Imperium:
The Second Planet

For exactly 75 years, since Olaf Stapleton’s First and Last Men in 1930, one of the staples of science fiction has been the terraforming of other planets: changing their environments to make them habitable for humans. The actual term comes from Jack Williamson’s 1942 short story “Collision Orbit.”

Terraforming in our Imperium game is a concept held over from the original Game Designers’ Workshop edition. A player can transform a suitable candidate planet into a life-bearing world by expending 10 Resources a turn for seven turns. We give no time scale in Imperium (time being a relative concept in deep space and wargames) but the turns are not meant to represent a length of time any greater than a year or two. The 70 Resources are less than the cost of three super-dreadnought battleships. At that point an Outpost can be placed on the planet; another 40 Resources must be spent to convert that outpost into a World.

Mars, #$@%^&s!

Terraformation is a long-term investment. While some writers have made grandiose projections of converting Mars into a livable world within a generation or two, that’s highly unlikely even given great technological advances. Planets are huge objects; changing them requires an investment of resources and energy on a scale never seen before in human history. Tossing a few genetically engineered algae on one is just not going to make a difference within any single human’s lifetime. More rational estimates indicate a span of thousands of years would be required, longer than any Terran society has managed to hold itself together.

In game terms, there is no incentive for the Imperial player to terraform planets. He or she gets most Resources from the Imperial core worlds, not the backwater planets of this sector. Only one Resource comes in for a World. The game would have to last 110 turns to show a positive result, which is theoretically possible but not likely. And even then, a World is no better than a connected Outpost.

The Terran player, on the other hand, gets 8 resources for a connected World. The project pays off after just 14 turns. A long peace between wars in the campaign game can see the Terran player increase his or her industrial base significantly — if a suitable planet is held. Loki seems a good choice, an N2 planet well off the potential Imperial routes of advance; if the bad guys reach Loki, they’ve likely already taken Earth. Junction, Agidda and Procyon are also likely places to terraform, as they lie along routes the Terran player already must protect.

Dust storm on Mars, per NASA.

But Mars is the prime choice for terraforming in the game, as it is in science fiction. In the early scenarios, the Terrans don’t even have an outpost there (they’ve been lax about their own solar system, while expanding into the stars). By the last Galactic War scenario, it’s listed as a terraformed world.

Mars has no appreciable atmosphere, but may have once held a thin one. There is also evidence of surface water presence in the far past, but as yet, no concrete evidence of life. While some very fine science fiction stories (such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Colored Mars” trilogy) have been written around the notion of de-stabilizing the Martian environment enough to free the water resources trapped in her polar icecaps and perhaps underground, this is not likely to be feasible. Instead, water and other volatile compounds will need to be imported. It now appears that the Oort cloud of comet-like bodies has an abundance of such materials drifting far beyond the orbit of Pluto. Some speculate that these objects could be crashed into Mars, adding their elements to the Martian atmosphere and tossing up clouds of dust to increase the greenhouse effect and warm the planet.

Venus unclothed.

The other traditional candidate within the Solar System is Venus. Venus is only slightly smaller than Earth, yielding a surface gravity much closer to Terran normal than Mars. It is, however, an extremely hot planet with its thick atmosphere displaying a runaway greenhouse effect. It also rotates very slowly, increasing the heat and other climactic effects.

Many early science fiction stories translated that into a planet with a climate much like lower Alabama, sometimes with jungles and dinosaurs (again, much like lower Alabama). The atmosphere is much thicker than that, with massive amounts of carbon dioxide. If this carbon could be sifted out through some chemical or physical process, it would leave the planet covered in a layer of soot many hundreds of feet thick.

Thus, terraforming Venus requires that two huge engineering problems be solved: speeding its rotation, and blasting away a huge portion of its atmosphere. Cooling the planet is not as difficult in engineering terms, only incredibly expensive: just hang a huge sunshade between Venus and the Sun. Easy.

But with future technology, perhaps these things will be possible. They’ll still be expensive. So we’ve added Venus as a planet in Imperium. The free .pdf download adds a planetary battle display for Venus (based on a NASA projection of what a terraformed Venus might resemble) and a box for the galactic map as well. Since the Sol sector is somewhat crowded on the galactic map, we recommend just using the box on this side display and remembering that there is a third planetary box alongside Earth and Mars.

Adding Venus to the game, giving the Terran player the opportunity to have three productive Worlds in his or her home system, is an enormous game advantage, To balance that, increase the Resource yield of Imperial Worlds from 1 to 3. This makes them more important to the Imperial player, though it’s still probably not enough to make terraforming a good Imperial investment.

The green hills of Mars.

To clarify, the Terran player receives 10 resources for Earth, not “Sol” as the rules read. Any resources for Mars (and Venus if using this variant) are in addition to those 10.

Decrease Glory by two when a planet is terraformed by the Terran player; increase it by one in the unlikely event that a planet is terraformed by the Imperial player. If the planet changes status during peace, make the change to Glory at the start of the next war. Add Venus to the list of locations the Imperial player must conquer to win the campaign game.

The terraforming costs given in the game a remarkably low, given the enormous cost of transforming an entire planet. Increase the cost to 12 resources per turn, with 30 turns required to transform an N1-type planet and 45 turns for an N2-type. That’s still unrealistically low, but at least a little closer to what the actual costs might actually total. Costs for converting an Outpost marker to a World remain the same.