Don't get me started on my English teacher. She says '"yeah?" in almost every sentence, sometimes multiple times in one sentence
Sorry for off-topic
[GS] Phoenicia Livestream Discussion
- Thread starter Laurana Kanan
- Start date
Sorry for off-topic
Brutus2
Prince
Thank you, I knew it was not global currently but they did make it sound like it would boost other cities in the livestream.
Sostratus
Deity
Okay, so exactly how are you supposed to be shooting a laser from Earth to a ship light years away?
For everyone who heard the devs talk about the laser pushing and are curious, what they are talking about is the fact that light exerts pressure on things when it runs into them. Ever see dust suspended in sunlight- same thing. So if you have light shining in the direction you want to go, you put up a "sail" to catch it and get pushed along, just like wind based sails. The difference is that this sail is a mirror instead of a cloth. The upside to doing this is that you don't need to carry fuel with you- making your spacecraft immensely lighter. Weight is to be avoided at all costs on a spaceship.
Please adopt Synthetic Technocracy because things are about to get technical.
Putting the laser on earth is a bit silly - not because you might hit a bird but because 1) atmosphere 2) aim.
Obviously the atmosphere will introduce a lot of losses on a large part of the frequency band because guess what - there's air in the way, which absorbs and scatters light. The frequency limitation is the solar sail on the other end; the solar sail has to be able to absorb sunlight frequencies, and the frequencies that stars put out is linked to how hot they are:
Spoiler :
Basically, hotter stars emit more UV light, cooler stars emit more infrared light as a % of the light they put out. Why do I mention this? Because we probably don't want a "perfect mirror" sail that just reflects EVERYTHING. For starters, you won't be able to "see" in front of you - not ideal for a space ship trying to go forward. But anyways, we need a laser that both penetrates our atmosphere well and pushes on the sail well. Not a lot of great choices since our sun heavily outputs near the visible spectrum (it's a little left of the blue 5000k curve) and the atmosphere and blue light does not equal efficiency. But, oh well. We can shovel more coal into the turbines; I need that laser!
2) Aim. The earth rotates. So you'll only get a narrow window to pew pew at your space ship. Basically to make this worthwhile on earth you'll be sending huge, short pulses and shooting it at where you think the sailer will be in a few years. It'd be way easier to just have the laser be constantly sending a beam out - like a space based laser.
On to the downsides of this plan generally (and getting at your comment RE birds/planes)
So, people have this idea that lasers are rail straight beams of light forever. This sadly isn't true.
Laser beams are often talked about, especially in scifi jargon, with terms like "focusing lens" or "collimated" or something of that nature. Consider a laser pointer for a second. It's pretty straight. But (easiest to spot in cheap ones) the spot on the wall actually gets bigger as you move away from the wall. This is because beams naturally have curvature to them - so lens to "collimate" the beam are used to try and focus them so they get straight enough for the distances involved - usually on the scale of meters for lab experiments.
For interstellar travel, we are going to have to hand wave the current technologies and just assume we can collimate perfect beams so they act as ideal Gaussian beams. (That Carl Gauss guy sure was prolific getting stuff named after him.) But even in the ideal, beams still have this curvature: they are thinnest (called the 'waist' of the beam) wherever their focus is, and they get bigger going either direction from it.
Spoiler :
Okay, but lets ignore this whole notion of laser beams having curves; in this bold future we will assume people have worked it out.
Here's the fundamental issue. We are trying to hit something lightyears away with a laser spot. Let's imagine we have a perfect line that is the laser, the spaceship, and the target. The spaceship sail wants to be large in area so it can take advantage of more light, plus we aren't gonna be perfectly accurate with our laser. So we want a beam that's got a decent region of coverage. But even if the laser beam is perfectly straight and doesn't curve, we would need a laser emitter the same size as the spot we are projecting (given that this sail/ship will be big... this is large.) That's a BIG laser.
