Consider Fergus, my Thoraxian homeworld. It is a Hypertonic Gas Giant with a base 1.5 compatibility with Thoraxians. They have a racial building providing 40x defense against bombardment and 5x troop strength on defense. This world has 61 moons, all uncolonized. Its surface area is 25,671m km^2, which is about a third of Jupiter in real-world terms. Its equilibrium population is 3.3 trillion, almost entirely composed of nightmare-quality ground troops.
Even with a dead queen and RCIs in the negative thousands, you can expect many solar years of grinding, stagnated perpetual bombardment and ineffectual invasion before anyone will be able to dislodge the Thoraxians from this planet. With a living queen and no player intervention, you could expect an overwhelming siege of this planet last for hundreds of solar years, literally stretching out until the AI attackers develop Death Mote and Time Travel for themselves. I know this because I tried it in observer mode, and that's exactly what happened. The attackers eventually got the workers turn on queen event, and even that didn't precipitate the fall of the two overwhelmingly besieged Thoraxian gas giants.
Perhaps the thematic explanation of the 40x defense Thoraxian tunnels on gas giants are that the Thoraxians are living in an immense solid core deep inside the gas giant. The high racial compatibilities of most races with Hypertonic Gas Giants, along with the art for all gas giants, seems to suggest an alternative explanation that they're living on the moons. Then again, the uncolonized moon count and the gigantic surface area both seem to contradict this explanation. I find it quite unclear what is actually happening on these planets that the other races are having such a hard time attacking.
The combination of gameplay and thematic difficulties with the current situation suggests that a creative solution could be found to address both the grind that results from Thoraxians on gas giants and the thematic questions that result from their colonization.
Some possibilities:
- Perhaps races should not be living in the cloud layer of the gas giant, but have a low starting total land area and see it go up every time they colonize a moon, simulating them living on the planet's moons rather than its surface. Thoraxians can still dig in deep, but they won't get trillions of people.
- Or perhaps they should be living in the gas giant proper, but under the thematic guise of being in sky cities in the upper atmosphere. Thoraxians could get trillions of people, but they wouldn't be able to build their racial Underground Tunnels in them, and expanding usable land area would be very difficult.
- Perhaps they should be living on some immense solid core, but with an exceptionally hostile environment that is unfriendly to most or all races, and makes very difficult to convert unusable land area to usable. Thoraxians could dig in, but would not be able to "naturally" expand across the entire planet in a reasonable amount of time, and would not have a 1.5 base compatibility with the world.
Mind that the variety in world gen is part of the replayability and enjoyment, and I don't want to strangle that off. It's just that the Thoraxians are already crazy strong, and when they're combined with the huge population cap on gas giants they can grind progress to a halt.
I am interested in hearing your thoughts on the matter -- what makes sense to you? What would you find fun and interesting to play with? And what strategies you use to dislodge the Thoraxians when they absolutely gotta go, but their population is in the trillions?
