Border enforcement is simply put declare war. I would prefer the idea of creating or possibly funding pirate units (similar to privateers) a way of controlling borders without the diplomatic repercussions of war. The way border control has been done in the most usual sense. Private citizens providing the border control and the government suggesting these individuals are outlaws (probably rightfully so). Simply put it would be nice to privatize a fleet that will work border control, or other questionable activities.

Simple mechanics, decommission a fleet, goes under private or pirate control. Pay at a high rate to prevent these pirate entities from attacking your ships and they will wander your space or neutral space destroying or raiding enemy ships.

I do not want to necessarily add a huge layer of mechanics here, just provide pirate making from civilizations that they might regret in the future.

The way I would like to see it reminds me a lot of Star Trek, with set up neutral zones and the like. I like the idea that the player can designate where his boarder lies, but I think that it should be a claimed territory that can be set by the player, or negotiated for (this could cause some interesting diplomatic situations). I always imagine some ship going up to a planet, to have another ship come up to them and say, "This planet is claimed by the Terran Empire!"  

What annoys me the most is when colony ships come into my space, and colonize planets that I was going to colonize. I know that I can go back and capture it, but I also lose any option in the special event that it may have had. 

I do not think it should bar them from doing it, but I think that it should send you a warning if a ship enters your space (at least, if a planet could see it). When that warning pops up, it should allow you to choose from a group of options such as threaten them with war, destroy them, let them go, impose a toll, etc. If you destroy them, this would clearly cause diplomatic issues, and could potentially lead to war, which would be kind of cool. 

The toll thing would be pretty cool, too. "Unidentified freighter, you have entered Terran space, either pay the toll, turn around, or be destroyed!" 

Of course, each choice would be determined by the proximity of military ships in accordance to both sides. So, lets say the Drath have a colony ship trespassing into Terran space, and the Terrans have three armed cruisers within two turns of the colony ship, it would be more likely to give in, where as if there were ALSO 4 Drath Battleships within two turns and thus their fleet outnumbered the Terran fleet, they would be more likely to ignore.

 So this system would calculate situation by taking into consideration the nearest response forces, and the power of those response forces. A stronger force on the borders (either ships or space stations), would result in things going more favorably for the Empire that is being intruded upon.

In the Star Trek universe many of the main factions (Federation, Klingon, Romulan) aren't at war but they still consider ships entering their space as hostile and this is definitely something I'd like to see included with a superior diplomacy and foreign relations system. You should have a number of options to limit your space to neighboring races like "open borders", "military restrictions", "trade ships only" and "closed borders" and ships that break that should be considered enemy without having to engage in war.

What you choose to set your space as should also affect what races think of you, for example, having open borders should cause negative standings with someone like the Drengin who's militaristic nature would make them want to take advantage or be positive with more peaceful diplomatic races. Or maybe you could allow specific races access to improve relations.

I also think there should be a difference in your sphere of influence and your territorial sphere because, as people pointed out, there may be foreign planets located inside your influence.

Ok, so we got telekinetic tele wonder where a bunch of religious freaks harness the power of the Dysoruntis Crystal fueled by the souls of the dead to magically create a impassible influence barrier the size of a few thousand parsecs. The supreme priest sees everything within the radius and controls what ship passes through and what gets pushed out.

Congratulations, this topic needs to be put to rest badly before these extreme ideas start to pop up. Please end this conversation and agree on something.

I don't care what happens in the conversation unless these 5 things are included.

 1. This closed border agreement only applies to armed militaristic vessels and not regular ships (trade vessels, constructors, space miners can pass)

2. That you can sneak through boarders only if the empire does not see you.

3. Diplomatic option to tell them to leave or they will be destroyed without triggering a war (2 turns to be fair). When time is up feel free to attack the ship with another ship, or hope the enemy will run into the danger zone with mines in it.

4. The ability to use a constructor to plant long ranged mines with hyper drive modules which NO ship can pass (only the owner of the space mines can see them to be fair and autopilot of the owner automatically avoids them) NOTE: I AM Fed up with the conversation on space mines, I will end it forever with this single picture.

5. Stop talking about space mines and more about keeping people out.

What about un-armed militaristic vessels, like troop transports?

I like this idea.

But a requirement to have to enforce this 'border control' would be good. This could be in the form of fleet patrols or listening stations (starbases with extreme sensor equipment).

Cloaking fleets to get past these sorts of things would be cool too.

Adding hyperdrives to mines would appear to defeat the purpose of having cheap, disposable weapons, and would require relatively large mines (at a guess, based on the relative sizes and costs of various hyperdrive components compared to weapon, life support, and sensor components in GCII). Engine components, particularly early engine components, tend to be among the largest components available for ship design, and are also on average the most expensive per unit size (based off of the costs and sizes for components for the Tiny hull class using the Terran tech tree at the start of a Battle of the Gods scenario).