We can't juice this device to the max and blast our sail like it's Death Star vs alderaan. There's a space ship between us and the sail and we can't drench them in a constant bath of pure power; that's how "wireless power transmission" ends up killing birds (for WPT, they just make the beam have curvature such that a small beam at the emitter covers a large solar array the base; the power density would be low enough near the ground to not immolate airplanes.) But we wanted a straight beam to be able to push this spacecraft. You could pull the same trick for the spaceship, but then you'd need to send all the energy at the start while the beam is still small enough to be effective, and then you're upping the power requirements massively for this laser.*
For example, let's say our starship, the SS Beyond Earth, weighs as much as the international space station, and we want to accelerate it to half the speed of light so it only takes a generation to get to Alpha Centauri. (Because you have to speed up and slow down, you don't go 0.5c the whole time.) Using some back of the envelope relativity, if you want to accelerate to 0.5c in, say, 10 years, that 450 ton spaceship is gonna need a laser pumping out ~2E12 watts, or 2 terawatts. Given that tens of kilowatts can easily zap drones from the sky, I think terawatts (even if 99.999% of that energy hits the sail and not the ship) is enough to cook up some astronaut omelettes.
*there are practical limits on the laser itself too. You can only pump so much energy through real materials used to build lasers out of before they explode. (This is why the armies of 2019 don't yet have megawatt lasers, even though generating that power isn't hard.) The field of beam combining is very hard; the best ways we can do it now involve using a bunch of different colors of light so they don't interfere with each other. But remember that we are trying to be picky about wavelengths. There are ways to do large scale same light color beam combining, but they are truly in the "we just discovered a niche effect that could maybe work for this" stage.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Phew. Gotta put those obscure academic publications to use...
Anyways, I think it's a clever way to give us a way to speed up the science victory. They sure are correct to make it use power. 50 turn wait I like particularly, because you don't just launch and done; other players have 50 turns to react and try to win other ways (or less if you're trying to speed up your crew! or more if there sabotage your laser arrays!) which hopefully makes the science victory less "isolated techno hermit victory" and make interaction matter.
Trav'ling Canuck
Deity
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It's a sci fi technology. Don't overthink it.
For everyone who heard the devs talk about the laser pushing and are curious, what they are talking about is the fact that light exerts pressure on things when it runs into them. Ever see dust suspended in sunlight- same thing. So if you have light shining in the direction you want to go, you put up a "sail" to catch it and get pushed along, just like wind based sails. The difference is that this sail is a mirror instead of a cloth. The upside to doing this is that you don't need to carry fuel with you- making your spacecraft immensely lighter. Weight is to be avoided at all costs on a spaceship.
Please adopt Synthetic Technocracy because things are about to get technical.
Putting the laser on earth is a bit silly - not because you might hit a bird but because 1) atmosphere 2) aim.
Obviously the atmosphere will introduce a lot of losses on a large part of the frequency band because guess what - there's air in the way, which absorbs and scatters light. The frequency limitation is the solar sail on the other end; the solar sail has to be able to absorb sunlight frequencies, and the frequencies that stars put out is linked to how hot they are:
Spoiler :
Basically, hotter stars emit more UV light, cooler stars emit more infrared light as a % of the light they put out. Why do I mention this? Because we probably don't want a "perfect mirror" sail that just reflects EVERYTHING. For starters, you won't be able to "see" in front of you - not ideal for a space ship trying to go forward. But anyways, we need a laser that both penetrates our atmosphere well and pushes on the sail well. Not a lot of great choices since our sun heavily outputs near the visible spectrum (it's a little left of the blue 5000k curve) and the atmosphere and blue light does not equal efficiency. But, oh well. We can shovel more coal into the turbines; I need that laser!
2) Aim. The earth rotates. So you'll only get a narrow window to pew pew at your space ship. Basically to make this worthwhile on earth you'll be sending huge, short pulses and shooting it at where you think the sailer will be in a few years. It'd be way easier to just have the laser be constantly sending a beam out - like a space based laser.
On to the downsides of this plan generally (and getting at your comment RE birds/planes)
So, people have this idea that lasers are rail straight beams of light forever. This sadly isn't true.
