Planetary Management: How?

Well building on the planet, i guess its gonna be like the old game ascendancy

a screeny from the old game

Those are really cool planet buildings. Are there restrictions on what can go were - sort like an input and output requirement?

um...

my guess was that it was going to take more of a total war approach, where you can chose to buy indescrete little off-camera buildings that would populate the ground, these would have indirect bearing on your empire (i.e. bonuses, money, populace, resource collection etc.)
whereas orbital construction would be more direct (factories, orbital defense platfroms, hangars, planetary shielding etc.)

I dont believe you can target certain ground buildings, however I believe you have the option to zoom in on them (via the picture of the advent city on the website, but I may be wrong...)
of course you will be able to target the orbital ones.

Each planet will also have unique atmospheric conditions (IGN preview)

!!! what could this mean !!!

could battles with either party *really* close to the planet work differently? (or maybe its just a typo)

The unique atmospheric conditions seem to be more for telling which race will best be suited for a particular world. Ex. Advent like Desert planets, TEC like Earthlike ones.

but that would be ecological conditions. in which case I would call that a typo.

well that as well as the atmosphere and what you can breath... if you have no trees and wat not then you wouldnt have much ozone to be breathing now would you?????
and wraith has it right bout that since that is wat we gathered from the last forum... besides that though i do not believe that there will be much effect on the space battles

and schem i thought blair said we could target specific buildings on the last forum no???

and schem i thought blair said we could target specific buildings on the last forum no???

maybe on the pre-official one yes, but not on any thread that I read.

well that as well as the atmosphere and what you can breath... if you have no trees and wat not then you wouldnt have much ozone to be breathing now would you?????

na, ah, nope

I'm not getting technical with you, atmosphere falls under ecological conditions. period.

... besides that though i do not believe that there will be much effect on the space battles

atmosphere extends way farther out than is commonly believed

its not much of a stretch to believe that an acidic atmosphere could cause health degeneration in your ships, or a highly charged one to cause interference with your shields

like i noted, i'm probably wrong, but w/e

my guess was that it was going to take more of a total war approach, where you can chose to buy indescrete little off-camera buildings that would populate the ground, these would have indirect bearing on your empire (i.e. bonuses, money, populace, resource collection etc.)

I don't think so and here's why: Blair has mentioned different types of terrain tiles. Different tiles give bonuses to different types of structures.

I think that Lionheart's Ascendancy example is a very good one. On that planet you can see 3 different types of terrain tiles. Black, white, and red (the game also has green and blue ones but you don't see any in that screenshot). Black tiles cannot be built on (with a few exceptions). White tiles are normal tiles - no bonuses to anything. Red tiles give bonuses to industrial structures, blue tiles to research structures, and green tiles to prosperity structures. In Sins, Blair has mentioned grassland tiles and mountain tiles. Grassland is supposed to be good for cities/population centers. Mountains are supposed to grant bonuses to metal mining structures.

Now, if you couldn't pick and choose where to put the structures then how would you take advantage of these bonuses?

I read that there won't be ground combat, only orbital bombardments/infiltrations. How does these come into play? Can spaceships target specific buildings?

As far as I understand it you take over a planet more or less by intimidating its population into allegiance with you (or by blowing it off the face of the planet and replacing it with your own). All capital ships can bombard the surface of a planet though some are much more efficient at this than others. As far as I know, orbital bombardment does damage at random (i.e., you cannot target specific buildings). But as far as I know there are no surface based weapons that you'd need to take out so this isn't really much of a problem.

How different are planetary constructions from orbital constructions? e.g. their roles, behavior, capabilities, pros/cons...

Mostly just location I guess. Also, anything in orbit can be directly targeted by an attacking fleet whereas stuff on the surface can't. I suspect that structures with a certain function will be found in either a space based structure or a surface based one - never both. For example your ship building structures might only be found in orbit. Or a metal mining structures will only be surface based. Could be wrong about this though. And, as previously mentioned, offensive and defensive structures will only be found in space so that they can be attacked with a fleet.

Different tiles give bonuses to different types of structures.

well... I think the word "tiles" needs clarification, it could mean "place a city on the grassland tile" or it could mean "this planet has 13 grassland, 5 mountian, 1 volcanic, and 20 ocean tiles, so therefore any city you build on it will support a lot of life, but not so much construction."

other than that I completely agree with you

So you're saying kind of a percentage based blanket bonus? Like in your example the planet was about 10% grasslands so the whole planet would have a 10% population bonus. Is that what you mean?

