We want to avoid the situation where you can always place colonies on all four orbital slots. This is partly for the flavor of the game -- good colony sites should be rare enough that factions may get into conflict over the best ones -- and partly for mechanical considerations, as increasing the number of colonies per system increases the amount of micromanagement and late-game bloat. Unfortunately, the current terraforming system works directly against this principle, which is one of the reasons why we're changing it.
The idea behind gas giants and tiny worlds is that they're "terrain" to add interest to each system instead of just empty orbits. They have minimal utility in that you can place outposts around them, but they were never intended to be colonizable. I can understand that players reflexively want to exploit everything, and so there's a natural frustration when they can't colonize Tiny worlds, so unless we can figure out some kind of exploitation scheme for Tiny worlds, the simplest solution may be to just remove them from the game.
MOO-CTS implements gas giants and asteroid belts by allowing the player to build bases on them that provide either Science or Currency directly to the general fund (rather than to a particular colony). I think this kind of mechanism for non-colony exploitation would work for SIS, and in a sense you can already do it -- you can set up an Outpost containing a Science Stations module around a gas giant or tiny world, though the 2 Science you get from it is hardly worth the 2 Coin upkeep that it costs. One way to deal with this is to have the Science output of the Science Stations module scale with where it is placed, and to add more planetary specials that can boost science outpost and give the research outposts something hypothetical to study (as I think an ordinary gas giant probably isn't that exciting for scientists of this tech level).
We've always wanted to implement asteroid belts, and I think exploitation with a Mining Outpost that yields Metal could work. The biggest issue here is how to represent asteroid fields graphically in our system. We don't have a true 3D engine that would be required to represent rotating asteroids (the planets are done with clever shader tricks and are not really 3D), and most of the 2D animation options that we've discussed would probably look terrible, in my opinion. So I think the right thing to do here would be to use a simple static 2D image. I think that worked acceptably for the Warp Nodes. Asteroid belts (and gas giants) could also have more special features, like Mineral Rich or Mineral Poor, or various scientific anomalies that could generate science. Perhaps the presence of an asteroid mining base in a system could unlock the construction of asteroid bases in other colonies there (since I don't think an asteroid fortress would be of much use in that orbital slot -- unless you're a pirate).
If we added asteroid belts, I think that would eliminate the reason for Tiny worlds to exist, and we could simply remove them.
I'd also like to add a special native race that lives on gas giants that gives an opportunity to have actual colonies there, but this will probably need to be paired with some kind of special resource/planet special to make such a colony worthwhile.
We might add moons at some point as some kind of planet special that gives some kind of bonus. But we would not want to make them colonizable for the reasons mentioned above, in addition to the UI/graphics issues that this would present.
DanTheTerrible wrote:personally I find it a bit unrealistic that planets are required to build space stations at all. I see nothing in SiS's lore that would prevent building fueling and sensor/communication platforms in arbitrary points in deep space with no planet or star present.
While one could theoretically place an outpost in an empty orbit, I don't really see a compelling gameplay reason to allow it. I think star systems always have at least one planet, so there's always someplace to put a Fuel Depot Outpost, which is the only current use case I think think of. I can imagine min-maxers feeling compelled to put something in every empty orbit, and that's something I'd like to avoid.