Almost certainly. It’d likely require generation ships, but an ftl generation ship could be really, really, fast. Sorta like why I always wondered why the federation hadn’t colonized the whole galaxy in star trek. 75 years to get to the delta quadrant isn’t that bad, and it implies probably less than 200 years to get to Andromeda. The borg should have made it to half the local group by now as their ships are faster and they’re more into colonialism. Star Wars has the same problem but worse (hyperdrives are comically fast). In legends I believe there were extragalactic explorations planned, a logical explanation for why hyperdrives aren’t great at intergalactic travel (zero hyperspace lanes without gravity wells around) and the Yuuzhan Vong worked around those limitations intelligently, but then Disney erased all of that to spite everyone. Of course you can have ftl and also have no good way to do intergalactic colonization. the 40k factions basically have no way to pull off intergalactic travel. The forces of chaos and the tyranids could kinda pull it off (tyranids are from another galaxy I think) but like they’re turbo-evil, no sane person could pull it off. In stargate it’s trivial, because stargates are distance agnostic. In star trek there’s wormholes, if you could pick up a wormhole and carry it to another galaxy, you could have a really, really easy time of it. If you have a portal to home, you can have reinforcements or break time back home, and you can have unlimited supplies. It’s all dependent on the specific ftl tech.
Yeah, but just how much could the game afford to simulate?
Isn’t the scale off? The distance to andromeda is 2 537 000 light years but the milky way is only 105 700 in diameter. So it takes over 20 times longer to get there.
FTL can work in mysterious ways thanks to how it doesn’t exist IRL…
Oh yeahh I’m an order of magnitude off… Eep. Anywho, voyager wasn’t exactly in the best of shape when they made those calculations so a ship designed to cross galaxies could have less time and the Magellanic clouds aren’t far off at all.
Magellanic clouds are sattelite galaxies of the MW. A more impressive achievement would be reaching an “independent” galaxy.
I mean we’re on a collision course with andromeda, that’s not the hardest thing either.
How far even should the player be allowed to go with FTL? All the way to “the edge” of the universe?
Should the post-ascension be considered a part of the space stage, a separate stage or something different completely?
The only reason there is no ascension stage category on the forums is to prevent people from speculating and creating massive wishlists that don’t apply for like two decades.
To be fair, this also applies to the strategy stages to an extent…
Should the different types of planets created with the new planet generated affect how easy or hard it will be for a species to achieve spaceflight? Like if a planet had rings, the ring system could be mined for resources to help make spacecraft before going the systems Asteroid Belt… Or rings make it more difficult to launch spacecraft in orbit around your planet because of the hazard of small particle collisons…
Good question. I suppose rings would be fairly random since they don’t last very long time-wise when compared with the planets themselves, but it should still be possible to develop regularly into the space beyond even with their negatives.
It would interesting if multiple moons around a species’ planet are possible via planet generation, and these multiple moons would also affect space travel.
Also I wonder what would be the impacts of such moons on the planet in the evo stages, since they stabilize the tilt for example.
I wonder how stable a moon with a ring, or Chronomoon, would be around a parent planet? Too bad Rhea around Saturn did not have rings… A ringed moon around a ringed planet would be wild to see in the sky!
I am not sure how advanced will be the player’s control on the moon count and stuff with them…
The problem is that the difficulty settings are deeply entangled with the world generation settings. As you pointed out, having a world with lower gravity will affect how difficult it is to get into space. Having lots of easily accessible and habitable moons also would greatly affect the space stage. And there are many other effects that occur across the different stages. Consider for example the tradeoff of world size vs gravity, it seems a larger starting world would increase the potential size of your society and thus its manufacturing and research, but would the increase in gravity slow down the early space stage more? So, would a larger world be considered more or less difficult?
I think we will have to wait to see exactly how all of the world/universe generation settings will need to be handled. I think that we will have the possibility of changing most of these settings at least in the most advanced options menu, but for the normal presets and settings I really do not know yet.
Maybe have the difficulty settings and the “planet settings” separate?