It's only difficult for us right now because we've had no reason to try yet. The need for supplying large amounts of energy to distant colonies and space stations would likely cause people to put more thought into it.

For Jupiter sure, it's much less for smaller gas planets, and it would be worth it in some cases. For example Uranus is thought to have oceans of liquid diamond, with large diamond chunks floating in it, and diamond hail falling from the sky. In a sci-fi game it's as simple as turning on a glowing light shield to block all that pressure while diamonds are collected and sent up a space elevator. Who knows if that will ever be a reality, but it would be fun in a game.

Certainly. That wasn't a suggestion for GalCiv, like I said it would take probably 10s of thousands of years. Just it's not all that unrealistic or silly for ES to have that. Certainly there's the question of where all that gas is going (or coming from), or why it's not being turned into something productive, but ES has a very strong fantasy element anyway, like Dust for example.

I didn't get that vibe from your post at all.

Complex here means the global amount of stuff and different mechanics that are in the game. I could have said instead "How much stuff is too much stuff"

The op did not specify anything really precise beside the idea that those Gas Giant/moons could be used in some way, that is all. Who knows what cool mechanic could be implemented with them. I like what Stardock did with the Asteroid mining.

This is my primary concern here; Galactic Civilizations, while it undoubtedly has a strong fantasy element to it (Like, for instance, the treatment of dark energy in the lore) it's also a science fiction story; things are at least given a superficially-realistic explanation for why they work. Like in Star Trek or Stargate.

Conversely, in science fantasy settings like Star Wars or Warhammer 40,000, things just happen 'because magic' or 'thing x does thing y, now shut up'. No explanation is given.

I'd rather not have Galactic Civilizations take the latter route by saying 'space magic explains it all!'; I'd prefer if there was at least some pretense of realism.

Or maybe I'm just getting cynical at my ripe old age of twenty.

Not necessarily; I share the same opinion and I feel there are many others as well. After all, you can relate to something that is feasible/understandable.

Unless I'm getting more cynical at my ripe old age of twenty five.

It would be nice to see that beautiful new frigate your empire just made on its first voyage to a gas giant carrying missiles and margaritas. After some celebrating by the crew they are a bit drunk. which is against protocol but whose going to tell? A stupid snitch that's who! Private Jacob stupid Snitch. (thats his name) tried contacting command but communications were jammed by the gas giant. (no I'm not giving a explanation why comms are down. Star wars didn't say why a beam of light stops at the length of a sword or why FTL travel requires gas. And Paragade said something like this to.) so to get more power for the transmission he went to the Nightmare torpedo missile silo to transfer power. But since he had some magic margaritas as well the hippocrate was impaired, and swished the settings to thermal seaking and fired the missile.

a few short seconds later at hyper velocity the planet erupted sending gas, radiation, and rock out into space. Sadly the crew of the ship weren't prepared for this and were OBLITERATED!!!

After the flight recorder was magically recovered in a new asteroid belt. Scientists theorized that if enough missiles were fired at opposite sides of the planet at once. The gas could be blown away from the planet leaving a small but valuable orb of resources. Sometimes it might even be habitable up to a class three planet.

and that's how you mindlessly dream concepts.

DARCA

I would find it highly likely that a civilisation capable of interstellar space travel would have mastered radiation shielding to a great degree. Although i'm sceptical of colonizing the gas giant itself, the moons on the other hand should be colonizable to some degree, considering it would mostly be in domed cities like it's probably on T1 planets.

Regarding the Gas giant, one idea would be to have certain tipes of ship engines and weapons and terraforming options unavailable unless the empire has a gas extraction station on a GG with the particular gas needed to unlock it. This might lead empires to take different paths in research depending on what resources are available to each empire.

I just think any opportunity to blow up a something, should be taken. And I agree radiation should never be a problem. Sure in a over crowded galaxy you can get a high rise apartment or you can live in the nuked-out crater of fun!

Orbital missile silos/Stardocks would also be good at doing this.

