I mean it is kind of assumed you have unified your world before you get to the space stage. Allowing advancing so far while your species is divided will need a lot of specific extra game design. So it will be most likely just blocked until that work is done (otherwise a lot of weird bugs will happen, I assume).
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You mean closer to mid-space stage here? Since humanity would currently be in early-space stage, which is said to be highly similar to industrial stage.
I suppose yeah, that could be it, but I guess we’ll see once we near this in development that where the easiest and most bug-free place to add this constraint is.
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Maybe the barrier could be at your civ starting to colonize objects in other star systems? I’m pretty sure this is also the boundary between early-space stage and mid-space stage (or just a large step overall).
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i think types of sci fi technology and non sci fi technology should be unlocked or disabled before a game by the player. and if it is possible to discover, ai should be able to unlock it just like the player.
ai shouldn’t slow down to make the player win. game over is also an option.
i mean, there can be an easy mode, but that ai should be slow all the time irrespective of how far ahead or behind it is
when you’re losing, you can try to play better and advance even faster than them to catch up. if you have spies, the technologies you steal would bridge the gap faster if the bridge was longer? they wouldn’t protect very simple technologies to them that are very advanced and crucial to you
i think, if an AI civ gets too advanced, the game should make it automatically hostile to you, no matter how friendly it was at the beginning, so that you don’t end up in a limbo where you’re the junior partner, they have more diplomacy with aliens, it is moreso watching a simulation, the game playing itself rather than you playing it
FTL must be the beginning of the space stage. It has to be that
There should be big changes between the stages, right?
What has changed in our daily lives since the apollo programs to the moon? NOTHing.
It wouldn’t be easy to unify the planet. Even if you do, it is likely that mars would declare indipendence we colonise it.
But ftl is a crucial change. You could move between planets. And stars. There wouldn’t be communication time delays. You could hold more than one planet. And if you can have multiple planets’s resources, it would be very simple unifying your home planet. Imagine you are the Dutch, with your steam ships, and colonising Indonesia, except, the whole world is Indonesia. The first state to discover ftl would have a very big advantage. All the other countries, their supply lines would be easy targets. Space travel would be so easy. You could build everything in space right after mining them from asteroids. Most iron on earth is in earth’s core. It isn’t very helpful. Space is the future. Rockets are not. England couldn’t hold America. Speed makes countries large. Long travel times tear them apart. No railways, no Russia. Mongols immediately splintered. So did Latin America. They didn’t had roads in the jungle, darian gap, andes, etc. When lots of travel happens quickly in space, over the orbit, the “natural size” of countries would be larger than planets.
Question: How fast should FTL actually be?
I think ftl communication should be faster than ftl travel. And heavy things should be harder to carry in ftl than light ships. If you could teleport your home planet to another place in the galaxy, that would make the space stage less like society stage, not more.
If you could move all over the galaxy just for a single adventure, then exploration wouldn’t be fun. If you instead took 4 years to go to Alfa Centaury, Syria could fall 121 times during that time. Something in the middle. Maybe, at the beginning of the space stage, 10 times the speed of light, at the end of the stage, 100 times. How long even is the galaxy. 100 thousand lightyears. a thousand years. I mean, the galaxy in Thrive would be smaller anyway.
Why does it have to be that? The ancient developers were the ones who were allowed to set the stage boundaries, and they are written on our official wiki:
So that’s what they are, and it’s no use complaining about the stage boundaries as they are just meant for talking about different parts of the game so nitpicking when a stage starts is totally useless time usage.
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" After an Industrial Stage nation becomes advanced enough to build spaceships, they can begin expanding into the stars."
Into the stars. Ftl. An industrial stage nation that may or may not have rockets starts going to the stars. At a convenient speed?
Rockets expending through the galaxy would take way too long and you couldn’t even see it. A part of the galaxy would be fossils since the last time you’ve been there. It wouldn’t make compelling gameplay. You’d practically be a single solar system species.
Wherever you conveniently read that, it is inaccurate (it is more meant to paint the picture quickly what the stage is about). The “transitions” part of each stage’s page is what exactly defines it. For example here’s what the space stage wiki page says:
The stage begins when the player first reaches space with a primitive rocket.
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It is conveniently the third sentence in the wiki. I didn’t take the definitions in the wiki. I took what they expected from space stage and I’m arguing that they can’t get what they expected. Snails don’t make empires. Neither do they have adventures with aliens. There is nothing in common between the star trek world and 1980’s earth. But everything is the same between 1960 and 1980. Almost. The computer is a bigger invention than the space rocket. Why does the rocket make a new stage, but not the computer?
I realized after writing my reply and checking the wiki page more carefully that I should not have said the first part at all, as it was not suitable for what I wanted to say. So please let me rephrase as: the wiki has short summaries of the stages just to get the imagination going without providing unnecessary detail, and other pages also will briefly refer to the conditions to move to other stages. Those aren’t the authoritative answer as it would get really tiring to always refer to the fully accurate information. Instead the only fully accurate version of the conditions for the stage transitions, are in the specific “transitions” chapter of each stage’s page.
If some other text in the wiki conflicts with that (other than just being a simplified explanation), then that is an error in that other place and warrants correcting.
Because that’s how the stages are specified. The goal in Thrive, if you somehow don’t know, is that stage transitions are as smooth and unnoticeable as possible. [1] The game is only split into stages to make talking about stuff easier like some feature being in society stage or the space stage or the microbe stage. The exact points don’t matter so that why it is fine that they are totally set in stone and they aren’t changing no matter what argument someone brings up.
Sorry for the tone here but I’m extremely annoyed when different people require me to keep explaining this over and over. ↩︎
If a stage transition is smoother than the changes that happen within a stage. The stage name is useless.
I heard the comparison “something china dynasty to be fighting in tajikistan is like americans today fighting on the moon” which is why i thought ftl would be a bigger change. the change needed.
Main takeaway is that, especially for the future stages, stating where a stage begins does not indicate anything except for a mental note of where one part of the game begins. They are simply a legacy feature of the ones who came before us. The majority of Space Stage mechanics would likely be in swing long after either the first rocket or FTL travel, but symbolically, it would still be the space stage before then.
The multicellular stage will be a prime example of this. Even though both halves feature entirely different mechanics, the early, 2D stage and later 3D stage are still grouped together in our legacy definitions. In a game where transitions will be as smooth as possible, distinctions are more for ease of reference rather than actual loading screens and such. Arguing for a later or earlier start of a stage would just be symbolic, and not actually effect whatever eventual stage.
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A post was merged into an existing topic: Transition Between Industrial and Space Stage (or even a new stage?)
Turns out I could have saved a lot of effort by just linking to my earlier posts (multiple of which are iin a single thread). I moved further discussion about the space stage transitions (this is the wrong thread for that) here were I discovered also those earlier posts of mine:
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Back to the society stage
If your country splits apart due to some sort of a crisis, what would be the conditions for which part does the player inherit (if any)?
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4 posts were merged into an existing topic: Ideas for the Space Stage [Put your ideas in this thread]
I think it should let the player choose which country to play like in some of Paradox games.
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I’d guess so. Or if such an option is not available, the player’d get control of whichever split part is the “closest” to the original country.
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