Planets

Playing Stars!

Planets are the gold nuggets of the Stars! universe: everybody wants them, and hardly anyone wants to share. Green worlds give your people a place to grow, learn and produce. The minerals in each planet provide the building blocks for all the technology you create, including planetary installations such as defenses and scanners, and starbases with stargates that act as navigational shortcuts and mass drivers that fling minerals between systems.

When you click on a planet in the Scanner, you're actually selecting a star system. The planet that appears on your screen is the most desirable planet in that system. (There may be lesser rocks in the system, too, but you won't want them.) If you colonize a planet, it becomes your capitol world in that system, the local center of government and industry. If the planet is dangerous to your people, you can mine it from orbit, and ship its valuable minerals to other parts of your empire. If another player inhabits the planet, you can try to take it away. If the owner is another human, you can also try to establish trade relations.

No matter how you play, you need to give your people room to grow. That growth rate will vary on any given planet, depending on the levels of gravity, temperature, and radiation. You can create a race that is immune to one or more of these environmental factors—a very expensive advantage. You can also make a planet's environment more hospitable by terraforming.