That could work I suppose.... but seems like a lot less fun. That is one of the many things I hated about Sots. All it gave you was some number that described how suitable a planet was to your race's needs and that was it. All the buildings and everything else was just a number that you had little direct controll over. I loved Ascendancy. How you could go to each individual planet, see what was there, and tell it what to put where. So much more personal. Gave every planet some character, not just a number.

Thanks peeps for the answers...

(Going OOT) Having played GC2, I wonder how different is Ascendancy's planetary model as compared to GC2?

... looked at my post again... I don't know where I pulled 10% from, really don't. But you get my point

Medcatt, keep in mind that Ascendancy is a very old game. My CD has a copyright date of 1995 on it. But I've never played GC2 so I can't answer your question.

(Going OOT) Having played GC2, I wonder how different is Ascendancy's planetary model as compared to GC2?

In Ascendancy, the colored tiles are basically like 100% bonus tiles, and black tiles are equivalent to yellow/orange/red tiles. You can only build transport tubes on them (You're only allowed to build on adjacent tiles to ones you've already built on) until you get the terraforming tech, at which point you can convert them to white tiles.

Otherwise the planet system is pretty similar (of course the actaul effects of the buildings and the economic systems are completely different, and Ascendancy has population which limits how many buildings you can operate until you get Automation tech).

Ascendancy has several basic planet types and sizes. Each planet type has a certain ratio of tile colors (some are mostly white, some have lots of black, some have lots of bonus tiles, some are an even mix).

Otherwise the planet system is pretty similar (of course the actaul effects of the buildings and the economic systems are completely different, and Ascendancy has population which limits how many buildings you can operate until you get Automation tech).

so you actually get to place buildings and stuff?
that sounds cool. but it raises a quick question, if bombardment damage is random, can you have buildings on one side of the planet that take massive amounts of damage, while buildings on the other side are protected? (for obvious reasons)

All of my comment was comparing Ascendancy with GC2 for medcatt... GC2 has no orbital bombardment (though some invasion tactics do destroy random buildings), and it's been so long that I don't remember how Ascendancy handled it at all.

As to how any of that works in Sins, I'm as much in the dark as you guys (haven't gotten my hands on a test build yet)

Seems like a logical assumption. Think back to that screenie of the Marza using raize planet. Anything that happened to be in that mushroom cloud is pretty screwed but something on the other side of the planet ought to be ok. What I meant when I said "damage at random" was that you couldn't precisely target where that nuke was going to hit the surface. You could be sure that it was gonna hit something below your ship but not much more specific than that.

Sins used to have a tile based system with terrain but was removed for a number of reasons, not the least because it was too cumbersome for a real-time game and too disconnected from the 3d gameplay. This was explained in more detail in my old threads regarding the addition of the arbitrary orbital structure placement system. Surface development was simplified and orbital development was complexified  A quick summary of surface dev is as follows: on the surface you trade off slots for your multiple resource extraction facilities and population. Each planet has a total max capacity and population/resource1/resource2 max capacity that is related to its planet type. There maybe additional things on planets I can't give away at this time.

So essentially there are 3 buildings, and you can have (for example) a max of 5 of any kind on a planet and only 10 total on the planet?

All of my comment was comparing Ascendancy with GC2 for medcatt...

oh woops   

damage at random" was that you couldn't precisely target where that nuke was going to hit the surface. You could be sure that it was gonna hit something below your ship but not much more specific than that.

yeah, 'tis what I figured

So essentially there are 3 buildings, and you can have (for example) a max of 5 of any kind on a planet and only 10 total on the planet?

That is the essentials of surface development.  Note however, that Planet/Colony development is composed of both Surface and Orbit Development so there are plenty of interesting decisions and gameplay elements involved.

 

Are there also limits to orbital structures?
And if there are, do they share the limit with ground buildings?

Are there also limits to orbital structures?

well... I would think there has to be...

And if there are, do they share the limit with ground buildings?

that would be odd...
unless there is some sort of subjective reason for it.

There is currently no hard limit to the number of things you can build in orbit (there is lot more space and one piece of space terrain is no more or less useable than another unlike the surface). However, you are limited by what you can afford.

Can spaceships target specific buildings?

You can target all orbital structures directly, but you can't target specific ground structures.  However, there are a few ways to target things by class. For example the Advent have special ways to target just the population, leaving the industrial stuff intact.