Mod Request : Planet Terraforming

sounds nice, you could transform deserts to terran planets (but it should be expensive to terraform).

(excessive bombings on the surface could make a planet quali bad and turn it into a vulcanic world?)

More types of planets would be nice, since you mention master of orion and terraforming there was pretty neat, something like terraforming goes to certain point and the desert planet goes like you said.

As it would be nice to get the source code or something to edit the scripts, if so i could try something. Since i got a lot in my mind.

nice idieas guys like the concept of bombing hurts a planet like that alot
defnatly make you think before just bombing a planet to pulp but i guss youd need a new ship then to facillitate gound invasion as the other option but those must be REALLY expensive i.e troop ships that cant fire and are fragile and you need x amount to take a planet with x health

devs what do you think it has allot of promise this idiea

ps also looking for counters to this

The one thing I do think this game is missing right now is some type of ground invasion of a planet. Maybe that's much more likely for an expansion than a patch, but speaking as someone who is quite used to seeing ground invasions take place in 4X games, I would love to see Sins incorporate something like that, rather than having to go to the trouble of bombing a planet to death.

Bl4ckSh33p
took part of your idea reformulated it and posted it on the suggestions page hope you don’t mind i suppose i should have asked permission first

I agree, I think that right now the effects of bombarding a planet to oblivion are not as tragic as they should, IMO. One would think that it should take a truly long time for a planet to recover from orbital nuclear bombing... one way to solve this would be to make planets "invadeable" instead of colonizable, ala GalCiv2. It would require some sort of marine frigate, which would launch marine dropships to planets to invade them. Depending on the size and allignment of a planet, resistance would be greater or smaller. If you want to invade a planet with less effort, then just bomb them a bit before invading, but the effects of exterminating the population to a planet should be huge, considering that a planet population of millions should take a long to recover. Carpet bombing a planet should decrease the willingness of its citizens to resist along with their numbers, but should also severely hamper the income from that planet. It could be even possible to do some "strategic bombing", maybe targeting the main known military assets to try and decimate ressistance before landing, exterminating less population but leaving intact their will to resist...

terraforming doesnt make too much sense right now in sins, since planet usually arent inherently better than others. sure, asteroids are not as good, but you can't really argue being able to transform an asteroid into a terran. and since every planet has its own advantages, some of which are routed in the amount of res. roids they give, I can't see how it can be applied very well.

what you could do is include uncolonisable planet that can be terraformed to suit your needs, but the idea is somewhat in the game already with having to research some planet types and with having to improve them for max. benefit. but yeah, toxic planets, ocean worlds, etc, etc. could be a candidate for "use a terraformer ship first to transform it". we should, however, also consider whether this actually adds fun and not just work. you could make the choice what it becomes a player dependent one, so that these "bad" ones are actually pretty worthy in their own right by giving the player what he is missing. sort of like a joker card with a price.

I could also play with the thought of a "scorched earth" tactic, wherein you rather terraform your own planet to waste, than leave it to your enemy, but that also sounds a bit unfun.

ps: while it doesnt apply here, I also made a post on the marine frigate idea. if you want to discuss you might want to dig it out, its about a day old and definately a better place to discuss this. you will find my post certainly most interesting.

I really like these ideas .

Regarding Ground Combat, not wanting to burst any bubbles, but from The FAQ:



That doesn't mean that some kind of abstract system couldn't be worked out, but it is important to remember where the devs have drawn the line scope-wise.

Changing a planet's type (from Desert to Terran, or Terran to Asteroids) would be a nice possibility, but I'm not sure if the engine would support it without significant recoding.

I'd love to be able to hit a planet with, say, 4 novalith shots and turn it into an asteroid belt

Of course, the guy who wrote How To Destroy the Earth would tell you that it would take a LOT more than that.

Ground Attacks sound nice, too. Invade the planet to steal ressources (money?).
Techstealing is hard because everyone has other techs but maybe you can get a boost for your next research after "stealing" some techdata which means x% cheaper reserch for the next tech.