Average costs per size unit (using Tiny hull module size):

Engines - $8.21/size unit

Missiles - $6.31/size unit

Beams - $8.08/size unit

Guns - $6.48/size unit

Armor - $6.05/size unit

Shields - $7.10/size unit

Point Defenses - $6.64/size unit

Sensors - $3.79/size unit (this is including the survey module; if we exclude the survey module, the average cost is $2.06/size unit)

Life Support - $2/size unit (additionally, all life support units are size 2, which is much smaller than any weapon or engine component)

Given these numbers, it is most likely that the Tiny hull costs (and the space used up that we don't see because we're given the remaining available space rather than the total space with a note saying that we've used up so much of it already) can be split something like 58% engines, 27% sensors, and 14% life support using the sensor numbers which include the survey module, or 67% engines, 17% sensors, 16% life support using the sensor numbers excluding the survey module (and yes, I know I've excluded the hull strength from this, but I expect that the cost of manufacturing the actual hull for both the mine and the ship will be similar because as long as both are expected to be capable of superluminal travel they're both probably manufactured with the same general hull strength).

Additionally, normal tiny ships for me basically consist of weapons, maybe engines, and possibly a little life support. Turning that into a mine strips out something that is by far the least expensive and smallest component on the craft - the life support systems. Therefore, a hyperdrive-equipped mine is similarly expensive to a Tiny-hull spaceship on a per-unit basis (e.g. cost of one mine or one Tiny ship). As a result, it is less economical for me to seed fields of hyperdrive-equipped minefields than it is for me to maintain a squadron of fighters in the area I'd have been trying to defend with the aforementioned mines. Additionally, unless you're of the opinion that ships that reach the end of their movement points have for some reason decided to stop in space somewhere rather than have reached the end of their week, a mine which cannot leave its own tile must have at least 1/4 the speed of a ship passing through the tile, if we assume that we have our minefield distributed in such a way as to require any ships passing through the tile to always pass within 1/4 of the tile of a sufficient number of mines to be an actual threat to the fleet, because said ships are only spending (1 parsec)/(fleet speed in parsecs/week) in the tile.

I disagree that the closed border agreement should only apply to military units. I believe that you should be able to select what units go through. If you have a freighter that is connected to another empire, and it goes through my space, you will either pay me a toll, or I will destroy you. Also, don't bother sending your ship trade ships into my space without my permission, you will be labeled as smugglers, and will be destroyed (unless you go through the proper channels, and I approve, though this will usually involve money). Also, why are you sending mining ships and constructors into my borders without my permission?

Like I said, I think you should be able to choose what ships enter your space. If you don't want any ships in your space, you should be allow to ban them. Of course, they can still enter, but at risk of being caught and labeled criminals.

I still want the closed borders agreement to be where u have to click on the ship, and tell it to get out of my space, so this would apply for any ship u choose. The only thing I would want different is if the ship is from a species from one of your allies is that it wouldn't let me do this so there would be no mistake. I would still have u to manually catch me with your ships so I could have a chance to outrun u or fight u. I would like to have an option to capture u instead for ransome and other stuff. I posted this on another reply. This is really where I leave off. On what I am interested in.

Now as far as mines r concerned. The hyperdrive is currently the slowest ship on the game. According to Starwars U can't hyper drive in a gravity well like a star or a planet. What this means is that u can't hyperdrive into a planet. According to game mechanics hyperdrive is folded space, so as far as orbiting or invading a planet u would have to use a different kind of engine. At least as far as I know is that any concept that uses hyperdrives use slower than light speed engines when u r not in hyperspace u use a slower than light engine. Remembering that in the future we will be moving faster than 6 kilometers oer second. I've always set sub light at 1/10 the speed of light. Any ship that goes around a planet will have to use thrusters or some other sub light drive. This probably should be used defensively.I think this would be to cheesy without countermeasures, and if my technology on this is more than yours it would then be reasonable for mine to be more effective. This might spark an arms race.

Because of the size of space I don't know about realism. I would think a sub light drive moving at about 18,600 miles per second is about right especially sonsidering that u can't invade a planet in hyperspace. If I understand the mechanics of the game then a sub light engine would be significantly cheaper than a stargate of a hyperdrive; especially if this was nuclear powered. Personally I don't care about mines. I think u people should figure out who r on what sides of the argument and send each other private messages or make a post, and  figure out the best game mechanics for mines. Because from observing the post it looks like the next game is going to have mines, and if I was against mines knowing they were coming I would want to come up with a compromise, so I could minimise the damage. Personally I don't use mines. If I don't want mines then I don't use them.