DARCA

Perhaps the gas giant and zero level planets could act as "Easter Eggs" in the game - another form of Space anomaly. For example, you know how in the game where if you accidentally send a colony ship to a planet that requires a terraforming technology you dont have yet, and it pops up a message something like: "You need to research Barren World Colonization to colonize this planet"?

Well, maybe if you do this against a zero level planet, it instead randomly pops up a dialog with an "Easter Egg prize". The thing is, you would actually have to select the planet in question and send your ship there - it would not occur simply by scouting the region - the ship has to actually target the planet as a destination.

Once a ship reached the destination, there would be a random determination if there was some special "prize" or action associated with the planet. Some examples would be:

1) You find crashed remains of a ship floating in orbit around the gas giant. Inside the ship you find XXXXXX.

2) You discover the remains of some long lost precursor device. When you mess with it, it implodes the planet - taking your ship along with it. OOPS.

3) You discover a device that transforms the planet into a Level 2 planet. Ugh, but maybe the 2 tiles have special bonuses. At worst, you have a couple of farm worlds for another couple of billion people...

4) You discover some unknown alien race's long abandoned ship in the outer layers of the gas world. It is definitely a combat ship of some type, and might be a worthy addition to your fleet...

5) The Gas giant contains the right mix of gases and materials that can act as fuel for your starships - so now your range is extended for an additional extra number of parsecs in this quadrant...

6) Nothing special about this gas giant. Just another Gas Giant among millions. Thanks for playing, go home now, no consolation prize...

You get the idea. There would only be one Easter egg per gas giant planet. Once claimed, the gas giant might take on a color tinge that would indicate which race got to it first. The thing is, you would not see the tinge until you actually got to the world. SO you would be forced to go to every world during the game to see if all the Easter Eggs had been claimed or not. This would actually give your survey ships something to survey besides space anomalies. If you found a planet that somehow got terraformed as its Easter Egg, you would be the only one that knew it was terraformed until another race actually got to it. In that circumstance, once they make contact with the planet, then and only then are they aware it is habitable, so this gives you a chance to get your colony ship to that planet first before another race discovers it.

potential energy is just stored energy usually within objects with mass (particles) but not always

kinetic energy is just energy in action whether is be in waveform or motor-mechanical energy of particles

thermal energy is 'just' heat which is primarily sourced from energy being continuously absorbed and radiated as nuclei oscillate and extranuclear articles orbit and as all of the above collide with waves of energy from other sources (thus the metric of temperature measures the average energy of an area indirectly via thermal activation energy)

P.S; I also am a proponent of realism but one mustn't forget economic reality and technological potential when doing so i.e. half of the wealth creation in human history has occurred since the ~1980s

that said i think the whole point is moot because i do not understand why an amazing franchise like galactic civilizations has never incorporated any kind of satellite technology in any form

whether gas giants or stars or planets or your own colonies there should be a central game mechanic or atleast a branch of the tech tree focusing on orbital and satelite systems; gps-like navigation systems (both surface-facing and space-facing), satcom-like communication systems, stellar IPv6 (intergalactic internetworking and routing protocols anybody?), space-based radar-like early-warning systems (instead of planets magically being able to detect everything in their solar system), starbase-like orbital platforms, orbital defenses etc.

imagine the strategic element of trying to colonize a world but an enemy's unmanned vessel arrived first defense satelites to 'save' the world for their own colony ship..?  or a strategically located star with the most advanced sensors available for orbital satelites in the game that gives a single player a massive intelligence advantage and all that comes with it..?

I can't see this taking a ton to implement either

Well a Dyson swarm, bubble, or sphere would be easier to make around a gas giant instead of a star with practically similar returns because planets give off light just like stars give off light.

Uhhhhh, since when? Planets reflect solar light and give off some infrared light from fossil heat, but they don't emit visible light like a star does. Heck, some red dwarf stars barely give off visible light.

I like the idea of using the gas giants or their moons as well. I could see adding a tech in the research tree that either allows the space miner to do this or enables a new module that can be used to create a ship to do this. There could be several steps it developing the technology like mining the asteroids in GalCivII.

