Author Topic: Radiation Repair  (Read 4746 times)

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Offline Rich.h (OP)

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Radiation Repair
« on: August 11, 2015, 05:01:58 AM »
Either this hasn't been asked before (unlikely) or my search skills are lacking. But if a planet has suffered radiation damage is there a way of repairing the damage? Does it slowly decay naturally and you can do nothing to speed it up, or is the effect now a permanent feature of the planet/moon?
 

Offline GreatTuna

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Re: Radiation Repair
« Reply #1 on: August 11, 2015, 05:22:02 AM »
There is no way to repair the radiation. You can only wait until it reduces itself to zero.
 

Offline chrislocke2000

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Re: Radiation Repair
« Reply #2 on: August 11, 2015, 06:49:05 AM »
Yes it's one of those things that I would quite like to see as an option for your terraformers although having one run in reverse to irradiate a planet could be pretty nasty....
 

Offline Prince of Space

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Re: Radiation Repair
« Reply #3 on: August 11, 2015, 08:03:41 AM »
I don't expect radiation repair to be added to the game:

Not allowing radiation removal through terraforming is a game design decision to prevent a Starfire game strategy that used to be called "Genocide For Fun and Profit (GFFP)". GFFP was all about exterminating alien races and taking over their planets. This was possible in Starfire because you could completely glass the planet from orbit and move in the next day with no ill effects. Aurora has environmental and collateral damage to make ground combat a realistic option. If you could wipe out a population from orbit and then remove the resulting radiation, it would significantly reduce the need for ground combat.

Steve
 

Offline Rich.h (OP)

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Re: Radiation Repair
« Reply #4 on: August 11, 2015, 10:30:47 AM »
Cheers for the information, while my search skills are still lacking could someone point me towards where the mechanics of radiation decay are located so I can see how long a planet takes to recover by itself.
 

Offline Prince of Space

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Re: Radiation Repair
« Reply #5 on: August 11, 2015, 10:55:04 AM »
This was what I found. I think it's still accurate:

Background radiation is reduced by 100 per year. Dust is reduced by 250 per year. The dust in this sense is the atmospheric dust that blots out the sun and reduces temperature. I suppose I could have done it by half life but I wanted to emphasise the penalties for nuking a planet till it glows.

Steve
 

Offline hubgbf

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Re: Radiation Repair
« Reply #6 on: August 14, 2015, 08:28:04 AM »
Hi,

About GFFP, terraformers can already do it : just add some poison gaz in the atmosphere, wait for the population to decrease, then remove the gaz.
If there is defending forces and the atm is not too high, just remove enough atm to allow your energy weapons to kill the troops.

I will try it in my next game, I Wonder if the NPR will become hostile if i add some poison gaz...
 

Offline Prince of Space

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Re: Radiation Repair
« Reply #7 on: August 14, 2015, 02:49:47 PM »
Well, glassing the planet will take out PDCs and ground forces. Pumping sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere will just kill civilians. While that does approach the dictionary definition of genocide, or at least atrocity, I think the Starfire players had something else in mind when describing GFFP. So no, hostile terraforming does not fully replicate the results of nuclear carpet bombing.

Still, it'll throw a monkey wrench into their war materiel manufacturing.
 

Offline sloanjh

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Re: Radiation Repair
« Reply #8 on: August 15, 2015, 07:52:38 AM »
Using terraformers to pump poison gas into an enemy planet's atmosphere is precisely in the spirit of GFFP -it kills all the people and leaves the infrastructure intact (for sale later in SF).  It isn't mentioned in the SF context because SF doesn't have (anti-)terraforming.  It's a GFFP loophole in Aurora that someone came up with a few years back that Steve hasn't yet closed.  I'm not sure how big it is from a practical point of view (i.e. cost, length of time etc.), but it's definitely a loophole that I'm sure Steve would prefer to close if he could figure out a way to do so without breaking terraforming mechanics altogether. 

A kludgy (in the "no good engineering explanation" sense) solution would be to disallow adding any immediately poisonous gas to an atmosphere - that way at least one would have to devote significant terraforming resources to adjust gas percentages like oxygen or CO2 by a non-zero amount.  A less kludgy but bigger change would be to have a gradual ramp-up from 0 to 2 as poison gas concentration rises to some threshold (e.g. 1%) combined with a change in the way colony cost effects are applied so that they act more like radiation, i.e. suppressing the growth rate rather than preventing growth altogether if not-enough-infrastructure is present.

John
« Last Edit: August 15, 2015, 07:55:19 AM by sloanjh »
 

Offline TheDeadlyShoe

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Re: Radiation Repair
« Reply #9 on: August 15, 2015, 08:07:09 AM »
it doesn't really cause GFFP, because all it does it kill off civilians. It does little to deal with extant PDCs or - in particular - ground forces.  Those are what stop you from freely seizing infrastructure.  (Or would if NPRs used PDCs... :^)
 

Offline MarcAFK

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Re: Radiation Repair
« Reply #10 on: August 15, 2015, 10:06:54 AM »
An easy solution would be simply disabling terraforming from working at any location that has a hostile ground population.
" Why is this godforsaken hellhole worth dying for? "
". . .  We know nothing about them, their language, their history or what they look like.  But we can assume this.  They stand for everything we don't stand for.  Also they told me you guys look like dorks. "
"Stop exploding, you cowards.  "
 

Offline Bryan Swartz

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Re: Radiation Repair
« Reply #11 on: August 15, 2015, 05:15:03 PM »
Yep.  And of course if you want to do stuff like speed up the radiation repair etc., well ... SM it. 
 

