Stars and Planets Ratio

from Sins Forums
Just got Sins last night. Very interesting. For the last few months I've been playing GalCivII again like crazy, but it looks like Sins will be the focus for awhile. I'm a 4X turn-based purist who said he would *never* buy an RTS again, and I'm apparently the only person who likes space games but didn't like the Homeworld games, so buying this was a gamble for me.

But as I said, it's very interesting so far. But I have one minor quibble, which I don't think I've seen mentioned yet in reviews or on this forum. It has to do with the stars and planets ratio.

In every single other space game I can remember, the focus is on *stars* and even a very small map will nearly always have 10 or 20 stars, and a huge one will have hundreds or thousands of stars. And usually there is only a handful of planets associated with each star. Moreover, the usual convention is to have some kind of warp travel between stars, but conventional travel within systems.

Therefore, it seems weird to me that Sins, which is supposed to be a "galactic" game in scope, only has a handful of stars for even the big maps, and it also seems very weird that there are so many planets and other objects crammed into each solar system.

I haven't played with the map maker yet, but I hope there is a way I could make a map with, say, 50 stars but only 5 objects per system.

Anyone else find this odd, at least at first?
7,618 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
Yes u can do that. Thou 50 stars would be slow, most I ever used was 21, with 10 objects per star.
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
It's not really that crazy, when you think about it.

SoaSE counts asteroid belts, plasma storms, planetoids (you know, things not quite deserving the title of planet but next to it), planets, wormholes, and huge piles of space debris as "planets" in this game. Pretty much anything that can make a decent gravity well.

Our own Solar System has a goodly number of planets, isn't it like 12 or some such? I know they recently added some planets to the list that exist beyond Pluto... and I think they took Pluto off the list for some silly reason? Anyway, point in case... We have a goodly number of actual planets and we have a fair number of extremely large asteroids and planetoids floating around to boot. We also have a rather immense asteroid belt, and probably a few other things as well.

If you modeled Sol in SoaSE, it would probably have some madness like 20 "planets" or some such in orbit around it - at the very least!

So put into those terms, it's perfectly reasonable. Space is vast... our own Solar system is not fully mapped or understood, and likely wont be for a very, very long time.

Also, every star is connected to every other star in this game - the phase lanes just dont show up graphically, but the distance between any star is just one Phase Jump (granted, it can take longer to get to some stars than others).

The Phase Lanes inbetween planets probably represent a clear, somewhat stable corridor between worlds where you can open up such a rift and float through safely... Compared to traveling distances between stars, the distances between planets are chock full of objects in motion - it makes perfect sense that you would have to make more frequent, shorter jumps... you gotta avoid wrecking your ship!

In between stars you have more free room to maneouver, it's like taking the freeway after driving city streets in a gridlock. Besides... Phase Routes make for great choke points to play with!



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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
First, not all the planets are actually planets, many of them are asteroids, space junk and plasma storms. Second, you're basing your idea of a solar system on the ONLY ONE we've ever been to. Nothing says there can't be systems much larger or smaller than our own. In my opinion this game does a decent enough job of modeling fun and playable solar systems. Certainly it's far better than a game like Imperium Galactica II, where you have tons of stars, and only one planet in every solar system.