You are invisioning several thing that have been used in past space games.

Star Wars: Empire at War uses gas giants, but you cannot build on the surface and only can make starports.

Galactic Civilizations 2 has clusters of 1 to 5 planets orbiting solar systems scattered throughout the galaxy. You can even be terran and have Mars, Mercury, Earth, and Venus all floating around. You can colonize Mars, too.

The problems with dividing a sector with several colonizable planets is you can't do it in an RTS. GalCiv 2 is a turn bsaed game that can split up a solar system between several races but only because you can pause for each person to go and go slow paced.
In an RTS it would be neat to line some with gauss turrets and fortifications but it would eventually turn into either a boring never ending standoff, a region too spaced out to play in, or just spawning ships and waiting when to attack (or even stream it at 2 or 3 at a time in waves). The idea is good, but it just isin't for Sins.

The gas giant thing is a neat idea, though. It oculd be done and is fairly simple. Low population but high logistics and tactical slots. It would be amazing to see rings around spacious planets... im already amazed by close up views of lava planets and the stars.

They actually did try the farther the planets are, the different type of planet it is. But, the players just went to the inner and outter reaches of the solar system and it was way too predictable. So randomizing planets makes it more simpler.

Some could very well be stars that failed to ignite. One theory is that Jupiter is one such "Failed" star. But yes, people have already asked for gas giants. I think its a good idea but it is more work for Stardock and Ironclad....

This was all typed right after thetravelier's comments.

Lol I remember trying to find what I said on my previous quote because the topic turned up in my post.

Although I've never played command and conquer (im a battlefield 2142 fan) i'm looking at the game right now... wow it looks pretty fun... anyways I see what your getting at. RTS's are capable of close proximity capture points (like in the warhammer 40k series and Company of Heroes), but Sins is not (remember? its an RT4X, or whatever the hell that means).


And I'm not saying that gas giants can only have moons. Most people want moons everywhere (besides asteroids).

The main reason why I think it won't work is I don't think that anyone can get the mixture right. The gravity well would certainly have to be bigger to house the moons. It would have to be small enough to keep the action going but large enough to not just build gauss turrets to take pot shots at oher moons and planets. If you think about it, each moon would have to have a construction ring smaller than the planets, but it can't overlap or be too close to the planet's ring or any others. So picture this: 1 planet and 2 moons positioned in a horizontal line (like 3 in a row). The construction rings can't touch and turret perimeter's can't go deep into other construction rings (turret on turret action won't work) AND to top it off you have a gravity bubble that will probably be a circle (due to physics) leaving large empty regions in the top and bottom sections. I'm picturing it as a little too spaced out.


About your last comment about transit time. Actually I think gas giants should be more focused near the center of the solar system, were the action is. I imagine the gas giants as a spaceport (from my expiriences with Empire at War) with civilian structures (similar to the crap you see rushing around on the surface of colonized terran planets) near the atmosphere as its hitpoints. Leave the back for the stupid a** dead asteroids.

Oh YAY!!! im drulling just thinking about what you guys have in store...

craig you work for ironclad? cuz if you do, high five

if the grav well was to be expanded, then ship's speeds would have to be increased by a lot, they are fairly slow already and travelling from one end to another is a little annoying, so if there were moons and they were put in then it would slow down the game, personally I don't think they should be added, unless its small and only makes the grav well a little bit bigger, but gas giants would be good, still saying that whatever the devs come up with next I simply can't wait

A moon could maybe serve as an additional source of income, say, once a planet reaches level 2, and has a moon, researching level 3 infrastructure colonizes the moon and gives you more taxes.

Certain planets with many moons would thus be VERY valuable tax wise.

When originally writing this post i thought about the logistics of how a multi-moon/planet-moon system would need to work. As I thought about it, I concluded that there was nothing really prohibitively difficult to work out. Yes they would have to work out some logistics, but it really comes down to weather or not the devs want to put the work into moons and gas giants. BUT, by the sounds of things just said... maybe they are... at the very least they have something very yummy planned

The next paragraph can be skipped if you really dont care about the lay out of a gas giant grav well.

That said, this is how i envision gas giants and moons working: you have a gas giant with a larger grav well then the average planet. Around it is 2-5 asteroid/moons all of which are colonizable, with other asteroids for mining and such. These moons “orbit” at various distances to the planet, with each moon having its own individual grav well. The inner moon's grav wells would not be distinguishable from that of the gas giant (except for its building ring). The outer moons on the other hand may have part of their grav well extend out past that of the gas giant, thus creating a slight bulge on the side of the circular grav well boundary. Around a gas giant the moons should be spaced enough so that their building rings do not over lap, these building rings would be smaller then that of a normal planet. As for a planet-moon system i can forsee the moon needing to be closer to the planet, thus their building rings may over lap. This could be solved several ways, my personal oppinion is that you should take the “average” of the strength of both wells and draw a solid boundary between them (i hope you understand what im saying there). I feel that way because if you were going to put somthing in orbit around the earth you would not be able to stick it too close to the moon, because its gravity would throw the object off orbit... but slightly past that line you could put it into lunar orbit and it would be stable. (well honestly the moon is so far out it really wouldn't effect any usable orbit of earth, but if it were closer it would)

Anyway I'm a stickler to details and realism. My excuse is I'm studying astro-physics at UCIrvine and... well it bugs me when things aren't realistic. But its a game and a good one at that, so i do cut it some slack

Past the physical lay out of the moon/planets there is a lot of economic and strategic details you would need to consider. Obviously the colonizability of individual moons is a hot topic, but its already covered so moving on. The economics of these lunar systems would inevitably be low population, highly strategic, and better at mining then a regular planet but less so then an asteroid field. I like the idea of some sort of other bonuses such as +speed because of abundant hydrogen and/or -shields due to strong magnetic field (but then again the sun has a much stronger mag field and it doesn't hurt shields) or even +research speed due to cool phonomona with the gas giant. Anyway i could go on but i wont. What do you think about the bonuses? How do you think the economics of a moon/multi-body grav well should work?