Minor Request: Fix the Time Scale

[jscott991]

Does it bother anyone else that the game's time scale seems off?

For example, it seems to me that to be more "realistic", what is currently a day should be something like a week or even a month.

It really makes no sense that a single planet with about 10 billion people (depending on your startup settings) could be a huge intergalactic empire with 1 trillion people within 100 years. If we lengthened the time frame to something like a week, that growth would happen over 700 years, which is a touch more believable (though maybe the month time frame is even more believable).

This would have no effect on gameplay, but it would give the game a better sense of scale.

GalCiv had this same problem. I remember posting about on Stardock when GalCiv 2 came out and the developers even said they agreed, but it was too low priority to worry about. Maybe I'll have more luck here.

[Astorax]

Good idea, Jscott.

I fully endorse this aesthetic enhancement!

[EisenHammer]

Why not... sounds good to me, I'll go with a week.
It would make it more realistic.

[Dadekster]

I like that idea as well. This along with some other background information regarding the galaxy that is Distant Worlds would be nice and would help answer many other related questions. I am sure the biggest issue is that there are just two people working on this and they have bigger fish to fry but like I said before, it's wierd that we have content regarding what some species like to do in their spare time but we don't even have a standard name for the currency. [;)]

[martok]

I'm pretty ambivalent. I don't see the need for changing it, but I've no particular objection either. However, I'd be mainly concerned with how it works from a gameplay perspective as compared to the standpoint of "realism".

ORIGINAL: jscott991

It really makes no sense that a single planet with about 10 billion people (depending on your startup settings) could be a huge intergalactic empire with 1 trillion people within 100 years.

Why not? Your empire's population could reach that mark -- with about 5 years to spare -- with an average growth rate of 5% per year (although granted 5% would be pretty robust). Even with a 3% growth rate (which I believe is roughly Earth's population growth rate these days), you'd still have 192 billion people after 100 years, and you'd reach 1 trillion less than 60 years after that (so 160 years total).


So perhaps a "day" in DW should be twice as long? I'm honestly not sure.

[Jaimoe_MatrixForum]

This is something that has bothered me in most space colonization games. Two things tend to bother me a bit, actually. One is the fact that these games all seem to start in the relatively near future. Folks may disagree with me but I don't see humanity starting up an interstellar empire in the next 500 years or so. Plus a new galactic empire might want to start off with it's own calendar, at year one, on the founding day of the empire. The second thing is the time scales most of these games tend to operate under. Just as jscott says, a galactic empire consisting of up to hundreds of planets and trillions of people doesn't just pop up over a period of a few decades, or at least it doesn't seem like one would.

Back in the day Civ2 let you modify the length of your turns, from a few decades per turn all the way down to a day, and it also let you choose your starting year. I wish more games since then would have allowed us to do that, but few if any games give you that option. The closest I've seen has been from Space Empires 5, where I was able to reset the starting date to zero but not alter the length of the turns(or was it the other way around? ). I haven't played every space game out there though, so there may be some I missed. It seems like it would be something that would be relatively simple to implement, even in a real time game like Distant Worlds.

[Keston]

100x in 100 years is just doubling population about every 15 years.  Humans can do that in suitable regions (until they find more interesting things to do than have kids), and in space infant mortality is probably low.  Other creatures - sure.  Trim it down by half, fine too.

[ceyan]

ORIGINAL: jscott991

Does it bother anyone else that the game's time scale seems off?

For example, it seems to me that to be more "realistic", what is currently a day should be something like a week or even a month.

It really makes no sense that a single planet with about 10 billion people (depending on your startup settings) could be a huge intergalactic empire with 1 trillion people within 100 years. If we lengthened the time frame to something like a week, that growth would happen over 700 years, which is a touch more believable (though maybe the month time frame is even more believable).

This would have no effect on gameplay, but it would give the game a better sense of scale.

GalCiv had this same problem. I remember posting about on Stardock when GalCiv 2 came out and the developers even said they agreed, but it was too low priority to worry about. Maybe I'll have more luck here.

If they just played with the timescale would you be happy with the fact that everything else would be weird and make less sense than a enormous population explosion? A single small fight that lasts weeks? A race able to quickly transverse the universe takes a few weeks to cross from the right side of large planet to the left? Ships that can take more than two-three weeks to make a u-turn? (In retrospect its actually kind of weird in the day scale, but I don't care about the timescale so...)

Or if you increase everything in sync, can you handle ships moving so fast you can barely make out the blur? Fights where you're lucky to see a single shot before its over?

[Fishman]

ORIGINAL: Keston

100x in 100 years is just doubling population about every 15 years. Humans can do that in suitable regions (until they find more interesting things to do than have kids), and in space infant mortality is probably low. Other creatures - sure. Trim it down by half, fine too.

