Happy January! This month I’ve been working on interstellar civilisations and the encounters you’ll be able to have with them.
Precursors
At the start of the game, the game generates 10 interstellar civilisations, along with their home systems and home planets. They’re first created like regular civilisations, except they always having the “spacefaring” technology level rather than a random one. Then, the game randomly adds some traits from a separate set of interstellar civilisation traits representing specific advanced technologies (e.g. suspended animation or nanotechnology) and reasons for going into space (e.g. exploration or colonisation). These interstellar civilisations and their home systems are remembered throughout the game.
Civilisation number zero is always the Gatebuilders. The others get around either using the Gatebuilders’ Gate network, or using sub-light ships.
Whenever the game generates a new random system during play, it picks one or more interstellar civilisations who might have visited that system. Each planet (or other body) in that system then has a chance to have signs of having been visited by one of those interstellar civilisations, with the kind of traits the civilisation leaves depending on both the planet’s traits and the civilisation’s traits. For example, if explorer type aliens have visited a system, they might have built a research base on a planet, and they’re more likely to have done so if the planet has life or something else worth studying.
An advanced ship upgrade can detect the effects of interstellar civilisations, represented by the flying saucer icon.
Fellow Starfarers
There are now two general types of traces that interstellar civilisations can leave on planets. There’s meddling, like aliens redirecting a planet’s orbit or releasing self-replicating nanites that turned the surface into dust; and there are alien ships and outposts.
There are several types of ship and station, and each one can be either crewed or robotic, in orbit or on the surface, and active or derelict.
I’ve added events for interacting with alien ships, similar to the existing event for making contact with or investigating a planet-based civilisation. For active ships, a Xenologist can attempt to establish communications. For derelicts, an Engineer can attempt to gain entry and study the technology. (You can also try without a Xenologist or Engineer, with a lower chance of success.)
After you make contact or board a derelict, there are new sets of events for possible encounters you can have with them.
Name Assignment
When you first encounter an interstellar civilisation, the explorers will give them a nickname based on that encounter, which they’ll keep using until they learn the civilisation’s own name for itself. For example, if you encounter a planet that’s been mined out in the Sigma Beta system, they might call them the Sigma Beta Miners. If you eventually make contact or otherwise learn their name for themselves, they’ll appear under that name in the list, but with the original nickname in parentheses so you can keep track of which is which.
The civilisation that built the Gate network automatically gets the nickname “Gatebuilders”, and now appears on the civilisations list from the start of the game.
Civilisations can be extinct or living. If you find an active, crewed starship then obviously you’ve found a living civilisation, but if you find a derelict that doesn’t necessarily mean its makers are extinct. So, civilisations in the list are now “presumed extinct” until you know one way or the other.
When you encounter the effects of a civilisation you’ve encountered before, you immediately know it’s the same one. This might not be strictly realistic, but I think it’s the best option, as keeping track of multiple civilisations that later turn out to be the same one would add a lot of extra complexity that I don’t think would add much fun. I guess every civilisation has a unique technological fingerprint.
That’s it for this month. Next month I think I’m going to work some more on ship upgrades. Thanks for your continued support.