Single System Campaign. Possible and best practices?

[Ush213 (OP)]

I have been playing with the idea of creating a huge solar system 400b+ km with 4 stars planets and no JPs.
I want to create lots of habitable worlds, think of the Verse in the Firefly series

https://firefly.fandom.com/wiki/Maps_of_the_%27Verse?file=Verse.png

My plan is to create my human race and seed it all over the worlds then release them as independent races.
Give each world the same amount of installations and pops and let them fight it out,

How I see the campaign going is NPC and me take over one another in the smaller sun systems and grow in strength absorb the populations. Then with improvements to engine range, ships can reach other suns for more conquest.
Suns will hopefully be around 100B+ km away to force fighting between direct neighbors first.

Questions:

Will this work?
Does the AI have the capability to build ships with huge range or will I have to go to them?
Can you absorb the human population like I want or will they just be separate races once conquered?
Is there any show stoppers to my plan that im not aware of?

[nuclearslurpee]

This should work in principle, mostly, although NPRs are not very bright so don't expect a lot of complicated strategic intrigue.

There are a couple of potential pain points:

• NPRs don't really do well at building ships with particularly long ranges. Probably the solution here will be Lagrange Points. Engine range improvements are not as drastic as you might expect until rather high tech levels, the bigger benefit comes from bigger engines but NPRs use fixed engine sizes AFAIK.
• Actually invading a home planet is very difficult, and I'm not sure an NPR can pull it off against another NPR even if they completely wreck the opponent's fleet. Possibly they will succeed by orbital bombardment, but that will probably wipe out most of the population and infrastructure, and NPRs are not very good at taking advantage of "extraterrestrial" resources by themselves. Especially if their civilian shipping fleet was massacred in the war...
• NPR diplomacy is not very predictable so you may see alliances instead of wars, although there are options to address this.

[Garfunkel]

As long as you make sure that you switch back to the original Human species at the creation screen, then the populations can be absorbed after conquest. Note that by default, the empire creation window will create a new human species instead of reusing the original one. So it's likely to end up with multiple "human" species that are identical looking but separate in the database which makes absorption impossible.

And yeah, you have to use Lagrange points - since Hyperdrives are not in C#, there's very little point of traveling 100b km distances normally. Just see how long it takes for ships with early game engines to get from Earth to Pluto (and/or Minerva) in a Sol game.

[Ush213 (OP)]

Thanks. With the AI behavior do you think its worth the effort to put the system together?

[Froggiest1982]

Tried That, the problem is that the amount of ships you are ending up in one system only is going to be insane along with all other little things. Long story short, your turns are going to be massively slow very fast, and very soon with little to nothing you can do to avoid that.

Therefore, if you don't mind that, go for it. I had some fun until I gave up.

[Ush213 (OP)]

Thanks for your input. On paper it does seem like it would be pretty cool. It may not be worth the effort to build out the system if its going to slow down so quickly.

[StarshipCactus]

You could also control some or all of the factions yourself and just play them all differently. With various starting conditions, techs, ships and neighbours, you should be able to create a variety of emergent conflicts.

[Garfunkel]

If you want to be nice, share the database once you've built the system itself. That way other people can use it as a basis for all sorts of campaigns. Mediafire is the hosting service that I personally use, it's free for small files. Ideally, build the system/game in an otherwise empty database, then rename it to MegaSystem.db and upload it to Mediafire and share the link here on the forums.

Then all of us can try different variations on it. I've been wanting to try something like this but I haven't had the time and energy to get into system creation/modification on a level required for something like this.

Actually, the most awesomest thing would be a DB that includes both Firefly system in one game and the Battlestar Galactica home system in another game. That'd be convenient and super duper useful.

[GodEmperor]

Just fyi - letting colony go "independent" creates a new empire but under player control not computer. So you have to either make normal nprs or control everything at once.

But the idea is very solid, i might try that myself tbh.

[Ush213 (OP)]

Garfunkel I made a start on the system before making the post, I had the sun orbits and basic planet bodies set up done. But after hearing about other peoples poor performance issues I haven't had the drive to complete it.

I think I will wait for 2.2 I believe Steve has improved the Civs fleets so they don't spam ships as much anymore. It might help and allow this game mode to be a bit more playable. I know I could just turn of civs but I use them heavily in my games so I don't want to nuke them. 

GodEmperor I also didn't know that about independents. thanks. I wanted to have it so the other races are the same species in the game DB so that when you conquer them, the pops get absorbed into your empire not treated as a separate race. Like the Great crusade in WH40K

[Falryx]

Fairly certain the process to do this is to make sure that you're creating the NPRs with the same 'race' as you as Garfunkel described above.   I'd recommend changing something (flag, portrait or hull) so that when you have the NPR ready to be created you have a good visual cue that you've got them assigned to the correct (e. g.  your) species.