Rapidly increasing the population very quickly becomes less than unexpected if you factor in things like cloning and longevity that would be available to SPACE PEOPLE.

[Bartje]

I agree with Fishman but I will say that the game should explain this better.
 
It would make far more sense if you could have some growth enhancing improvements like Cloning & healtcare.
 
Given ofcourse that starting healtcare should be relatively good compared to our systems currently anyway.
 
Explanation & Visibility make immersion!

[Canute0]

You all are still thinking like normal humans from yesterday/today.

But 1. are all races at DW are humans ? no some are insect other reptiles. Do you know how fast reproduce insect at last much more then 3-5%/year. Reptile are much faster then humans too.

2. do you know that humans at the future still reproduce at the same old natural way ? Maybe they got incubations plants ? Parents send in their DNA samples and get their Baby(s) next week.

3. when you change the time scale to fit the human reproduce curve, the time scale for the battles dont fit (ok they dont fit at moment anyway).

[Bartje]

Battles take days & weeks in the DW universe.
 
They do too in real time war although there is more direct action there.
 
This is just indirect action & waiting to die from the impact of what's coming.
 
Somehow you'd think our ships would have evasive abilities.

[jscott991]

This isn't Galactic Starfire. Most everything in DW is abstracted (at least I assume it is). The battles are representative of engagements, not literal presentations of them. I don't see any problem with an engagement between starships taking a week or two.

It is also weird that the movement scale would bother people, but the current building scale and time scale doesn't. Building an advanced starship in a couple of days seems off to me (not even Star Trek can do this and they have replicators).

This isn't worth a debate, but the growth and expansion rates in DW are way off for any species that is human-like.

Just watch how quickly your population grows on a day to day basis. I used 100 years just because it was round, but you can actually get to 1 trillion people in around 50-60 years, without significant conquest (I never fight wars) or alien populations (I turn them down to rare).

[ASHBERY76]

I actually agree with the moaning man.The time scale is out.

[Bartje]

It is somewhat funny yes.
 
 
Growth should be slower.
 
OR
 
Time should be faster (weeks / days) (Cosmetic)
 
 
 
I would prefer a slower pop growth & ship building solution. 
 
 

[Dadekster]

ORIGINAL: Canute

You all are still thinking like normal humans from yesterday/today.

But 1. are all races at DW are humans ? no some are insect other reptiles. Do you know how fast reproduce insect at last much more then 3-5%/year. Reptile are much faster then humans too.

2. do you know that humans at the future still reproduce at the same old natural way ? Maybe they got incubations plants ? Parents send in their DNA samples and get their Baby(s) next week.

3. when you change the time scale to fit the human reproduce curve, the time scale for the battles dont fit (ok they dont fit at moment anyway).

You are right we don't have any idea about many of those things so there are two solutions to this.

1. They explain what they have in mind regarding this world they have created in DW...when they get the chance at least.
2. I just make the stuff up myself and really stretch that immersion factor. Sort of takes the fun factor out though.

I mean in most fictional universes many things are explained. What exactly is the 'Force' in Star Wars? What makes the Enterprises engines go or why are Vulcans so damn smart, etc.

[Fishman]

Time scales in games never make all that much sense anyway. Look at the time scale in Civ. It can take a unit centuries just to cross a single city. CONTINENTS move faster than that, as seen in the Fast-Paced World of Continent Racing!

[Astorax]

Dadekster, Metachlorians are responsible for the Force; Dilithium Crystals + the sweat off the brow of Scotty powers the Enterprise's engines and Vulcans have tri-lobed brains.

Or something.

[the1sean]

Maybe a Distant World "day" is actually not based on our solar reference, but on some solar system where their days are 5 times as long as ours are here in the Sol system. Then the calendar would be counting at a totally different pace. Thats gotta be what it is,

[Dadekster]

ORIGINAL: Astorax

Dadekster, Metachlorians are responsible for the Force; Dilithium Crystals + the sweat off the brow of Scotty powers the Enterprise's engines and Vulcans have tri-lobed brains.

Or something.

Yes, thank you...that makes my point. We have answers to this because they have been provided. DW has a lot of question marks atm [:)]

I agree scale is a difficult subject. I mean a lot of it does require a bit of imagination. I always hated having to remind myself that my nicely painted Panzer IV Ausf G actually represented more than one vehicle when wargaming, course then I discovered GHQ mini's and it was like omg game ON!! But I think you get my point. Scale can be stretched to make what you are trying to do to make a bit of sense, but there is a limit before it borders on wtf. In DW I don't know if one ship is supposed to represent a squadron or what. Seeing how they have individual names...I doubt it. But that sort of seems to fly in the face of commons sense when as someone pointed out, a U-turn takes two weeks. If that's the case then we should be looking at these as campaign events not 1 vs 1 battles. Everything just seems to be at odds with one another when taken as a whole.