Brother came over, we're playing games on the projector. Show him Stars in Shadow.

Playing as humans, hard, 99 stars. Find some Threshers nearby, explain to him about climate zones and the usefulness of... ahh... free labor to work the oceans. Mention Phidi and Threshers as liking the ocean the most.

Fighting the Gremak, he asks about how much of a pain it would be to 'swap out' the Threshers for Phidi if I find them, due to being clearly better.

Just so happen to encounter the Phidi. Hadn't explained they look like Seahorses...

The discussion resulted in the following tongue twister:

See sea-slave seahorses surely slave by the sea shore.

"The most unrealistic thing about this game is how you can move one million people in a transport."

"Well, they're probably in stasis."

Brother does math...

"That ship would be like, twice the size of the empire state building, assuming 42 sqft per human."

"eh, whatever"

Later, find Phidi.

"These guys make sense. Sprinkle some dehydrated Phidi in water and watch em grow!"

Games on this scale really require a certain degree of abstraction. Think of it as a unit of population; the actual number of individuals it represents isn't really all that important in game terms, and can easily be changed.

The problem in choosing a number that's low enough to seem completely realistic when moving population in transports, is that then the capacity of planets becomes ridiculously small. As it is, planets have a population cap of 12-15 million, which isn't terribly realistic either. If you lower the "population unit" number from a million to, say, ten thousand, then the planetary population caps are 120,000-150,000. You'd either need to abstract transports to represent a whole fleet of ships, or you have to change the population model so that you'd have to manage planets with hundreds of population units, neither or which would (in my opinion) positively influence gameplay.

Sometimes gameplay needs to trump realism.

sword of the stars had a way with that, they separated population into two catagories, civilian and citizens. one did the work and one payed the taxes.

Arioch wrote:Games on this scale really require a certain degree of abstraction. Think of it as a unit of population; the actual number of individuals it represents isn't really all that important in game terms, and can easily be changed.

I'd agree, I think the scales are fine where they're at; it's not meant to be a sim. He wasn't being serious RE: transport scaling.

Mostly just wanted to share some of the banter we had while playing, since this was the first time I got to show it to somebody else.