Here is an idea.

One cool way to make use of say, Gas giants, could be that some of them contain hidden resources.  Like some very rare and powerful substance that can only be found on this planet. ( Was slightly inspired by Dune and the Spice here )    It works a bit like a space resource or  allows some specific techs etc. 

The twist is they are rare and you would need to survey the planets first to know if its they have something interesting or not. This  takes a few turns and require a special ship.   

Oi, the misunderstandings, it hurts me >_<

Metallic hydrogen isn't some funky isotope of hydrogen that, when you know where it is, you can go extract it, and no, it isn't feasibly creatable in a factory, either.  Metallic hydrogen is simply hydrogen that is super-compressed -- exactly by those 'millions of earth atmospheres of pressure crushing you' -- so crushingly so that the gas gets compressed into a liquid which, as it turns out, is better than iron (the primary element in earth's core) for creating and sustaining a planetary magnetic dynamo core.  To create it synthetically, you would need to recreate the "millions of atmospheres" (actually I'm too lazy to look up exactly how much pressure you need, but it is indeed far more immense than any pressure we've ever been able to generate even for nanoseconds) of pressure and somehow keep it contained.  There is no material we know of that, even in ridiculous thickness, that could keep the necessary pressure ... and even if you could, the moment you took it out of that vessel, the hydrogen would rapidly expand in a massive pressure explosion and would not retain its metallic state.

That said, I agree with the general premise gas giants are far from useless.  They would be the easiest source for large-scale extraction of light elements like Hydrogen, as their (relative to earth-scale planets) large gravity wells and strong magnetic fields are better able to hold onto molecular hydrogen.  The only more abundant source of hydrogen in a star system would be the star itself -- which would, duh, be a bit more difficult for viable extraction.  Hydrogen has many uses, such as 'fuel' for fusion reactors.  It would, indeed, be nice to see some use for them in GC3.  And, yeah, moons of gas giants can be larger than rocky planets -- in fact, Ganymede (a moon of Jupiter) is larger (in its radius) than the planet Mercury (though only about half Mercury's mass; Mercury has one of the highest densities of any rocky planet or moon in the solar system due to its iron-rich core being proportionally bigger than any other rocky world in the Solar System, including earth -- in point of fact, despite being much smaller than Earth overall, Mercury's iron core is nearly as large as the Earth's iron core; its overall dimensions are much smaller because Mercury seems to have almost no mantle -- just a thin crust over its proportionally huge mantle).

Durr, my name is Chibiabos, and I'm an astronomiholic.

+1 to IronBat1's idea! I was thinking along the same lines: have 0 planets and gas giants yield some prize for sending a survey module equipped ship or flagship to research. It could take several turns to complete the research, meaning that your flagship is missing out on other anomalies, but the potential reward from moons, gas giants, etc. could produce something greater.

Sins of a Solar Empire had a neat mechanic where you could search your newly acquired planets for goodies. Something like that would be perfect. 

Blast the gas!

I agree, as well.  Some pretense of realism, where possible, because we have connected the game world to our real world in some manner.  We know a lot about gas giants and their moons.  Why not incorporate this knowledge into the game.  Gas giants have a lot of, well, gas.  Skimming the upper atmosphere to collect this concentrated gas makes sense - when the gas has a use.  Oh, and maybe some lucky soul will discover the Eee lurking about.

I was thinking the same thing!  It would be very simple to implement.  At a minimum, you could use the same astroid mining mechanics from GC2 and just classify the moons around a gas giant as "astroids" as far as the game mechanics are concerned.  

Obviously I would like to see it be a little more in depth than that.  If the mechanics of a more complex gas giant moon colonization system are not already on the drawing boards, I would be willing to settle for some way of "mining" the gas giant moons as a reasonable, easily implemented, alternative. 

Side not: 

I like the idea of creating a "dyson cloud" or other power array assembly as our empire's power needs grow.  This idea deserve's its own thread!

