Loading colony ships--please fix the @#$%@#$ slider!!

While it take a little time, you can use the scroll wheel on your mouse to load people.

If you go to the Library you will find a new mod created by Cariel with a minicolony ship that only carries 1000 max.

I second the recommendation for the mini-colony ship mod.

~SDC~

Cari said that the AI's strategy wouldn't be disturbed if you actually replaced the standard colony ship with the mini one.

~SDC~

Does that actually replace the standard colonyship, or do you get both?

You get both if you install it as is, but if you change the name and ID to match and it'll replace the original. Or you could edit the original to only hold 1000.

~SDC~

I'd want both. If you flip an AI planet, they tend to strip them, so if you shove off the majority of the pop to a colonyship, you can bring the morale up until you have enough improvement to put them back. I would like to have the extra ship type available for late game colonizing.
[Message Edited]

Well, I don't have a mouse wheel on my laptop. So, how about making an editable control where the number of colonist is displayed? Put the value of colonists to be loaded into the edit box. The slider would still work, but players would also just be able to type in the value they want (50, 100, etc) into the amount.

When you guys have a spare 2 hours.

Thanks for the great game!

You can still increase the number or colonists one by one by clicking on the arrows. (Replace madly spinning the wheel with madly clicking the arrow.) Still not ideal, but better than launching the ship with four billion colonists.

~SDC~

I have a laptop as well and dont use a wheel mouse, I use a wacoms graphics tablet. I would also love to see the option of being able to type in the amount of your chosing into a box, as it gets annoying clicking 300 times to load up a colony ship.

There are many things about the user interface which need fixing, and this is most certainly one of them. I do not have a mouse wheel, and when the wheel does not resolve the problem any better than the slider that is no solution anyway. Like any well designed program this needs to let us type in a number instead of using that k3wL slider. The time it would take to code would be less than it takes to read this thread.

I think that you shouldn't be able to load more than 100 million into a colony ship. The whole unlimited colonists thing is just plain wierd. If you consider how much food, air, water and space a million colonists is going to require it's hardely likely that a ship as cheap as a colony ship is going to be able to support 1000 million colonists.

I've actually destroyed my mouse button doing this (not a joke, but amusing still).

Bill

~SDC~

Goblin Cookie... the colonists are not "alive" in the ships. They are just cargo. No need for support of any kind. So it seems to me that they must be frozen in some kind of statis and the colony ship's power unit is more then sufficent to keep them that way. This being just frozen as pure cargo also explains why there is no issue of the colonist in a ship rebelling (because they've been living in it for 10 years or more and forgotten), or growing or dwindling in size.

True Star Pilot, but it's still rather unrealistic to be able to load "unlimited" colonists into a starship, especially when you can do this at the start of the game, but only carry 1000 soldiers. I've felt for a while that colony ships should have a top limit too.

Plus when you think about it, the soldiers would most likely be in cryo too, considering how slow the Transports are, it can takes a game year or longer to reach some planets

At the end of the day, I doubt this will change, it's been like this from day 1, but it would be good if it could be sorted out... GalCiv never did claim to be realistic after all!

Dark Paladin... are you kidding? They just strap the frozen colonist on the *hull*, and then *each other* once all the hull is covered. It's space. And with everyone frozen, who cares how long it takes to get there? Or how long it takes to unload them and warm them back up later.

Now, as for the troopers... their ships have actual defense, and the troopers have to be in fighting shape at the end of their journey. So, limited space for the troopers inside the armored hull, and probably better handling/care then the colonists. Just how I look at it. Makes sense to me, but I don't know if that's what is "supposed" to be going on.

If you look at the movie that plays when you colonize your first planet, you'll see that colony ships are segmented. I guess they're like trains - you can attach as many cars as you want...

Bill

~SDC~

So can you make a train long enough to reach from one star to another? That'd make building transports for pop transfer obsolete.

Yeah. So what if we burn up a few million colonists unlucky enough to be placed on the outside of this huge massive mound of flesh around a colony ship on reaentry. It saves the cost of a heat shield.

LOL Never thought of it quite like that Star Pilot! LOL

I like the idea of building a train of colony ships, could make them walk that way too, saves on fuel!
[Message Edited]

Darn straight! Well, I suppose the GOOD civilizations break out a shuttle when they get to their destination world, and first unload all the exterior hung colonists. But the EVIL get to save all that shielding costs for important things... like executive christmas bonuses!

And it would lead to the newest dance show sensation to hit the holos. The Coooooolony Train.

Freezing humans into blocks of ice would kill them as their bloodvessals would burst upon freezing. People have survived drastic reduction of core body temperature but more often than not with severe brain damage.
Some insects are possesed of the ability to survive freeze-thaw action and live and it's possible that through advanced genetic engeneering humans might become capable of this.
However your human would need

a)Cold bloodedness
b)Drasticly reduced intelligence
c)The ability to breath through it's skin
d)A drastic change in anatomy which would possibly make your modified human hideous to look at

[Message Edited]

Some animals survive freezing by having an effective anti-freeze in their cells. The main way cells are damaged by freezing is that when the water freezes, it creates jagged shards of ice that push right through the cell wall. Maybe all that we need is to isolate the gene that does this, stick it in the blender and hit the switch...

Bill

~SDC~

Bill Ko is right. And this is a not a hard science game. Otherwise, there would be exactly ZERO other races in the game. Modern Astrobiology and Modern Cosmology says that there are no other intelligent bipeds out ther. There are no other tool users (as we are) out there. There is most likely many small, early eco systems on many worlds, but most worlds are not stable enough environmentally long enough to get anything approaching a jelly fish, let alone "higher" life forms.

So, that leaves us non-planet bound life forms. Whose sense of time and basic concepts would be so alien to us that we would have no common framework to communicate with. VERY large astro creatures, living in nebula, and being on the size scale of our solar system themselves. We won't even recognize that they are living beings... just as they won't recognize us as anything beyond "bacterial" life forms.

GC is pure science fantasy. We don't know that the freeze people using cold. For all we know, they download a person's brain, process the body for raw materials, and ship out. When the colony worlds get to where they are going, they land and "clone" new bodies for the colonists, and upload their "virtual brains" back into the body. This would also explain why a colony ship is effectively unlimited for its carry capacity. It's just data storage. And why Troop Transports aren't... they are actually carrying the body of the trooper.

It just depends on what you are most comfortable with. What makes the most sense to you. If "cold sleep" coffins offend your personal universe, then please, envision your favorite views. It's only a game, after all, and based on "what would be more fun", not "what is more realistic".