03-03-2003 12:11									#1
	Are Green planets hard to find? Support Apolyton, buy GURPS/ Alpha Centauri

I have fired up a number of games to experiment with, but so far I am not finding that many Green planets and most of the ones I do find are not exactly swell. They have one or more crappy traits, such as Poor or Hostile or the wrong Grav or very small.

	03-03-2003 13:29									#2
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I assume it depends on the race you´re playing with.

Some Races have a bigger environmental Tolerance i.e. more Planets are green for them and some Races a smaller.

Playing with the Psilon I normally have on an average 1-2 Planets per System within Green Levels.
Only very few of them are really perfect regarding their Minerals, Ecosphere or Gravity, but I tend to colonise them, as long they´re Size 5 or bigger (and most of them are)

	03-03-2003 13:40									#3
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You should find green planets but they will certainly be outnumbered by the red 2's. The range of possible conditions is huge and most of them are red to you. That's why fast exploration to locate and grab magnate civs is important. Then you have 2, 3 or more sweet spots when they outgrow their home worlds and start looking for more breathing space (they do it automatically though, I don't think you can influence it.)

If you pick many starlanes then you should have no problem intermixing with other empires and finding lots of nice worlds as long as you are diplomatic or send a protective fleet. If you go for few starlanes then you're probably going to have to double colonise yellows. Even at half efficiency you can get good research colonies while you wait for the terraforming techs to pop up.

Yellow Gravity can be eliminated around tech level 10-15 as long as you can research or trade for the tech (I find most empires receptive to a 3:1 tech exchange.) I frankly don't worry much about the other settings like poor or infertile. The poor worlds grow food for the infertile worlds to eat and have plenty left over for the rich mining worlds.

Last edited by Grumbold on 03-03-2003 at 13:46

	05-03-2003 09:05									#4
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quote: Originally posted by Proteus_MST I assume it depends on the race you´re playing with. Some Races have a bigger environmental Tolerance i.e. more Planets are green for them and some Races a smaller.

Yeah, that makes sense...some races have more greens than others. Right. My problem is that I don't know which ONES. I played a game with the humans and they had green planets everywhere. I played one with, umm, I think the trilarans, and I couldn't find anything better than Yellow 2. Doesn't this make a huge difference in how good a race is--how many great colonies they can set up early in the game? Then why isn't it possible to modify the tolerance in the custom race screen? I mean, suppose I've figured out a really great minor modification for the Cynoids that makes them just the greatest species ever, but I get inbto the game and I find that only one out of thirty planets they find is green for them. If I could modify this, I could maybe sacrifice some minor diplomatic skills for more tolerance, but I can't. What's the point of having a customization option if you can't fully customize? I think this also makes some races near unplayable if you can NEVER get enough good planets with them no matter how you customize.

	05-03-2003 13:36									#5
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I believe thet these races are the ones that their sweet spot is nearest to the center of the square. Indeed, having a better sweet spot gives you more green planets, but also more yellows, and less reds. This is an unwritten advantage of some of the races (Humans for example :-) Everyone should consider this when he is comparing the races.

I need to gather much statistical information, or find out how the universe generation mechanism determines the types of planets to confirm this, but this seems to be true at first glance.

	05-03-2003 14:06									#6
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I am not sure I follow the center of a square bit. As the I-cools, I am in the dead center of the white or right in the middle of the target, with red on the farthest ring.
I see so few Greens, it is a joke. Now I do not have many map gens to say that is the norm or not.

	05-03-2003 14:22									#7
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The reason there are so few greens is pretty simple...

There 8 playable species and a number of magnate races species beyond that.

Each species has a "sweet spot" planet type with a certain temperature and atmospheric pressure, along with preferences for various levels of gravity and other issues in the rather complicated model that creates the planets.

The bottom line, however, is that all the planets in the game seem to fall into about 20 or so different distinct planet types.

Each species seems to have an optimal planet type that gives either sweet spot planets or green 1 or green 2 planets, depending on its optimal qualities to your exact racial preferences (I think the devs said there's over a dozen different things that effect that, but not much between different races of the same species).

For the Humanoids (as an example), the optimal planet type is "Terra Approxima", or Terran. The Harvesters seem to share the same terraforming circles with the Humanoids (probably because of the background story item with a Human colony being where the Ithkul got their initial hosts).

The reason why there are so few greens then is that your species' specific optimal planet type is only one of about 20 or so different types.

Each species is optimized to one of each of those different types. So the IDEA is that each species is going after different planets, which seems to cause competition for planets only between races of the same species (competition over systems and natural hatred between different species being a different matter).

I'm currently working (for my own benefit, at the very least), on trying to classify all of the different planet types and see how each species treats each one... I'm going to look at the spreadsheets and see if that gives better information (almost certainly does).

If I find that, I'll post on this board. I'd be nice if the devs would save me the trouble, though (hint! - if anyone is reading...).

	05-03-2003 14:54									#8
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Even at the start of the game Green 1 & 2 and yellow 1 worlds are perfectly useful. Yellow 2's are productive but can't farm. More important is gravity because yellow grav halves your productivity.

As soon as I find at least one race willing to sign non-aggression and TA: Intelligence treaties my world finding problems are normally over.

	05-03-2003 20:29									#9
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Hm, I think that it is more important to find out what is the statistical distribution of the planets in the universe ...
I am not sure if I am using the right terms, but is it normal or is it even? I.e. is there a most common type of planets in the universe - close to the medium temperature and medium atmosphere, or there are equal count of all planet types ....

	06-03-2003 07:02									#10
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I found it very difficult to find extreme gravity planets when I needed to, but one game wasn't a very large sample to draw conclusions from.