Cari

re orange glow, er, yes my saved game works again, but i am rather embarased to admit that it was, in fact a Drengen occupied red giant system.

At the time (rather late perhaps?) i was unaware that races could ind habitable planets anywhere other than yellow suns. I assume this isnt the case.

Still dont quite know why i lost so many ships attacking the planet but since then loss rations attacking planets have been painful but accurate I think

sadly the orange glow is but a myth....or is it?

This may not seem like an issue to some.... but could you possibly have planets arranged around stars according to current astrophysics beliefs? In other words the smaller, more dense , thus more solid planets should be closer to the star while the less dense (gaseous) thus larger (because if they are less dense they must have a larger size in order stay together via gravity) much like our own sytem. Pluto is just a captured mass it probably didn't form here. I only say this because it seems strange to see a gas giant listed first then several smaller planets then a gaia planet last. I'm sure most people don't care... but physics is my occupation, so I do care. Feel free to criticize me as you see fit...

Hmm... also while on the subject.. how hard would it be to include moons? MANY moons in our own system are capable of sustaining life. Sorry to go on. I'll stop now.

Actually, only one or two moons in our solar system are capable of life support without extreme lengths of terraforming, and all of those are in orbit of gas giants (the only way such a planet could be colonized, incidentally) so my interpretation would be that that's how a class 2-6 planet is colonized in the first place.

Did you know our own moon has water, frozen ice at the northern pole? Plus even Saturn has a moon with an ocean on it.

What's the difference between a moon and a planet? I don't remember.

Cari,
The short answer is that a planet orbits a star where a moon orbits a body that orbits a star.

I have a question: For all of the past games I've been playing, I have found that I am in alliances with other nations that I never willingly entered into. Are alliances intended to be cultural kind of things, like one of those understood relationships like that between North America and Great Brittain? Is it where you don't have much choice in it? Or is it busted and you actually are supposed to enter into formal alliances? How this works is not quite clear.

There's a bug in the current Beta that the "auto alliance" behavior.

Sigh...insert "causes" between "that" and "the".

Hmm. I thought that recent planet hunters have been finding gas giants all over. They have even found one as close to its star as Mercury is to ours. Our solar system is not necessarily the model to use as an "average" system. And about Pluto. So we captured it. Is that normal? Could be...there's a lot of stuff out there. And now there are rumors there is a brown dwarf circling out sun somewhere further out.

In summary, put the planets anywhere you wish.

About the planets "discovered" so far, consider this: The bigger ones have more mass and more of an affect on their sun. And the closer a gass giant is to its sun the easier it is to spot by that sun's eratic behavior. Much more needs to be discovered, and our tools need to be much more precise, before any "model" can be developed for an "average" star system.

In other words, we just don't know yet.