Laser beams are often talked about, especially in scifi jargon, with terms like "focusing lens" or "collimated" or something of that nature. Consider a laser pointer for a second. It's pretty straight. But (easiest to spot in cheap ones) the spot on the wall actually gets bigger as you move away from the wall. This is because beams naturally have curvature to them - so lens to "collimate" the beam are used to try and focus them so they get straight enough for the distances involved - usually on the scale of meters for lab experiments.
For interstellar travel, we are going to have to hand wave the current technologies and just assume we can collimate perfect beams so they act as ideal Gaussian beams. (That Carl Gauss guy sure was prolific getting stuff named after him.) But even in the ideal, beams still have this curvature: they are thinnest (called the 'waist' of the beam) wherever their focus is, and they get bigger going either direction from it.
Spoiler :
Okay, but lets ignore this whole notion of laser beams having curves; in this bold future we will assume people have worked it out.
Here's the fundamental issue. We are trying to hit something lightyears away with a laser spot. Let's imagine we have a perfect line that is the laser, the spaceship, and the target. The spaceship sail wants to be large in area so it can take advantage of more light, plus we aren't gonna be perfectly accurate with our laser. So we want a beam that's got a decent region of coverage. But even if the laser beam is perfectly straight and doesn't curve, we would need a laser emitter the same size as the spot we are projecting (given that this sail/ship will be big... this is large.) That's a BIG laser.
We can't juice this device to the max and blast our sail like it's Death Star vs alderaan. There's a space ship between us and the sail and we can't drench them in a constant bath of pure power; that's how "wireless power transmission" ends up killing birds (for WPT, they just make the beam have curvature such that a small beam at the emitter covers a large solar array the base; the power density would be low enough near the ground to not immolate airplanes.) But we wanted a straight beam to be able to push this spacecraft. You could pull the same trick for the spaceship, but then you'd need to send all the energy at the start while the beam is still small enough to be effective, and then you're upping the power requirements massively for this laser.*
For example, let's say our starship, the SS Beyond Earth, weighs as much as the international space station, and we want to accelerate it to half the speed of light so it only takes a generation to get to Alpha Centauri. (Because you have to speed up and slow down, you don't go 0.5c the whole time.) Using some back of the envelope relativity, if you want to accelerate to 0.5c in, say, 10 years, that 450 ton spaceship is gonna need a laser pumping out ~2E12 watts, or 2 terawatts. Given that tens of kilowatts can easily zap drones from the sky, I think terawatts (even if 99.999% of that energy hits the sail and not the ship) is enough to cook up some astronaut omelettes.
*there are practical limits on the laser itself too. You can only pump so much energy through real materials used to build lasers out of before they explode. (This is why the armies of 2019 don't yet have megawatt lasers, even though generating that power isn't hard.) The field of beam combining is very hard; the best ways we can do it now involve using a bunch of different colors of light so they don't interfere with each other. But remember that we are trying to be picky about wavelengths. There are ways to do large scale same light color beam combining, but they are truly in the "we just discovered a niche effect that could maybe work for this" stage.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Phew. Gotta put those obscure academic publications to use...
Anyways, I think it's a clever way to give us a way to speed up the science victory. They sure are correct to make it use power. 50 turn wait I like particularly, because you don't just launch and done; other players have 50 turns to react and try to win other ways (or less if you're trying to speed up your crew! or more if there sabotage your laser arrays!) which hopefully makes the science victory less "isolated techno hermit victory" and make interaction matter.
'Cus if you do, posts like this happen.
Boris Gudenuf
Deity
I remember reading 'cutting edge' hard-science fiction stories (my dad had a Forever Subscription to the old Astounding Science Fiction magazine, so there was always lots of SciFi reading material in the house) and in the 1950s up to the end of the 1960s, the stories would still include massive building-filling computers and mechanical slide rules for the engineers.
Nobody, but nobody, predicted solid-state electronics until just before the devices hit the market.
