- Fin5434p
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"but you already knew that, I mean, how couldn't you?
Only when no Human brick is left atop another, shall we be satisfied with your destruction.
Posted by: grey101
It has always bugged me when races go from planet to planet colonizing and don't sit down and settle on a planet, I just feel that it would be more stable to have fewer worlds with higher population than hundreds of worlds with a few million each.
High population density isn't usually a great thing, people like having a bit of space.
I'm sure most people if asked would like to have a great big house with a great big garden rather than live in a small flat in a massive high-rise. It's something you can see in modern housing developments today, high-rises are going out of fashion in favour of lots of smaller buildings covering a larger area.
Low planetary populations also means that there is more land available for agriculture, which is immensely important, as you can get metals and minerals from virtually anywhere but crops need a complex biosphere and ecosystem.
Add to this the benifit of the planets having a more "natural environment" feel (even if terraformed) due to not being overcrowded and you'll find it would be a much more pleasant place to live.
It always drives me to no ends when they call them "colonies", while i understand the reasoning behind that i don't see the prime logic. I do get you have to spread out to find more resources and such, but why don't they ever just focus on a few worlds at a time?
Well, if it's main 'purpose' is to produce and export goods (say, food) to a more major world, or indeed the homeworld, then it is absolutely a colony. Just compare it to the old colonial powers in Europe importing goods from their world-wide colonies.
Most Sci-fi I can think of would only refer to worlds as "Colonies" if they were recently colonised. (Exception being battlestar galactica, but they do a lot of weird things there.)
Also, you haven't played many strategy games have you? Go play something like Sins of a Solar Empire. :p
Expansion is always important, it lets you discover new things, gain new resources, and means your people are less at risk of getting wiped out should some nearby star do something nastily explosive.
Or in the case of bad guys appearing it means you can more easily run away and hide/rebuild to counterattack.
This is why i loved reading cryptum, to see that the forerunners had 3 million fertile worlds not just colonies.
I thought that number was surprisingly low for a supposedly galaxy-spanning civilisation, but then they do make their own worlds too.
[Edited on 05.12.2011 10:41 AM PDT]