Missed 4X feature

[CladInShadows]

I've been playing 4X games for a long time. One feature I loved that I have never seen make a return was the multiple planes introduced by the Sci-Fi (Lalande) and Fantasy (Midgard) scenarios in Civ II:Test of Time.

Why did I love this? Because it suddenly added a whole extra level of strategy with the 3D aspect it gave the worlds. In the Lalande scenarios colonies that you thought were safe could suddenly become under siege when enemy craft descended down from the orbitals above the surface. Units could also travel to the system's moon or the neighboring gas giant.

To give an example of the depth it adds, in the Midgard scenario I remember how good it felt upon realizing that an underground tunnel existed that ran from my continent to an island off the coast, meaning I could get there although I had not yet discovered seafaring or flight. A tunnel from the underworld could open behind your defenses or enemies could descend from the sky.

In a game like Pandora, similar strategies could be unlocked with, for example, an abandoned set of orbital platforms above the planet, a mysterious series of caves discovered inside the planet, or even the ability to travel and colonize under the sea - all of which would fit in perfectly with the sci-fi setting.

I was just wondering if anything like this had ever been considered?

Cheers

[Blackadar]

Actually, this was really pioneered by Master of Magic back in '94. There were two worlds - Arcanus and Myrror - that you could develop and explore. And of course SMAC let you build cities on the water - later in the game they could be quite powerful.

I'm not sure I like the idea of the sky world, but the opportunity to build a cave civ could be interesting. It could have different flora and fauna, require different buildings (making some of those relatively useless techs useful) and provide choke points for easier defense. The devs could have the map scripted so that it would only be viable to build cities in larger caverns while there were tunnels connecting cavern to cavern. Water cities IMO tend to clutter up the map a bit. Without some sort of negative influence to curb the spam of cities, I think that would be problematic because you'd just end up with cities on every spot on the map. But it's something the devs could explore to give Pandora a unique feel. Good idea!

[HMEE]

I remember an old Civilization: Call to Power had the space/orbit feature, as well as orbital and underwater cities, although they dropped it in the sequel (CTP II). Another example is the more recent Warlock, which have multiple extra dimensions (planes), so I would not call this feature a forgotten one.

I think the greatest challenge for the devs to implement this feature is the AI: as it stands now, it is quite stupid in most cases even with one plane/dimension to play in.

[fortydayweekend]

Aren't there orbital drops already? I researched something which gave me 3 drop ships as an Operation, but they were blacked out and I never got around to figuring out how to use them before the Acension nuked me..

[jdmillard]

They are blacked out because you don't deploy them the same way that you would field training. When you have a unit selected (must be in a city), you click on the little drop-pod button in the unit's control window in the bottom left corner of the screen. You chose where to drop, and that's it. You never need to click in the operations window that's in the top left. The drop-pods are only displayed there (grayed-out) to let you know how many you have left.

But I don't think the previous posts were referring to drop-pods, rather an entirely separate plane from which units are transferred.

And for the record, I think these ideas are interesting but Pandora doesn't need them. I think the game is in greater need of diplomacy improvements before more dramatic changes are considered.