Offline Prince of Space

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Re: Radiation Repair
« Reply #12 on: August 16, 2015, 09:41:22 AM »
I'm not sure how big it is from a practical point of view (i.e. cost, length of time etc.), but it's definitely a loophole

Are you talking about engaging in hostile terraforming against an empire that doesn't consider you an enemy? I've never tried that, but I could definitely get behind having NPRs recognize and respond to it.

But if you've already initiated hostilities, established space superiority in the theater, and then held onto that advantage long enough for a terraformer to sit in orbit for a construction cycle, then I think that's reasonable. It's a third option for taking the planet:

1. Nuke it from orbit, and to hell with the post-invasion penalties
2. Send in the troops, and take on the strategic and logistical burden
3. Poison the atmosphere, and let the planetary siege soften up resistance for you
 

Offline sloanjh

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Re: Radiation Repair
« Reply #13 on: August 16, 2015, 10:03:17 AM »
it doesn't really cause GFFP, because all it does it kill off civilians. It does little to deal with extant PDCs or - in particular - ground forces.  Those are what stop you from freely seizing infrastructure.  (Or would if NPRs used PDCs... :^)

Good point on the ground forces.  Maybe that's why more people aren't using it.

That being said, I just went back and re-read the original (I think) article: http://www.cfar.umd.edu/~keverill/Games/Starfire/Genocide.html
 and it reminded me of a few things I'd forgotten.  I also found this link on Matt Wadwell's old (archived) geocities site: http://www.geocities.ws/mwadwell/Playaids.html  It has a link to what looks like a later/longer analysis.

First, for those that don't speak Starfire:

PU/PTU = population
IU = industry (construction factories etc., but it's abstracted into income and can be sold off)
PU facilities = kind of like emplaced infrastructure, but it's required even for habitable worlds
PI/I1/I2 = pre-TN tech levels (primitive, industrial1/2)
HT = TN tech level
PCFn = ground forces at tech level n
SEC = security troops
CFN = Civilian Freight Network; effect similar to contracts with civies, except ships are abstracted out and not tracked directly.

So (my understanding of) what the GFFP article says is (roughly):

1)  Build big ground forces
2)  For PI and I1 NPR simply invade and quickly crush their ground forces with your ground forces.
3)  For I2 (or higher?), nuke their ground forces to the point where your ground forces can quickly crush them, then invade.
4)  If/when they rebel, use "active reprisals" by ground forces to kill off the population.  I would argue that this is the equivalent of the terraforming trick in Aurora, except it's even worse in Aurora than in SF since in SF you need to kill off all their ground forces first, while in Aurora you can start killing population from the start.  In addition, I think that the conquered population needs to be in rebellion in order to apply active reprisals, which again makes it more difficult to kill population in SF.

That being said, I think Aurora has a MUCH lower motivation for actually killing off the population once you've conquered them - nothing stops you from planting your own colony on their world, you can already steal their factories, and they won't have any infrastructure (assuming it's their home world) for you to steal.  Note that this is what the 2nd article says - to solve GFFP the game needs to make enemy populations more valuable alive than dead.  I think that the terraforming trick still goes against this, since it at least keeps the enemy from building more ground forces etc. once they're dead.

John
 

Offline sloanjh

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Re: Radiation Repair
« Reply #14 on: August 16, 2015, 10:13:37 AM »
Are you talking about engaging in hostile terraforming against an empire that doesn't consider you an enemy? I've never tried that, but I could definitely get behind having NPRs recognize and respond to it.

But if you've already initiated hostilities, established space superiority in the theater, and then held onto that advantage long enough for a terraformer to sit in orbit for a construction cycle, then I think that's reasonable. It's a third option for taking the planet:

1. Nuke it from orbit, and to hell with the post-invasion penalties
2. Send in the troops, and take on the strategic and logistical burden
3. Poison the atmosphere, and let the planetary siege soften up resistance for you

[Edit] Yes (on hostile terraforming).  Oops - didn't read carefully enough.  No I'm talking about hostile terraforming in general.  Also didn't realize that it was you that I originally responded to - sorry! [/Edit]

From what I understand of Steve's position (and you found the perfect quote for it up-thread), it's a game-play mechanics thing, rather than a "could you do this in 'real' life" thing.  Basically, (I think) he doesn't want players to be able to easily wipe out a planetary population as part of the conquest; kind of an "actions have consequences" concept in terms of cost, i.e. planetary populations should be difficult to wipe out.  So the loophole isn't so much that #3 is do-able, it's that it's relatively easy to do with a single orbital terraforming unit.  If the poison gas rules were changed, then I think it would pass muster.  And as you say, the rules/mechanics should also be switched so that NPRs noticed it was happening and built their own terraformers to counteract your orbital units, at which point it becomes a contest of who can terraform more quickly.

John
« Last Edit: August 16, 2015, 10:17:22 AM by sloanjh »