Space Stage

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 (scific) 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 combination of God Tools and Ascension. Some players may not like scifi in an 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. This will lock the player to essentially the early Space Stage.

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 first satellite launches and tries to reach moons of the home planet mark the early Space Stage gameplay. Otherwise 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. Another main point of early Space Stage is the unification of the player's world, because if not unified the other nations on the player's planet can keep interfering and attacking the player. It will be much harder (and we might want to make it impossible) to maintain a space empire when your homeworld is always at the risk of descending into planet-wide chaos. 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. As Thrive is a science-based game, the scifi tropes to be included in the game will be picked with utility and some semblance of realism (basing them on currently speculated plausible technologies) in mind. The game will aim to only pick scifi technologies that are really needed to make the latter half of space stage work. FTL will be essential but exotic weapons, energy sources, or materials thought to be currently impossible can be excluded without making the rest of the game plans about galactic empires impossible. This will reduce the amount of scifi handwaving needs to be added to the game.

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.