you could just make it to where the player gets to control the ship above the planets atmosphere, so the player moves the ships around uncovering parts of the world by some advanced form of radar. This not only fixes your problem but adds great suspense because they can't quiclky switch from the radar ships above the planet to the ground forces therefore making it a risk, a risk that would be fun becauseyou also get the uncover the land. This would be sort of like in starcraft, where you control a scout crew to uncover the land while your base is unwatched. the scout crew=The space ship above the planet.

I agree with a lot of the suggestions above, but I would like to add one of my own.

Part 0: Exploration takes time. Even satellites can not look at the whole world at the same time. Have you ships/ satellites equipped with different styles of scanners. The cheapest would be a low res camera that could image 1/4 of the world at once, but could only see the main geography. The best would be a very hi res camera that could see, troops, terrain improvements, your best friends house, or whatever. The hi res camera would only see a line of "terrain squares" (think civilization) 10 long for example.

Part 1: The satellite behave like satellites actually do and follow a fairly preset course. Each satellite would come with a certain number of course corrections that could be made. and once used up there life span would be limited. Launching the satellite in any direction should be possible and it would help to see the path it will cover. Satellites could have a certain lifespan in general and making course changes would shorten that span. Refuelling in space could make things interesting.

Part 2: How much detail is know should affect how blurry a a square is, terrain only is mega blur, hi res image would look crystal clear.

Part 3: Clouds and other blocking "technology" would affect the scanners differently. Low res camera would be blocked by large cloud groups and would leave holes in the initial scan but would likely get the next time around. Radar scanner could be thrown off by high metal in an area. High res camera could only be blocked by dome technology.

Part 4: Ground radar could detect satellites without stealth tech. These satellites could then be attacked.

there are a lot of possibilities here, and they keep immersion. It still adds to suspense of unknown.

Higher res and higher area scans cost more resources (cost increases exponentially with each factor) so mapping the whole planet down to a 1m scale is prohibitevely expensive to do in a short time, or it takes a lot of money over a long time which isn't all that helpful for your mission. So you can map a large area at lower detail or a small area at high detail.

You can only infer so much from orbital surveillance. Is that factory producing guns or butter? Is that a civilian air control tower or a command center for ground-to-space missiles?

You could also make it dangerous to do better scans of some planets. The planet could be occupied by hostile forces who will detect and attack you. The planet could have an unstable core producing bizarre magnetic pulses which damage your ship's systems.

Fine ideas all.

some more:

1. Every time has secrets. Why not key up the secrets? For high tech, secrets aren't "where's the continents" but "what's around that star?".

2. Even if you see everything, you don't necissarily know what it is or what it does. Especially with high tech, terrain is increasingly meaningless. Resource deposits and ruins are more interesting [and the survey teams required to explore them].

Or of course, the standard reason that humans are even exploring space rather than armies of drones: Common, cheap EMP devices.

THer's definetly a balance between gameplay and story immersion, An which one you go with really depends on what type of game it is. arcade games should have no story immersion at expense of gameplay at all, but longer paced games like RTS's and RPGs, I think do very well to have a story you can get involved with. If you come up with an excuse, as long as it is not utterly cheesy, most people will buy it without getting disgusted.
I think, however, that your ship orbits a a finite rate, so it only reveals your area every so often, unless you run a ring of sattelites or put yourself in a clarke orbit. I opine that it would abuse the story more than the gameplay not to reveal terrain, so go ahead and do it. But that's just my opinion.

Cheese factor! Cheese factor! [grin]

I mean, come on, look how many people like Star Trek. [wink]

I mean, come on, I like Star Trek. [cool]

"Why yes, I would like some cheese with that 'whine'". [grin]

Why not stop treating it as a matter of planetary issues, and instead simply extrapolate the logical excuses from reality-tested thought exercises?

Example:
The majority of the world has been explored for the past century. We know the mountains, the rivers, the deserts, the seas. This is even before we launched satellites and knew everthing that much better.

Yet, to this day, we cannot precisely pinpoint specifics when we aren't aware of the location. If given a random satellite image from a random city, would you easily be able to pick out individual buildings, streets, sections and know what they were? Certainly it's easy to tell a small shanty from a manor, but when given - in a futuristic scenario - alien architecture and worlds, how would you make sense of things?

By alien I'm not necessarily even talking 'little green men' so much as I'm talking about the very fact that living on another planet is naturally going to cause adaptations to even a human society.