I remember working in the main bookstore in a college town, selling slide rules and other non-textbook supplies around 1970, when the first pocket calculators came out that would do square roots. At $150 or more each, nobody thought they could replace a $25 - $35 slide rule. Six months later, you couldn't give a slide rule away and the calculators were down to $30 each.
Point is, Future Tech is Magic: we can't even predict the principles they will end up using to do the engineering, because if it's more than 50 years in the future, they will be principles we haven't discovered, or haven't discovered how to apply yet.
So, make the spaceship go any way you want, from lasers to unicorns on a treadmill: it's all the same. . .
Nobody, but nobody, predicted solid-state electronics until just before the devices hit the market.
I remember working in the main bookstore in a college town, selling slide rules and other non-textbook supplies around 1970, when the first pocket calculators came out that would do square roots. At $150 or more each, nobody thought they could replace a $25 - $35 slide rule. Six months later, you couldn't give a slide rule away and the calculators were down to $30 each.
Point is, Future Tech is Magic: we can't even predict the principles they will end up using to do the engineering, because if it's more than 50 years in the future, they will be principles we haven't discovered, or haven't discovered how to apply yet.
So, make the spaceship go any way you want, from lasers to unicorns on a treadmill: it's all the same. . .
acluewithout
Deity
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Just watching the stream now. Gee whiz, Phoenicia and Phan-tastic.
- Loving that Phoenicia can sneak in coastal cities all across the map.
- Confirmation you can move your Capital if you're sieged. I'm sure that's not a thing that you'd ever need or really want to do, but would be fun to do it once (or have the AI do it to you).
- Confirmation you can maximise the Colonial Offices by moving your Capital. Very cool.
- I like the Future stuff. But late game and Future Eras actually still feel kinda thin. Just seems like a lot of near-future Sci Fi stuff is missing - why isn't there more around AI and automation? Why aren't there more late game units? Hopefully there will be a third expansion to flesh this out a little.
- I like the Future Governments. Giving them a negative is also quite flavourful. Really like how they interact with late game policies too. All very cool. Again though, Governments still feel a bit thin. Hopefully this will get expanded a bit in a further expansion (maybe with Ideologies, and loyalty shifting because of internal factors a bit more).
- I like the changes to the Science Victory. I'm happy to suspend disbelief with Sci-Fi, but sending spaceships out at "light speed" is a bit lame. But the basic idea, including the laser, is still quite cool. Actually, the laser is very cool - power needs, option to have it on earth or in space. Lots of things to juggle. I really hope the AI can compete on SV. I wonder if having a Mars Colony gives you any benefits?
- I really don't get why the SeaStead is an improvement not a district.
- Loving the changes to ice-caps. Is that a weird thing to be excited about? Huh. Well, I'm excited anyway.
- New reports and lenses are cool. Love how the continent map looks now. They're going to need a lense for power though, so you can see what PowerPlants power what Cities.
- Carl's yields per turn are very worrying. Seems like an unassailable lead. You'd think King would be tougher. Mind you, he has 21 Cities! Good grief! I couldn't be bothered with all that!
- Sigh. AI still seems pretty lacklustre. The late game play they streamed also seemed super, super boring. But happy to take a wait and see approach with that. It may be actually playing the game, rather than watching it, the gameplay is a bit more fun.
- Phoenicia purple needs to be a luxury in the game somehow. Phoenicia definitely don't need it for balance. But given even the FXS guys were discussing it on the livestream, it's just super weird it's not in the game somehow.
One of them (Strenger?) said that he got the lasers idea from a book.
I am wondering if it was „Fiasco” by Stanislaw Lem, a novel from 1986.
Edit. And the ship cannot fly with the speed of light (physics), only „almost” like 0.99c etc.
I am wondering if it was „Fiasco” by Stanislaw Lem, a novel from 1986.
Edit. And the ship cannot fly with the speed of light (physics), only „almost” like 0.99c etc.
Last edited:
Boris Gudenuf
Deity
I believe it was used even earlier, in Niven and Pournelle's Mote in God's Eye, by an alien race to send a probe across interstellar distances.
