It's not practical, would require alot of added crunch in between turns
This.. Now don't get me wrong, on paper it does sound cool and I really wanted it when the idea first came up, but there are many things to consider, unlike other games doing this would have some large consequences due to the nature of how the game play area is used.
basically it has been brought up before and after a basic number crunch by the devs they determined the memory/performance drain outweighs any cosmetic effect it might have, because really when it comes down to it its just cosmetic. They brought up a few issues with it.
-It wont just be an animation/visual effect, each planet, asteroid, etc takes up a physical space. Moving them around each turn takes alot to calculate. Imagine the drain each turn on an Insane map!, that memory in game cam be better used for other things.
-What happens if you have a ship or shipyard on a hex, and then the next turn the planet moves there. Does the ship move, if so where? does it get destroyed?
-The AI would have to recalculate every turn all its move orders, currently they AI sets a location and only really rechecks what its doing under certain circumstances.
- when you click on a planet does the ship travel to where the planet is or where it was.
-How do star bases work, if a planet moves out of range does it not get the bonus for those turns until it comes back?
-Do you prevent nebulars from being near by?
-What happens if a star base is in the path of a planet, do they prevent where the base can be placed, does it move or something else.
-If you look at how the planets are currently placed, most planets are within the same "ring" around the sun. if they make it realistic then they would have to make each system become alot bigger. They actually early on tried making the planet placement more realistic and it effectively double/tripped in some cases the size of each system. this in turn made the smaller map effectively smaller, and the larger maps not seem as large. instead of being able to fit say the current 3 star systems within an area, they might be able to only add one.
-What happens if you have the system like the sol system with 5 or more planets. Assuming you don't want to add ALL of them. That means the radius around the sun would be 5 + 1 for the planets and star, +1 for the asteroids. then people complain that they are all only one hex apart, so do you add some random spaces between them. so say an extra 3 hexs.. that can make an average system have a radius of 10 hexs! The current size of a system is 3 and on very rare occasions 4 hexs... on a tiny map this would mean there would be a max of about 4 systems, then you need to add nebulars, black-holes, relics and other resources.
Compared this to the current tiny map of about 15 systems on the default settings. this would be a 4x reduction in over all play area. That means that each map size would effectively have a 4 times or more smaller play area. Also less systems means less planets. Then you have the issue of each system taking 10 moves to get out of. and keep in mind 10 hexs is in both directions from the sun, so that's 20 hexs to get from one side of the system to the other. Now the Sol system example might be a example of a larger system but it still need to be taken into consideration. need I go on... lol
I dont mean to sound negative, and im not at all trying to put down your idea.. just there are a lot of things to consider
