Dont remember if I posted this before as I've had this idea mulling about for a while now.

So as we know looking ahead at higher ranks planet prices to colonize and invade become increaseingly high, to the point where its not worth colonizing planets unless for a specific artifact / purpose, or if its just really really good

Now we have touched on planet transmutation already, with the gaia seeds, melters, ionizers, and even the mission planets, however all of these have thus far been augmentations of pre existing planets, and not an actual construction per say.

by default the easiest idea would be to implement this in the CTL, it could also be implemented as a base module, a mission chain end reward, or a variety of other things each ending in either an artifact / ability / blueprint / something that would allow for the construction of planets, if a chain would be for this im rather votint that it be an extension of the prejor chain personally the whole slave labor and ancient race thing kinda work for it ( unless im thinking of another race chain ).

the output would be a planet project that you would increase incrementally and would not have to pay for upon completion.

basic idea breakdown - most likely needs tweaking :
100 ship bots + 10 mass storage pods per size up to very massive so >> 900 ship bots / 90 mass storage pods to make 1 VM planet
resources :
10k of each resource per availablilty bonus up to 15k >> 270k of mining / arti / rp to make a 15x planet
passives :
cloak : 100:1 EM:cloak >> 100kEM = 1k passive cloak
attack : not sure yet
defense : not sure yet

I like the idea. +1, but some parts do need tweaking I think, such as the amounts of ship bots and mass storage pods needed and also, 270K/hour? Doesn't that seem like a bit much?

You are probably thinking of the Goa'uld from stargate.

If this creates a new type of planet, and can't be used on other planets. +1

270k? That needs to be much higher, even I almost at rank 500 get that much every day in arti alone. This means that it's not really a requirement at all, I like the sizing requirement though - new use for ship bots for all those complaining about them.

I don't remember the Goa'uld making or even terraforming/changing planets at all in SG.

Just had a new type of planet, so I'd advise against adding another in so soon.

Although Cthonian planets are horrible.

Oh right, me being an idiot again. Carry on.

I actually like this a lot.
Im thinking it would have rather intense energy reserves as well. I would suggest a element of randomness to the whole thing - I dont want it to be a horadric cube recipe

The costs would have to be increased, particularly the mass storage pods and points used to build the world - but keep in mind a very real hard limit is going to be a persons maximum storage. Require 500k artifacts? hope you can hold that much!

I do realize now after I posted the initial idea that I had forgotten something, as I had never actually written this down, so I do thank everyone for the responses, and for reminding me

like all real construction projects that take place on a wide scale it is something that would have to be completed in stages. I was thinking of it as an increase by 1 step in planet size and richness per day at a cost of 2k energy per increase. So to get a free 15x planet you are looking at a total of 27 days to create, faster than what any of the improvement races will give you I will grant you this so it may also require a tweaking as well.

To reply to the concern about the amount of resources required to incrase the planets richness, at first I as well thought that this was low, but then thought about how quikly people would start running out of ship bots, I do not know what type of numbers higher ranked players are looking at, but me personally I could make 1 such planet and then wouold not be able to make another for an extremely long time. So in a sense I saw the amount of ship bots required as a limiting factor.

Also to address the new planet question : I had not intended this to be a new planet type, In fact since you are creating the world, I would imagine there could be a sort of customization available, for example : upon initial creation you can select any standard planet type >> ocean / barren / icy / metallic, etc. and if you have certain features unlocked then you could expand this, drannik = gaia , talith = ecunomnom ( or whatever they are ), if you have the medal points for the mission planets then you could create more exotics / dysons / rifts ( though it would just be looks, this wouldnt incrase the planets size / resources at all )

Lastly, and this is a side note, you would need resources of course to builde a planet and ship bots / MSP's to me logically do not = planet, the cthulhu planets ( or whatever ) is a cool idea as a start where it takes one planet type and transforms it into another, I had a similar idea except it just completely destroyed the planet and gave you (x) raw materials to build with based on size + total element richness, but this is probably to coding / time intensive to even be worth persuing, which is namely why I left it out of the initial post, but figured it was at least worth mentioning, to see if anyone had a reasonable way to build on this.

maybe they could add in a research tree were you would unlock blueprints to build "gravity pits" that you would use on scan able asteroid fields. the stronger the gravity pit the bigger the planet. the reason i wouldnt put the gravity pit blueprints it the ct lab is because one person could throw their research at it and unlock it for everyone. if you put it in a research tree you can go at your own pace. for resource richness the newly formed planet would start at sparse. you would put in more points from the desired resource. the cost would increase exponentially.

I've come up with a theory as to why Colonization/Invasion costs are so expense: At the beginning of the game your production grows exponentially, until you reach the last tier of planetary production modules. After that, your production grows on a linear scale. Whereas Colonization/Invasions cost stay exponential. The disparity will continue to rise the more planets you take.

+1 to this lovely idea
this need still some balancing.
either multiply the required resources or let the required resource grown by each increase in size.
Please do not make the planet creation and size upgrades shorter than other abilities existing = this would be hardly balanced.
Could we have this only as planet creation with no or lowest resource availability?
The planet would be abandoned after creation - so still colonization cost (colonization cost is lower than invasion as per my knowledge)


+1 for Diablo and also the suggestion - the created planet type should be random... just to make it more fun

what is the weak point of the idea itself and need to be solved:
The number of planet in this galaxy is given by some mathematical function of number 2 (>4M planets).
We do not know, if any planets could be added to the planet database for GL (if planet created should be listed).
The only easy way I can think about is, that if Dan would support this - he would delete some tiny planets from total planet list for this galaxy leaving only the names and planet type filled and the creation of planet would assigned the planet to the name and planet type in the database.