Now, here's the deal: stars don't live forever. You all know that. Now, the purpose of this thread is to bring up this question: how will a star's life be represented in-game?

I mean, to properly represent this, we need to properly track some certain characteristics of stars. Mainly, it's size (which translates to mass). A high-mass star will become a supergiant once it gets older, then explode into a supernova before either becoming a pulsar or a black hole and violently destroy the universe around it.

However, a low-mass star will simply become a red giant, and shrink into a white dwarf. Not so dramatic.

Now, how will we represent a star's life cycle in-game?

I dunno. I'm thinking random events. It's an idea I've had for some time. Random events randomly happen all over the place [star birth star death life begins ect.] which are fairly, but not too rare, and each provide a 'learning opportunity' for the player's species, like they can study the event and learn from it possibly unlocking a hidden branch of the tech tree ect.

Eg. Space Captain Xerg is blowing up his one-time allies when he coincidentally flies past a collapsing star. He decides to send a signal for backup to his empire before flying in to the star. When backup arrives, the scientists observe it, and eventually discover a way reproduce a star on a tiny scale, allowing for research of the 'Sun-Core' which powers ships cheaply, which then unlocks the 'Sun-Tech' tech tree branch, allowing for Sun-Based Weapons, Sun-Based power supplies and eventually, the God Tech - Artificial Sun

I know you probly won't like it because I can't explain the exact science behind the idea of a 'Sun-Core', but we could expand on the idea...

That coupled with the possible Terraforming God Tech, Create Planet would then allow the player to create their own Star Systems! Though it would be very difficult to keep it alive because the planets would have to be set in orbiot the right way or they might fly away or fly into the sun ect.

Firstly, can I point out a star isn't a huge ball of flaming gas, it is a huge ball of flaming plasma.

FrogEmpire wrote:

That coupled with the possible Terraforming God Tech, Create Planet would then allow the player to create their own Star Systems! Though it would be very difficult to keep it alive because the planets would have to be set in orbiot the right way or they might fly away or fly into the sun ect.

I don't think the terraforming godly tech did include creating planets... Or would one tech allow you to use the planet editor, rather than manually terraforming? We need that god tools thread...

Anyway, the random event thing sounds good. You could get suddenly frozen to death at any time while playing, but other than that, I like it!
But when you start your save, your star could be measured (and only that star). Starting age of anything between 0 and up to 2 or 3 billion years, to add a bit of unpredictability, and to make it seem like there is something triggering the next phase. Then as you play, your stars age continues to be measured, and when it it exhausts its helium supply (included as a fixed age)... Bam! Red giant! Havoc for your home planet, but giving a good chance to research space travel before that.

I dunno where you guys would put it but we *should* have a create planet tech or something similar eg. Moon-Base, a moon-sized star ship that is incredibally slow and costly to move, but can support massive population, can be upgraded to become sefl-sufficient [oxygen farms, food farms ect.] or be upgraded to be a military powerhouse, building ships, shooting lasers at nearby enemies and having incredibally thick armour and possibly powerful shields.

Yeah, the star could also have an in-built chance to turn into a black hole if it's a giant, possibly allowing for advanced gravity research? I reckon the god-tech for a gravity branch of the tech tree would be harnessing a black hole as an infinite power source - much like the Time Lords of Doctor Who.

Just some ideas, I don't know if you guys have already thought of gravity research or not but it seems to be a good idea to me...

I think the star your home planet is orbiting around and the stars near to your colonies should have their own age and when old... a message warns you your star is running out hydrogen (only having advanced space tech, obviously).

For those stars very far from your colonies and/or home planet we should put a very very little chance to explode in a supernova or to collapse in a black hole.

Standard deviations and gaussian distributions are your friend. Star lifecycle should be a function of its size (so should be temperature, composition, etc) , and then add a random component to it which would offset the target max age by a few million years or so. Simply put, if you had one thousand identically sized stars and sat back to watch them they woudn't go out at once, but rather, on a gaussain distribution. It'd start slow, with one star here and another there dying out on its cycle, speed up, and then slow down when a few are left. Many natural phenomena are assumed to have gaussian distributions, so I think we should use it too.

EDIT: Also, create-a-planet should be essential.

Guys, remember when you talk, stay ontopic. And get refrences.
A star's life cycle is pretty straightforward. It goes through formation-main sequence-post main sequence-collapse.
Life Cycle of Stars

Excellent wiki article. We have the solution for our problem here:

Spoiler:

Pretty much, make in-game stars follow this chart. Add some noise to the function for the uneveness and voila.

From a player's point of view, having their stars explode a lot will irritate them and likely make them quit. I know our goal is to have science and playability in this game, so I have a couple of suggestions in order to keep those two qualities.

-Keep the stars' deaths very infrequent. When the player's star explodes, it is an inconvenience; but at least the player doesn't have to worry about their other stars exploding too often.
-We could give the player an option to turn that feature off. No stars exploding if they don't want it.
-We could also add a technology in the game that allows the player to make their stars immortal. This would, of course, be a highly advanced technology.

Personally, I would want stars in the game to die often enough to irritate me; giving me incentive to reach that technology.