How about Disneyland planet? Or introduce Space Ponies as space monsters.

"There's too many of them! And they're too cute!11 ARRRRGH"

I have and its an awsome mod, but it would be good to support Ironclad with a paid official Planetary Expansion

Modding is the planetary pack.  Planet models and textures are a big part of the memory issues--the more you have, the more lag.  If you could have the game only load and run selected planet textures and models at the start (rather than all of them even when not being used), that would be really useful and then we could add planet libraries to choose from before games.

All this on a single core iron engine? Forgive for sounding skeptical but i think i'd just be buying more lag.

/signed

Don't forget there's the Invalid and *insert custom name here* groups as well. There's a total of six groups to work with, plus Uncolonizable if that's a valid group as well. Unless you mean the names themselves, in which case I'm being silly.

I don't know if you can tie population techs to Invalid....I've never tried it, but somehow that just seems like it wouldn't work...

Forget the "IDS_PLANETTYPE_PIRATEBASE" too...

Not sure that it is possible... but maybe associate a planet bonus level 1 who can upgrade the population... will need 1 exploration upgrade for be activated... something like :

requiredPlanetBonusesCount 1
bonus "PlanetBonusIncreasePopulation"
possibleRandomPlanetBonusesCount 0

A other possible way is maybe via research and abilities... after all, each planet type have 4 abilities slot... sun use it for recharge antimatter on ship... maybe a passive one who increase population on planet who have a pre-requisit research needed... 

Well, it is only idea but in the almost 4 years that i play sins, i have see modders make crazy thing with these game, in some case, thing who was say to be impossible... so, who know...

You can, it's been done in past revisions of SoGE before.

/signed

/signed

I really think that giving non-colorizable astronomical bodies (cept wormholes) more impact in gameplay is something that needs to be addressed in Rebellion. Why have space junk, asteroid fields, gas giants, etc all over the place when they have barely any impact at all on gameplay?

I more or less ignore them. Sure, I send ships through them when necessary and make sure to check them for a mining site, but to me it never really matters what sort of astronomical body they are. A magnetic cloud has pretty much the same affect on my plans as a plasma storm. Neither one would ever turn the tide of any battle, so why fight battles over what might as well be empty space? Even stars and gas giants aren't very interesting to fight near.

There needs to be a reward for fighting in uncolonizable planet slots, and greater risks as well. It needs to be a big tactical decision to fight there, not just something that happens when two armies stumble into each other.

I won't argue that such wells could be more interesting...that being said though, I've had some very interesting games where lots of combat actually did occur in magnetic clouds or plasma storms...granted, it doesn't happen very often but it does change things quite about when you consider that spamming bombers or banking on certain caps/support cruisers are common and generally effective strategies...