Dyes are in, all we really need is for them to be a marine resource as well as a land one.
It's referenced in her clothes and the civ's jersey colors, but I agree that it would have been thematic. They went for the Writing eureka which is fine too.
Pietato
Platonic Perfection
Was Democracy changed?
Wiki says that „Human ships use the Alderson Drive, which allows them to travel instantaneously between "Alderson points" in specific star systems”.
Sostratus
Deity
It looks like they made it a super fishery, which i kind of get since coastal cities really need yields more than 4 housing per tile. 2 housing ain't nothing to sneeze at. Will go great with kampungs to fill in those few tiles you can't quite get otherwise. Then you can have your 70 housing on that one tile island town!
Yes; they seem to have removed district production and housing and added the Arsenal of Democracy card effects. Communism's flat +15% production got swapped with +10% science, which I dislike strongly but oh well. If democracy can slot their legacy card you could have 10-12 food and production per allied trade route while you're in the gov't, depending on if the AoD card is still in or not (livestream shot showed wisselbank is still in. )
Elhoim
Iron Tower Studio Dev
Yep.
A pity to see lack of resources on the AI. Now that the system is more granular, it might have been nice if just discovering a resource tech would at least give you 1 resource per turn. Not much, but at least enough to upgrade your (and the AI) units.
acluewithout
Deity
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You’re right! Good point!
Maybe Dido could just get an extra gold from Dyes? It’s just flavour, but feels like something missed. But you might be right, maybe it’s already covered really.
Or like somebody (sorry, forget who) suggested get an extra copy of luxuries or some other bonus for luxuries
I wouldn't tie it just to dyes because RNG is so well, random
I'm not really sure how strong Phoenicia will be yet, but some sort of minor bonus like that isn't going to make them the new Aztecs
SupremacyKing2
Deity
The laser pushing a ship is a real idea but I think it would work differently than the game seems to suggest. In real life, the idea is to have a laser in space that would be used to launch a very light weight micro satellite. You need a light weight micro satellite because the lower the mass, the easier it would be to push thus the laser would be more effective. So you place the micro satellite close to laser where the laser will easy to aim and be most powerful and you turn the laser on to push the satellite and launch it out of Earth orbit and into deep space. Using a laser to accelerate a large ship that is already several light years out would be highly impractical if not outright impossible. 1) at that distance, it would be impossible to aim the laser to hit the satellite 2) at that distance the laser would be so diffuse that it would have no pressure left 3) a large ship would be so massive that you would need an astronomically powerful laser especially considering power loss and diffusion to even create the smallest acceleration and 4) if the ship is already travelling at near the speed of light, relativity says that the amount of energy needed to make the ship go even faster rises exponentially which is why it is impossible to actually go the speed of light. Even if you resolved all the other issues, the change in speed would be tiny unless somehow you discover a way to alter the laws of relativity.
So launching a small satellite with a laser would be doable but using the laser to add more speed to a large ship travelling at near the speed of light several light years away would be nigh impossible.
So launching a small satellite with a laser would be doable but using the laser to add more speed to a large ship travelling at near the speed of light several light years away would be nigh impossible.
I feel the representation of Phoenician monopolies on many goods in the ancient world is done through settling on multiple continents very early in the game, as luxuries are divided by continents in Civ6. If we ever get a third expansion that implements corporations, the impact on Phoenicia would be real
acluewithout
Deity
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@Sostratus I agree it’ll be a fairly good improvement. But it seems weird to me a Neighbourhood is a district whereas a floating Neighbourhood is an improvement? Perhaps FXS should have really committed and let players found cities in the Ocean as part of future techs.
As I’ve said, the whole Future Tech thing currently feels a bit undercooked, compared to say disasters and diplomacy which seem very well thought out.
As I’ve said, the whole Future Tech thing currently feels a bit undercooked, compared to say disasters and diplomacy which seem very well thought out.
Neighborhoods come far earlier. This is really late game
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