Who do you think rides the space ponies?

I can't believe that it ever got popular at all.  Some things in life are just frighteningly baffling.  What we really need is this...

My current ICO character.   See what happens to me when I stay up all night?  It has a moon in it so it's on-topic.

YAY! Done! I'll just wrap it up and upload it soooooon!

(Edit: oops forgot to fix up the new random planet lists and edit the last galaxy issue...)

You can use it it for anything you want.  I whipped it up last night after actually finishing a game with decent players who were really good sports.  Basically, I stayed awake all night. 

I don't have any others but if you have something in mind I can give it a look.

Yay on the mod being finished Nova.  Gimme Gimme Gimme.

FYI, that thing on the left side above his wrist is based almost exactly on a wearable computer prototype Sony is making...and did anyone notice the water bottle on his hip?

So you are closet furry, eh?

Hmmm...there area ton of existing animalmorphs out there.  My first online name I ever used (and still do is) "Gerbil"--before the Richard Gere urban legend

Lemme look for something original and maybe I can whip it up.  A horse sounds intriguing.

Of course, they will all have to include moons in them

Time to shoot death beams at you from my Novus Universum moon-based laser cat installation.

Here's a space camel for you Rus...

No offense to Joe camel but camels would make great colonists and explorers for arid worlds and maybe even for long space trips.  Able to store their own food and water and have a native  filtering system beyond most animals.

Resistance if futile.

Huzzah!!!

I knew it would work..yessss...I did.  Good speed Nova.  We may have use for you yet and you will be spared when the great galactic purge begins.

Edit: Installed and ran the mod.  Minidumped first time when I tried to enable the mod so I ran it a second time in dev mode and it worked fins.  Did a small map with one AI and no issues.  I'll post praise and critiques later

One of your moons (grayish with a few craters) has a glicth along the terminator--it shows an opaque band over the texture, forming a ring around the planet surface.  The small silvery-grey, elongated  asteroid field objects orbiting the asteroids look a little like ships and you keep doing double takes.

Good to know.  really interesting worlds.  I like that it takes longer to develop them.

Ok...here's a more extensive report:

Get a random minisdump on start once in awhile.

On a larger map (huge, eight player vs ai) whenever a ship ability is selected within a gravity well, the game hangs for a few seconds while it processes.  Once the ability is clicked and activates, all returns to normal again.  It didn't happen at the very first but after a half dozen planets had been reached.

On the huge maps, ships crawl very s-l-o-w-l-y.  You can't speed it up in combat cause it becomes a turn baased game at that point and the computer takes its time for its turn.

At the start, the expensive upgrades make it become a more important strategic decision as to whether or not to upgrade.  At higher stages, upgrading a single planet can drain you dry.  I like the concept but here are some of the effects of the top of my head:

Resources on the black market are very expensive to buy.  They also generally fetch a good price selling them and here's the effect of that--you can sell resources and finance huge fleets/rapid tech research very quickly once you have a small but steady supply going but it takes awhile to upgrade the planets due to the cost.  So buying resources devours credits and makes it slow to hit higher stages of planet development.  Selling resources makes it possible to supercharge building  fleets and constructions and research which are much cheaper than the planet upgrades.

The planet slots for logistics and tactical open up in small increments and each increment can get a LOT more expensive.  There are very spare tactical slots at lower levels--two or three items consume them.  Some upgrades that are quite expensive allow you to maybe ad only a single additional tactical item.  This means when the Vasari are ready to deploy phase gates that the cost of upping planets to have enough slots to hold them is ridiculously high.  The alternative is to use starbases as platforms for this but then you lose other capabilities of the bases.

So the uptick is that the game is fleet driven--planetary items past a certain level just aren't worth it unless you have a very secure position (as in you are an eco for a team and won't be fighting frontline while they also defend you).

The magnetic (I think) clouds disable abilities but they have asteroid fields within them--only you can't use them because your ability to man them is deactivated (probably why they don't spawn resources in vanilla).

The planet ring colors are sometimes so bright they wash out ships and details which is a real hindrance in combat wjhen trying to keep track of lots of activity.

many planets have gravity wells so large that to phase block them requires all your tactical slots and still leaves gaps.  I can see sometimes this as a feature but most worlds are large and effected this way.

Just initial observations and plenty of room for disagreement and discussion on points.  I notice the AI seems to take awhile to get up to speed too (on hard anyway) but they do it with a vengeance when they get there.

To be honest I don't want you to fully upgrade planets in a game. They can be so ridiculously powerful. I also want to crimp players ability to reach this point to the point where you don't reach it in a normal game. To have all your planets fully upgraded should be the rare exception. Because I just work on planets, not ships or techs I don't plan to edit them. Though I am thinking of doubling the tac and civ slots... I'll drop the base market price by 50% and limit the market swings somewhat (was having issues of it nearly hitting the lowest level). I'll drop the ring alpha down by a factor of two. I'll add in proper shield meshes, which I didn't make. (Actually the resources are correct...) I'll strip clouds of there resources as well. (Forgot about that) I'll up the ship speed as well. Base normal wells were doubled in size but I only upped the ship speed by 50%. Also edit the phase inhibitors so there range is increase by 50% like the defense platforms. (Though I may end up editing it for 100%)

No SVN isn't updated cause Lavo is having issues with the gamefiles. (I'll have to fix them for him.)

Edit Gah! I changed the rings in the gastitan to a better one and forgot to change it in the rest. my bad.

Tac and log slots tweaked. They now go up by a multiple of 4. (Kinda) Max is now 128 for tech1 planets. Try taking one of those. Population/Pop. Support will be re calculated with multiplier so tech 1 and 2 worlds are much cheaper (.5 and .75) Tech 4 and 5 will get a kick up.

Yeah--it's interesting approaches.  The big discrepancy was that I was averaging about 10x the normal cost  for resources on the black market.  That means buying resources took ten times more but selling them got close to 10x as much.

When you are hurting for resources it straps you and piling the planet upgrades on killed you.  When you did have supply, you became a credit trillionaire and could buy all the tech and ships you wanted nearly as fast as you liked because you were floating in credits selling goods at near 10x the normal value.  Since research and ships and planet items were priced normally it was like getting them for ten-cents on the dollar.  That's great for making large fleet battles happen fast but it makes research effortless and pretty painless.

In real life concept, the planets should be hella expensive to upgrade.  Maybe research and ship costs could be upped more in expense.

The extras slots should make it easier for Vasari--I'll try those tonight.

Speed change will definitely be nicer.

I have bifocals and have slightly color deficient vision so I notice how the game displays pretty acutely.  The ring changes should help--they were just so bright it was a pain to spot ships there.

Purely aesthetic--all your planets and particularly the moon have a strong "shine" if you could bring that down some it would look a little more realistic.  Love the planet textures great work there.