Edit:  See Post https://forums.galciv3.com/452209/page/1/#3445456

You know that other than the cores the moons around the gas giants are water and ice. Living in them is similar to water worlds. I would allow that we haven't seen all of the moons around gas giants in the universe. Its that according to current formation theories they dictate that moons around gas giants are mostly ice unless they move to the inner solar system. Even though there are currently no theories for this if there were moons that unless they were captured planets or asteroids they would have been melted, and everything except their cores are water.

I remember in Master Of Orion 3 there was a race that can colonize gas giants or similar worlds. How about a new similar race in an expansion maybe. They can live and survive in gas giants. Oxygen worlds are hazardous to them. A unique way to play this race. Their worlds are usually huge but few.

Molecular oxygen is a gas.  However, its a highly reactive gas, so much so that its molecular form is quite rare (its usually bound with other atoms in molecules, such as hydrogen [water and hydrogen peroxide] and carbon [carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide]), and the only known means a planet can maintain a significant amount of molecular oxygen (that is, oxygen that isn't attached to other atoms) is life -- specifically, photosynthetic life that is able to consume a multi-element molecule such as carbon dioxide, use the non-oxygen component (such as the carbon in carbon dioxide) and release the molecular oxygen (O2 in the case of CO2 liberated from the C).  Photosynthetic life (such as plants) is why Earth has a relatively oxygen-rich atmosphere.  All members of the animal kingdom, including homo sapien, consume molecular oxygen, use it for our internal biological processes, and emit carbon dioxide.   In addition to ultimately starving without plants as a food source, all animal is also dependent on plant life for oxygen (whereas plants do not need oxygen; they need sunlight and carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide exists naturally with or without life -- all the atmosphere-bearing worlds of the solar system have carbon dioxide, but only Earth has significant molecular oxygen).  If there were life that could survive in the gaseous atmosphere of a gas giant, it might well be photosynthetic (or have some alternative source of energy, perhaps somehow able to use the energy from the electromagnetic pulses [EMPs] generated by lightning from storms in turbulent gas giant atmospheres) and, unbounded by terrain as life on rocky worlds would be, reproduce to enormous scales and produce molecular oxygen, over billions of generations, in significant amounts -- more oxygen, in fact, than any rocky world could possibly hold in its atmosphere.  Such a world, in addition to being a fuel source for its massive quantities of hydrogen its able to hold thanks to its large and powerful gravitational field, could also be a source for oxygen -- an essential element for life support systems for any animal-based life.

Gas giants could also serve as excellent places to assemble spacecraft, receive and process raw material from asteroids in orbit (it takes less propulsive energy to capture an asteroid in a stable orbit around a gas giant than a smaller world), plus their large gravitational fields able to hold a diverse set of moons in orbit could make them (well, in orbit of course) logistically more efficient places to build spaceships than in orbit of a rocky world.

Sorry, geeking out.

I like this idea and would add some more details:

• This new race could be beings of energy without corporeal form, kind of like Vorlons. They could use "encounter suits" for diplomacy and communication as well.
• They would be unable to colonize traditional planets and could only survive on gas giants. Instead of relying on territory to spread influence, they could colonize gas giants regardless of whose territory they were in, which would wreak havoc on Influence.
• Their back story could tie into the Ascension Crystals somehow
• Instead of building their own ships, they could capture opponents' fleets and use them as their own. The captured ships could change colors to reflect their new ownership.

This is only true if the molecular oxygen is maintained within specific temperature and pressure ranges. Since this thread is about Gas Giants, within which temperature and pressure can vary greatly from its outer edge to its core, this can become an important aspect of the technology required for mining the gas planet's resources. While tech A may work for mining the atmospheric edge of the planet, it would take tech B to mine a lower level, then tech C to mine a more liquid level, etc.

Are you thinking of Star Trek: "The Undiscovered Country"?

(Please excuse my paraphrasing here)

Spock: "A Klingon Bird of Prey is like any other space ship. It emits plasma, which is just another form of gas."

McCoy: "So what about all those probes we have for studying gaseous anomalies?"