Space Stage

Previous stage: Industrial Stage

Next stage: Ascension

In a nutshell: This stage sees the player exploring the cosmos and having great technological advances.

The Space Stage is the penultimate stage in Thrive. After an Industrial Stage nation becomes advanced enough to build spaceships, they can begin expanding into the stars. At this point, the player has entered the Space Stage.

The player's race has already researched many different technologies, but it is here that "science-fiction" technologies start to come into play. The player's race may encounter and interact with life on other planets and expand into the cosmos. Pursuing further technological advances will eventually lead to the unlocking of the God Tools and perhaps even Ascension. Some players may not like scifi in a otherwise science-based game, as such we will add a cutoff point where the player can choose to not advance to scifi technologies at the cost of not being able to reach Ascension.

Overview

The early space stage begins with the first space flights of the player's species. This part focuses on developing spaceflight and exploring the player's own solar system. The gameplay is very similar to industrial stage at this point but the player can zoom out all the way to view their own solar system and command their spacecraft in addition to still managing development of their planet.

Later space stage is when the player develops the capacity to explore other solar systems. This is where Thrive becomes a scifi (science speculation) game with the invention of a faster than light (FTL) travel method. A possible choice here is to give an option to disable the scifi aspects of the game, in which case exploring just the few nearby star systems to the player's home star system will be the end of the game. With scifi enabled the player is able to colonize many star systems and establish an interstellar space empire, entering the last part of space stage. At this point the player will interact with other space empires, develop very advanced technologies and space fleets. Planet management will be simplified to not overload the player with micromanaging dozens of planets. The stage will culminate in the player building many mega projects like Dyson Spheres with the final one being the Ascension Gate which takes a ton of power and time to use. As the Ascension process gives unlimited power to the empire that first achieves it, the player needs to hold off all the other empires while they are building their ascension gate.

TODO: write more in-depth overview

Transitions

The stage begins when the player first reaches space with a primitive rocket.

The stage ends when the player has built and powered the Ascension Gate with vast amounts of resources and research.

Features

Coming soon.

UI

Coming soon.

Current Development

Work has not yet started on the Space Stage.