After a planet has been bombarded from orbit, I doubt the surface and atmosphere of the planet would be hospitable. Therefore, it makes perfect sense for “Terraforming” or something similar to be a necessary first step to colonisation.

We should also be able to terraform less hospitable planets. This could provide gains in population, culture income etc.

I too would also like more dramatic orbital bombardment. A greater variety of surface explosions would be nice and please modify the shockwaves so half of them don’t disappear / get cut in half by the planet. It’s just one of a few small but annoying glitches. Also, would it be possible for the surface texture to subtly change as the bombardment continues and the population of the planet dwindles? Some environmental effects would be great too.

That’s it, I’m out!

I like the idea of ground assaults a lot. Think Starship Trooper style, or the intro to Quake 4. Either have dedicated troop transport craft that land on the planet or perhaps a new capital ship which launches drop-pods / smaller craft once in orbit around the planet. Troop effectiveness could depend on the level / experience of the carrier and the level of the facilities currently constructed on the planet. The higher the level, the more effective the attack (troops) and the defence (planet). To help counter this new threat, the capital ship should have reduced shields and weapons effectiveness during the drop-period and perhaps take a certain amount of time to enter and leave orbit, making the ship unable to move and thus vulnerable to attack.

What do you think?

Terra forming is already abstracted into the game -- its the population upgrade you need for all planets before you get income from them.

Terraforming was a great feature in Haegemonia... Damn i wish they'd bring number 2 out.
Theres a nexus: the jupiter incident 2 but wasnt put into full production Thees a petition going around to try and push things forward for it though.

Planets/asteroids should not be colonizable for a # of minutes after they have been destroyed. That # should be 1 minute X the infrastructure level of the planet at the time it was destroyed. Thus, if it was an asteroid with a single level of upgrade for the infra, it would be 2 minutes until it could be colonized. For a large terran planet that has been fully upgraded infra (4 levels + the starting level), you'd have to wait 5 minutes before it could be colonized.

Conversely, if you use assault troops (perhaps added later), you would just the planet over and lose perhaps a random # of infrastructure levels and other planet upgrades.

Terraforming takes thousands of years.

One liners with zero thought or purpose behind them take seconds from one person to make, yet take seconds from thousands of people to read and dismiss.

Dawn of Victory will implement two ways of capturing a planet - bombing/strafing it with assault corvettes or troop transports which do not wipe out the population.

If you have terraforming, then there should be terreforming ships that are like giant mirrors, or something to that effect.

Ha ha, nice one Ron.

These are all nice ideas, and for those of us who like the slower game then it would edge Sins' closer to a 4X, rather than an RTS.

The invasion of a planet could be implemented, nothing would need drastically changing. However, terraforming would take a lot of work. I don't think, that with the current state of the modding tools its even possible to change a planets skin mid-game. Not only that, but you'd also have to change the option of whether a building is constructible or not, mid game. You may even end up doing it so there are different levels of terraforming, and for each level you can build more, and the planet's skin changes slightly. All these points would take some time to do, and probably the new mod tools.

But if someone is up for it, good luck, and any help you need, I'm sure we'll all give as much support as we can.

well this idea could work really wel in a star trek mod.

call it the "genesis device" and make it a super weapon

also im thinkin for the skins of the planets, maybe its possible to make the planet skin be an animation thats halted and is triggered when terraformed, this way the game might not have to load in a new skin ingame.
this would put some limits in cause there's only one animation per planet.
however, i figured u could terraform like the lower list.

vulcanic planet > desert planet
ice planet > oceanic planet
terran planet > vulcanic planet
and vice-versa

or...

make every type with water turn terran and vulcanic planets become desert planets and vice-versa.



also i was wondering if its possible to higher or lower the planets population size and civ. and defensive slots ingame.
cause in this aspect only the astroids remain the same.

just thinkin, im not very good at scriptin' so its possible this idea is more like brown clay....