) and they die out because of that.

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Doing that automatically would be complicated and potentially quite confusing and buggy. By automatically, I mean the game engine generating one or more modified versions of a scripted species during the game, adding effectsgroups or changing their environmental preferences. If someone wants to script a new set of species and write a big list of effectsgroups to create objects or set the species of existing objects with the new species (or the multiple new species) associated with each starting species, that's possible, but would be a lot of extra scripting and in-game species to keep track of.

An alternative might be to attach a special to a planet that applies effects to that planet only, and which is removed if the species doesn't match the one it's intended for. This would represent the fact that the species is modified on that planet. Might be confusing, though.

A "modifications maintenance" building might work the similarly to a special, but with an area of effect to avoid needing to build lots of them. A building would probably only work for a particular empire, though, essentially getting back to the situation with techs.

Well, that's how to make the essential concept actually work. But i doubt it is currently possible. More importantly, implementing it that way has several troubling ramifications:
How do you distinguish the new sub-species? 9 variations of the icon won't work. What about the species descriptions?

More troubling is that using these techs inflate the number of species a player needs to deal with, while decreasing the overall variety.

Lets say tundra-dwelling Hhhoh, create "Desert Hhhoh". So the "Desert Hhhoh exist as a species in their own right. Then the Swamp-dwelling Gyisache capture some "Desert Hhhoh". The Gyisache have some tundra planets they want to colonize, so they further engineer their "Desert Hhhoh" to become the "Tunrda Desert Hhhoh".
Or

Modifying species while, theoretically very cool-- would also be pretty complicated to do well. Chances are a good implementation isn't going to mirror the content description of the xeno/bio techs.


Well, cyborgs are only the last tech, the rest are biological. But i suppose the descriptions could be changed to something much more artificial, and plausibly fragile-- weather control, bubble cities, etc.

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How about: once such a technology is unlocked, all colonies (present and future) in the empire gain such a special. This special will not be removed once captured, but will disappear once the original species is somehow removed from the planet.

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[...] for Man has earned his right to hold this planet against all comers, by virtue of occasionally producing someone totally batshit insane. - xkcd

Cyborgs is just a name. Do you object to having a tech in that position in the tech tree with the same effects as that tech?

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Or a building.
Which kinda matches the way MoO does things, except buildings are automatically built when you discover a tech.

To totally retcon the way bad planets are accessed, a little more streamlined than what em3 mentioned:
Some of these techs might allow you to build special (more expensive) colony ships, that work on hostile and poor planets. When colonized a "force bubble generator" building (insert technobabble here) would be built. The building contains the effects that allow poor& hostile to be inhabited. This could persist after a planets capture-- but might make a vulnerable target too spies/bombardment.

Biotechnology might be invoked, especially for adequate planets -- but more in the role of getting food crops to grow in a different climate, etc. not utterly changing the species.

It should be clear, i object to techs with names and concepts that mislead the player as to what they do.

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I agree. However, I'm also not too worried about that right now. My intention was for the current tech names and descriptions to be just placeholders. If you're worried about confusing the player, I'd much rather rename the techs to "Xeno-Tech 1", etc. than talk about completely redesigning the habitability modifying techs to suit the names and descriptions which I arbitrarily made up more or less on the spot.

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I'm not too concerned with matching your names and descriptions, but to avoiding counter-intuitive (and doubtless annoying) colony death upon capture by a lower tech empire. New descriptions that match the behavior will very probably be different from the current.

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