Gas Giant and Asteroid Belt Natives

[labgnome]

So I've had some ideas floating around in my head for a while, and this post might actually be a better fit in the "scripting an balancing" or "story" sections, but I think it's ambiguous enough of a situation to put it up here.

There have been a few people who have talked about wanting to make gas-giants "more interesting". One idea I have along those lines is to have some non-colonizing gas giant natives that you might be able to find and conquer. Mind you these would be specifically non-colonizing species, so I'm thinking they would avoid a lot of the potential balancing issues that gas-giants seem to have in this game as potential colonies for specific species due to their size and abundance. However I don't know about that either so I wanted to run the idea by people to get some feedback before I started designing away on species that might just be game-breakers anyway.

Also form what I understand asteroid belts don't really have this particular issue, but I don't know if they have others. However, I do think asteroid-belt dwelling species, especially as non-colonizing natives would also be a cool addition. As they're both planet "types" that are both unused and outside the wheel a habitability I thought I'd just include them with the possible gas-giant natives too.

If anyone has ideas or input as to why this would be good or bad it would be greatly appreciated.

[The Silent One]

I can't imagine why a (non-colonizing) gas giant native species would be a problem. I like the idea, and I'd also love to see a asteroid belt species.

[MatGB]

It's awhile since I worked on a gas giant native, one of the problems is the way galaxy generation works, it picks a planet to see if it can add natives to it, and then selects from a list of natives that can live on that planet, so gas giant natives ended up being everywhere and far more common than other native species. Not necessarily a problem but it wasn't what I wanted with what I was working on, as GGs are the most common planet type it did mean the galaxy seemed swamped with them.

Re asteroid dwellers, I'm very up for having a couple different types, I'd be loath to just add one at once (see above), but even a couple very similar ones would be fine, there'd be balance concerns and it might be annoying if you finally get that black hole you've been looking for only to find it inhabited by weird rock eating space critters, but, well, annoying the players in a fun way is an objective

[Dilvish]

It's awhile since I worked on a gas giant native, one of the problems is the way galaxy generation works, it picks a planet to see if it can add natives to it, and then selects from a list of natives that can live on that planet, so gas giant natives ended up being everywhere and far more common than other native species. Not necessarily a problem but it wasn't what I wanted with what I was working on, as GGs are the most common planet type it did mean the galaxy seemed swamped with them.

That's a very good concern.

You could add some extra population constraints to the species (like -20 if there is another planet in the system and/or the star is not blue or white, etc.) so that the vast majority of the initially spawned GG natives promptly die off

[Sloth]

As a scripter i want to point out that adding a spawn rate, a spawn limit and a location condition to natives (just like for specials and monster fleets) would enable a ton of new possibilities. Some stuff can be solved by hacky scripts that happens at turn 0, but there's a limit to that.

[Kassiopeija]

I'd like to see a special on GasGiants "Helium-3 deposit" which would increase the bonus from GasGiantGenerators by 150% or 200%.