One agreement we have come up with is that U were going to have to click on units to warn them to stay out of there space, and if they were going to be removed it was going to require a military presence to remove them. As far a going into borders it was allowed otherwise. As far as I know this was what the post about, and everything else were suggestions.

The AI will never fail to do that. It'll do it with 100% accuracy unless the AI is deliberately crippled.

So in the end, that system is really there to let the AI sneak into player territory (as humans are not going to search their entire territory for ships every turn), and make the player constantly look for ships sneaking in to click and say "stop that". There's a reason why so many games went away from that style of border control: it gets tedious.

Michael, two requests for you:

1. Don't bring Star Wars (or Star Trek, or Babylon 5, or Stargate SG1, or Firefly, etc) in to explain operating characteristics of the various ship components in GCII. There's no real similarity between what we can see of the GCII Hyperdrive and the Star Wars Hyperdrive aside from the name and that both are superluminal travel devices. The general behavior of the GCII superluminal drives seem to be more in line with Star Trek warp drives than Star Wars hyperdrives, in my opinion, but I wouldn't bring Star Trek warp drive performance characteristics in to explain why the GCII drives work the way that they do.
2. Please do not abbreviate 'you' and 'are' with 'u' and 'r'; same for 'your' and 'ur'. I find it very difficult to read your posts because your grammar and spelling is acceptable except when it comes to those words (and perhaps one or two others that I've forgotten).

Now, as far as burning in to a planet on sublight drives: maybe we have to, maybe we don't. We can't really say, because we don't have a real idea of how large the tiles are in the neighborhood of stars and planets, since they clearly aren't full parsecs as that would indicate a system diameter of at least 16.3 lightyears, which is about four times the distance to the closest star to our sun. We can guess that the tiles might be about 10 AU each, based on the size of our own solar system, but it's rather difficult to determine an actual number regardless. If that were the case, then each tile would take about 500 seconds to cross at your 0.1 light-second per second travel velocity, which is clearly too little time since the time requirement for moving 1 move action is about 12,000 seconds (about 1/50th of a week, since the maximum number of movement points you can get on a ship is about 50 moves per turn, and each turn represents 1 week in GCII). However, as stated before, we simply don't know how much space each of those tiles represents and so we can't really do anything with them.

As regards the minefields: I don't have particularly significant objections to orbital minefields, though I see that as something that is much more likely to be done as an attempt to shut space travel in and out of the planet down (e.g. as part of a siege or a blockade) rather than as a defensive measure, because without space control or space parity maintaining the minefield would be impractical, and I don't see it as being either a cheaper or a better option than keeping a squadron of warships nearby, as the minefield and the minelayer(s) would have to be within reach of any surface-to-orbit defensive weapons stationed on the planet; minefields outside of orbital space couldn't be used for either a defensive or offensive purpose without significant investment in keeping them in the correct location relative to the planet to be useful. Orbital minefields would additionally only cover the tile containing the planet. Any sort of deep-space minefield is simply too ridiculous for me to willingly accept.

unless you could make it reletively easy for the player to do this 

in gc 2 you could scroll out to a tactical wireframe map I assume this will still be possible in gc 3 if I could select a mode in that wireframe ( like putting the minimap options on the tactical map) that would highlight your borders / territory and highlight all ships that are not your own

The default should be closed borders unless at war or some kind of "open borders" agreement is in place.

Great, now it's automated. All I have to do is remember to zoom the map out, then click the button.

So what is that adding to the game again? All I have to do is zoom the map out and sneaking plans are thwarted, which means it's contributing nothing to the game *unless I forget to zoom out*. This is just making turns longer as each turn I need to check "are they sneaking up on me now?"

Any game mechanic that's premised on the player forgetting about it in order for it to do anything is a lousy mechanic.

Ok no more abbreviations. Since we r to primitive for a interstellar space right now our current science can't work without some help. Do where do I get the basis for this.

I do know that 30 Au's is the distance to Neptune. 930 million miles is still a long distance. That is what u suggested. If I can't thwart a player trying to throw me out of his space on multi player playing against real people then I don't want to be able to throw people out of their space. I though the way people could try to throw u out of their space on Civilization 3 was quant or cute. On Civilization 4 it sucked. It was irritating and annoying. Like I said earlier I don't want an invisible imaginary field that can keep me or anyone out of territory without force. I changed my mind on what I agreed to earlier because u want to keep me out of your space regardless of how strong u r. I disagree what this site is trying to do. I know I can make ships that can outrun of fight the Ai. Unless you have a better idea on how to build starbases I don't mind constructor spam. I don't want to be able to close space from anyone without war. This is my new side.

Here's my question since we r not advanced enough technologically pull this kind of travel off then where am I supposed to get my information on this subject if I can't draw from my knowledge of sci fi or science? Are u asking me to just stop quoting where the information is from?