In Crusade, will we be able to inspect the planet before picking a colonizing event?

What do you mean by being able to inspect exactly?

According to the Dev Diaries you can now see the resources on a planet before colonizing.

I guess he asks abaut planet layout.

Inspect, view, evaluate.  See the planet, tiles and resources before the Colonizing Event screen.  But that sound like a yes.  Good, that was one annoying 'feature.'

Thank you.

(If you don't know what I mean by the Colonizing Event, it is that screen that comes up when you colonize a planet allowing you to choose one of three options that affect the planet or your empire. The title of that screen says "Colonizing Event.")

No you cant see the tile layout. Yes you will basically see everything else.

Bottom line, the question is this: are you able to make an informed Colonizing Event decision in Crusade?  

As it is now, you click to colonize the planet, the Colonizing Even screen pops up and you have no idea what resources are on the planet so if your choice is to increase income, manufacturing or research you have NO clue as to which is most appropriate for that planet.   I would like to see some transparency there.

Thank you.

In base game: Total Mystery

In Crusade: You can see what special tiles are on the planet but you cannot see the layout of the land.

I'm pretty sure you are able to evaluate it before colonizing

Guys - this is the screen I was asking about.  There is NOTHING on here that allows me to make a decision based on the planet attributes.  Is there no way to make an informed decision about these events?

http://imgur.com/iE7MNfs

I see that you can hover over the planet before colonizing, but my memory is not so good and I haven't memorized all the resources in the game. I can't remember the difference between Vile Vine or Reptile Turds.  Seeing it would be helpful.

I agree with the OP.  In order to colonize a planet, it kind of requires that you get close enough to see it and touch it.  No sensible colony ship would blindly enter a planet only based on long range scans or charts made up decades ago when a scout ship last flew past its solar system.  Colony projects are just too expensive to build and launch and they have too many lives on the line for us to throw caution to the wind.  Right?

At bare minimum, don't we have Hubble cameras on our colony ships?  High quality sensors?  Probe satellites?  Google Earth?  A guy with an iPhone?  

Or at least a damned window we can look out of and a crew member with a pencil and notepad?  I know, maybe this is a job for that vaunted "Galactic Citizen!"

And i do wish it would let us select the which tile we want to put down the colony itself. A lot of time it settle down stranded, denied you of any improvement bonus you could yield from it.

I agree; why can't I choose the site of "first landing"?  Or why does it always seem so nonsensical, like 2 continents away from everything else of interest?

Oh don't get me started on the WASTE of arable land.  I'm looking at a new planet right now, it's a Class 10, but the planet map is all GREEN, and there are 20 spaces unavailable for building.  One entire continent has only a single tile for building.  The topographical map should show something that would lead me to believe that those tiles are not colonizable.  You know, water, ice, mountain ridges, vast deserts, deep chasms, massive city-eating beasts; that kind of thing that I can SEE would require soil upgrades, terraforming, or (ahem!) well armed troops...

Brad stated in some stream something like "the decision to place the colony capital is no decision at all because players would always choose the same spot". There I strongly disagree with him since the correct spot strongly depends on the layout of the planetary tiles and the resources on them ...

4X game is about min-maxing and denied player to min-max it is opposite of what 4X should be.

I'm sure I've mentioned it before but I wish you could see the star map when colonizing a new world since I usually have some plan for the world and can't remember it without seeing its position.  I send a colonizer out and several turns later it finally lands and I'm like, hmm, wonder which planet this was.  Most of the time I end up colonizing then escaping out to the map before starting to build structures so I can make sure of where the planet is before building anything.  This is especially tricky if you have the colonizer trait and rush/free your first structure - you wanna be sure you're building according to the plan.

I agree, there should be no "we think this is how it should be played" in a sand box.  There should only be freedom and an effort to facilitate all styles of play.

I sometimes ESC out of that screen too to get a lay of the land before colonizing.  I tend to play bigger sized maps and can often have multiple colony ships out and with travel times and the random planet names I rarely remember which ship is where and when.

Wait what. . .you can ESC out and repick the choice? I always just save and load but the position of capital and event sometime change.

I just don't send the colony ship directly to the planet, but to a tile next to it.

Alternatively, you can send the colony ship to the planet but respond "no" to the dialog prompting you to colonize.  That doesn't lose you any moves, but it does make that colony ship pop up in the "idle ship" rotation, so that you can see the context of the system it's in.

You're right, when playing on looser maps as I often do, it can be a dozen or more turns before a colony ship arrives at its deep-space destination.  When it finally arrives, sometimes I'll not colonize right away but instead will take a chance and cruise the colony ship around for 2 or 3 turns first to see if I can learn anything interesting about the neighborhood before settling in. 

Due to the expense and number of turns required, I don't usually send out colony "fleets" of multiple ships (E.G., colonizer plus Constructor (or 2), and one or two defense or survey/scout ships), so it will be several dozen turns before I can have any sort of meaningful production and a few dozen more to build a shipyard and put out the first scout, constructor, or colonizer.  So taking a few turns to cruise the new neighborhood (even with a low sensor-ranged colonizer) can really help with planning and strategy.

Is there some way you could add that information to the Colonizing Event screen?  I cannot memorize all the special tiles and what they do for each planet.  We're just asking for some help for the UI and it seems Stardock just doesn't put any effort into that at all.  It's all "oh, look!  The game uses all your CPU cores!"

Actually, the information appears immediately AFTER you respond to the colonizing event dialog. 

The problem with this is that you've ALREADY committed to colonizing that planet, be it Heaven, Hell, or made of cheese.  At that point, it's kind of hard to put that toothpaste back into the tube.  Unless you save before colonizing and reload the old save if you don't like the layout.  Quite frankly, even a bad planet is simply not worth that much trouble, but is definitely deserving of a "preview" of the planet's layout.

Again, I go back to the logic that no righteously advanced spacefaring civilization would land on a rock without first scanning the damned thing or sending probes down, if not to ensure that there are no giant cats with magic sceptres or evil aliens who look like Elizabeth Taylor.  Hell, we've already done that with various Mars landers, and we already knew beforehand that the first colonists to arrive wouldn't be expecting to have any bikini beach days with blue skies, sun, and surf on THAT planet.

Just let me do my due diligence and scan the planet from orbit before I crash it and scare the giant worms.   

The frustrating thing is that there is no comment by the devs on why it is this way, was it designed intentionally to aggravate the players?  Or is the ability to see the planet before deciding so game breaking that they won't let it happen?

I watched the AngryJoe twitch stream and even HE mentioned that he cannot make an informed decision (and I don't think he's ever played the game before that stream).  Brad just nodded and smiled without comment...

So this is low priority then.  We need to keep this item front and center in people's minds.

Meh.  This never really bothered me that much.   I am usually either (a) RP-ing it,  in which case the choice is what matters,  not the outcome,  or (b) gunning for some ideology or other.   Which can also be a form of roleplaying - sure,  the Yor might have made some income from putting those Space Kittehs in a zoo,  but they were more valuable killed and skinned and used for insulation.

Simple solution: make the points allocation of the Colonizing Event less - ie if you choose to let the population work in the mines and get radiation sickness and die because, "How many times do I have to tell you? People are a renewable resource.", you still get points in the Malevolent tree, but not so many as you would in a later decision where you know all you need to make that decision?

To be fair, it's never really bothered me either way.