Colonization

As you might have guessed from previous posts, colonization has been implemented. Like some other features it was not a direct translation from CroVar iteration. In CroVar version colonization followed traditional Master of Orion I steps: bring a colony ship to a star system and land it on an empty planet. Additionally you could bring multiple colony ships and choose how many will land on which planet. Multiple ships on the same planet would establish a bigger colony. This is how the GUI for it looked:

Planets in the system are on the left side, information about a selected planet and estimated productivity are on the right side and a number of ships to land is selected with a slider below it. At first I thought about doing the same in this iteration but certain discussion on Wargaming's Master of Orion forum nudged me to think about other possibilities. In Master of Orion II there was a way to arrange colonization from a planet list. There was a screen with a list of planets which could be filtered and sorted by quality and size. Once you've decided which planet was the best candidate you could select it and press a "colonize" button. If you had available colony ships the game would direct a nearest one to the planet's star system and following turns the ship would fly there and land. Now don't kill me for bringing Master of Orion III up, that game went one step further in not necessarily bad way. There you could zoom in to a star system, mark planets for colonization and your unquenchable AI viceroy would build needed colony ships and send them to the planets.

I've decided to do something similar in the Stareater. Marking an empty planet for colonization creates a colonization project and on colonization screen you can decide which star system will build colony ships for which planet. Once built, colony ships will fly toward to planet and wait until there is enough of them. When minimum population has been accumulated, a colony is established.

GUI could use more work but that would be a job for another time. I've been looking around and there is an interesting GUI library for OpenGL, it's not so well maintained but I'll keep it in mind for that sunny day when I'll be converting Windows forms GUI to OpenGL. Now next on the menu: space battles!