Colonization nit-pick

I'm not sure what you mean. When I send a colony ship I can choose which planet in the system to colonize. When the computer colonizes, they only seam to go for the earthlike worlds (per the pictures). Then they stop colonizing, make lots of ships, and all declare war on me at once.

Why doesn't the computer try to colonize all planets?

How are the planets generated / catagorized? I used to play Traveler back in the old days, and I always think back in those terms e.g. gravity; atmospheric density, contamination (sulfur, chlorine, etc.), and make up (oxygen/nitrogen, hydrogen compounds, etc.); hydrographics; diameter; albedo; life forms; rotation; spin; ecentricity; etc. etc. oh my.... Really complicated but interesting. Lots of detail and usually based on real physics and mathmatics (with the laws of probibility skewed a little bit to make it more fun to play....)

I would be more than happy to pass on information regarding this per my old collage planetary geology text books and old rpg's if interested.

Can anybody tell me why I should colonize one type of world over another? If I send a colony and a transport, sometime the population I transfered over goes down over several turns! How can I avoid this, or is there a way to know the max pop limit?

How are the solar systems placed? Are they random thru the map size? How does star type (yellow giant, red dwarf, etc.) reflect what types of planets can be found in system? Are the star types reflected in the game or are they colored dots?

Is the planet / solar system generation finished, or are there plans to add more features such as black holes, pulsars, binary plus systems, etc.?

Again, sorry if this has all been discussed before. I didn't find anything in the boards. Thanks.

Except for tactical reasons (like having a jumping off point to invade the AI players) there's not much point in colonizing a planet below class 15 or 14 because it takes a lot longer to build anything on it since the resources are so low.

The number of habitable planets in the game is based off of the slider that you set on the setup screen. The quality of the planet then determines how good its resources is, will affect the morale of its population (which in turn affects their production), etc. I'm not sure how many stats we'll break the quality of the planet down into on the Planet Details screen when it's implemented.

Population, as I said before, is greatly affected by morale. You can improve morale by lowering taxes without going into defecit spending and building social projects. You can lose population if your star systems are sucessfully invaded or if you transfer part of your population to a colony ship or transport ship that gets destroyed.

The solar sytems are placed based on a seeding system, with no more than 5 stars in a given sector, and I think that there are always stars in the corners. Star systems with a good planet (class 15+) are always shown as yellow stars on the sector map. On the mini-map, white dots represent unowned stars or stars that are hidden by the fow but just on the edges of sensor range. I.e., you know it's there but you don't know if it's inhabited or not.

I'm not sure about black holes and such. I'll have to check the design doc later.