Who moves planets and why?

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Kassiopeija
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Who moves planets and why?

#1 Post by Kassiopeija »

Unlike other X4 games, there're alot of abilities in FO to manipulate the map directly, like, making planets from gas or asteroids, collapsing suns into black holes, making starlanes unpassable and also moving planets itself.

That can be quite a fun, but with moving planets, I can't help but to say I don't find many practical applications to it.

First off, I never do that defensively because I'd rather try to use the production to fight back with ships.

So I've been intrigued to actually move a sole isolated planet under a gas giant or an asteroid belt in order to cash in on the added production bonus from microgravity tech or GGG. My main problem here is that it doesn't seem to pay off. Because of the combination of negative accompanying factors such as
- massive loss of population
- meters reduced to 0
- additional buildings that need to be build
- have to change focus

it wouldn't be that severe if I could move a planet if it is still an outpost... but as it is, many planets are already outgrown because Planetary Starlane Drive has some severe prereqs that places it somehow midgame....
and to make matters worse Artificial Planet is a tech in close vicinity... and esp. Gas Giants will turn into tremendous productive powerhouses once made habitable and so, all GGG wills vanish, too - completely reducing my premier motive to move a planet to ash.

How do you do this?

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Vezzra
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Re: Who moves planets and why?

#2 Post by Vezzra »

I've only ever done it to get a planet to a black hole system (most of those don't have any planets at all, not even asteroids), when I had only empty black hole systems and no suitable red star systems where I could create an artificial black hole.

Damiac
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Re: Who moves planets and why?

#3 Post by Damiac »

Hah, I can't believe I never thought of that. It can be hard to find decent black hole systems.

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MatGB
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Re: Who moves planets and why?

#4 Post by MatGB »

Once, years ago, before the AI was working, I moved an entire galaxy of planets into one system. Lag, um, became a bit of a problem...

More recently, I once had a mobile Acirema shipyard (I think before Good/Bad weapons became what it now is), but that proved unviable because there are now lots of deep space empty systems (which is good, overall, but does reduce the planetary drive's effectiveness massively). I'm actually thinking of making the beacon that the drive locks onto a core ship slot, that could make it fun again, but it'd need balancing in some way, possibly risk of ship destroying itself else you could just move all your phototrophes into blue stars and have the right planets everywhere.

Which, y'know, would be fun to do but the AI wouldn't have a clue what you were doing.
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Kassiopeija
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Re: Who moves planets and why?

#5 Post by Kassiopeija »

A ship that moves planets sounds really nice, even if that coreslotpart is expensive and there's a chance that this ships is destroyed. Because, at least, you'd have a definite cost clearly shown when building that ship which might be lost or "invested".

As of now, with the loss of -50% population, that total loss of production happens over many turns and with the dynamic growing back of population, is kinda impossible to calculate in advance.

Atarlost
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Re: Who moves planets and why?

#6 Post by Atarlost »

I recently moved an ancient fortress planet from a cul de sac to a front line star. Not sure how useful that actually is, but the benefit I hope to get from it at least isn't impacted by the population loss.

Also, you can build drives on outposts, but you cannot actually use it because they have no focus setting, at least not in 0.4.5. It would be very useful to be able to move gas giants around.

Crius
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Re: Who moves planets and why?

#7 Post by Crius »

Vezzra wrote:I've only ever done it to get a planet to a black hole system (most of those don't have any planets at all, not even asteroids), when I had only empty black hole systems and no suitable red star systems where I could create an artificial black hole.
Umm, I'm missing something here... how do you move a planet to an empty system? :?:

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Vezzra
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Re: Who moves planets and why?

#8 Post by Vezzra »

Crius wrote:Umm, I'm missing something here... how do you move a planet to an empty system? :?:
AFAIK, you can't.

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MatGB
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Re: Who moves planets and why?

#9 Post by MatGB »

At the moment, anyway, I'm definitely toying with a core ship part that'll do the job of the beacon, when the planetary drive was introduced (a LONG time ago) there were far fewer empty systems in the game, but I haven't even got to the stage of writing a spec yet let alone costing and balancing it.
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Slay
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Re: Who moves planets and why?

#10 Post by Slay »

if a black hole or red giant has an asteroid belt i check for the possiblity of moving a planet there, that way i can build all the capital ships at the same place. the exobots' asteroid will just leave its stargate open :)

what i'd realy like to do is bundle up an asteroid belt into a tiny planet, move it, THEN unterraform it back to an asteroid belt :D (edit: not possible last i played, i did say i would LIKE to :P )

if i were the experimenters i'd build a starlane drive...

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Vezzra
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Re: Who moves planets and why?

#11 Post by Vezzra »

Atarlost wrote:Also, you can build drives on outposts, but you cannot actually use it because they have no focus setting, at least not in 0.4.5. It would be very useful to be able to move gas giants around.
That's more due to limitations of the UI. Currently there are no means to "activate"/"deactivate" a building (other than using workarounds like focus settings), and no means to select a "target" for effects (other than using workarounds like those "beacon" buildings).

At some point I hope we will implement UI elements that allow us to do such things.

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