If we're talking about a game that will turn into a strategy game of some sort, we're going to see then that the variables required to create 'unknown' areas are not in the landmass, natural hazards, or necessarily lifeforms - it's in the understanding of exactly what their society is made to do, how the infrastructure is laid out, and precisely what sort of unique engineering - social and physical - you'd find there.

Example.
You enter orbit around a new planet and scan what you can. You find the continents, the seas, the centers of population. The question now becomes a matter of interpreting that data. Are the cities mostly landlocked? Are they maritime in nature? What do either of those options tell us about the planet that we may or may not be able to figure out from a simple analysis? Upon entering a city on this planet, will you find that buildings - due to low gravitational forces - are epic skyscrapers reaching high into the sky? Are they laid out in a utilitarian, beehive sort of fashion? Does that large, pointy one over there manufacture weapons or house orphans?

These are variables that only exploration can tell - whether it fits the style of your game is another matter completely.

The other option, as a cop-out, would be to simply toss scanner technology into the equivalent of a high-tech dark ages. "Sorry, all the really smart people with that knowledge got wiped out when their star went nova. Nobody has been able to do more than copy their work since then."

Quote:

Original post by Run_The_Shadows You enter orbit around a new planet and scan what you can. You find the continents, the seas, the centers of population. The question now becomes a matter of interpreting that data. Are the cities mostly landlocked? Are they maritime in nature? What do either of those options tell us about the planet that we may or may not be able to figure out from a simple analysis? Upon entering a city on this planet, will you find that buildings - due to low gravitational forces - are epic skyscrapers reaching high into the sky? Are they laid out in a utilitarian, beehive sort of fashion? Does that large, pointy one over there manufacture weapons or house orphans?

This is brilliant, but it has a very difficult dependency: Worlds must be colonized by somebody, preferrably non-humans. What if we shift gears and make this Mars, or some untouched Gaia orbiting Alpha Centauri?

I think you're almost 100% on this, and I have a universe that could have a huge number of world with alien artifacts if not complete alien cultures.

However, to really rethink this: In Civ or RTS style games, unknown terrain is really MOSTLY useful if there's some pressure, like an enemy. Otherwise it's just mildly interesting to discover exactly how big an ocean or desert is, right? So maybe the effort is better spent in offloading the discovery into the systemic workings of the society. (Of course, that means I'd have to come up with yet another round of GameDev questions...[rolleyes])

Look at historical reasons for it. When computers has low power CPU, it was easier to implement "hiden" map, than fog of war. Then games with possibility of seing a general map of the terrain, and fog of war implemented appeared.

Quote:

Original post by Wavinator Quote: Original post by Run_The_Shadows You enter orbit around a new planet and scan what you can. You find the continents, the seas, the centers of population. The question now becomes a matter of interpreting that data. Are the cities mostly landlocked? Are they maritime in nature? What do either of those options tell us about the planet that we may or may not be able to figure out from a simple analysis? Upon entering a city on this planet, will you find that buildings - due to low gravitational forces - are epic skyscrapers reaching high into the sky? Are they laid out in a utilitarian, beehive sort of fashion? Does that large, pointy one over there manufacture weapons or house orphans? This is brilliant, but it has a very difficult dependency: Worlds must be colonized by somebody, preferrably non-humans. What if we shift gears and make this Mars, or some untouched Gaia orbiting Alpha Centauri? I think you're almost 100% on this, and I have a universe that could have a huge number of world with alien artifacts if not complete alien cultures. However, to really rethink this: In Civ or RTS style games, unknown terrain is really MOSTLY useful if there's some pressure, like an enemy. Otherwise it's just mildly interesting to discover exactly how big an ocean or desert is, right? So maybe the effort is better spent in offloading the discovery into the systemic workings of the society. (Of course, that means I'd have to come up with yet another round of GameDev questions...[rolleyes])

It's definitely optimistic in it's thought, probably unrealistic in the amount of content required to produce a wide variation, but honest in it's logic.

Lets say you've been chased across the galaxy by a band of raiders and you find yourself in a new star system, a single inhabitable planet that shows signs of spacefaring civilization but no record of them. Through visible means the challenge becomes trying to decipher whether it is safe to land for repairs/rearmament or whether they're a savage species that'll tear your ship apart. Rather than try and explain the societal workings with numbers(Planet: Alpha Centauri VII / Aggression: 8/10 / Technology: 3/10 / Industry: 5/10 / etc) you do so in a more fuzzy and ambiguous way - it decreases the ability of a player to easily min/max through the game. Without hard numbers, a player's danger level then goes up as well, since there's no definite way - without experience - of knowing how the NPCs would react.