Supply questions
 

I have some questions on supply.
I have always wondered why it does not cost any supply to repair? It only seems to cost time.
The Stellar Manipulation weapon type items are very powerful,IMO. Would it be possible to make them a one shot item instead of allowing them to be repaired, i.e. you would have to retrofit the ship to get the item functional again?
I have had ships run out of supplies. Once this happens it seems that even if I get a ship loaded with supply to it and form a fleet I still have reduced movement costs. Is there a way to transfer supplies from one ship to another, sort of creating a supply tender type ship?
Thanks

Re: Supply questions
 

I believe that you can use the transfer supplies option to move stuff between ships...you MAY have to be at a planet to do it, not sure on that, but, I moved troops from one troop ship to another Last night while in orbit around a planet.

Paul E. Mason
Senior VMS Systems Administrator

Re: Supply questions
 

Would it be possible to make the stellar manipulation weapons work like mines? You build them, place them, use them and then they are gone. You could build a stellar weapon mine layer but the mines would be expensive. Might limit the use of these weapons to critical situations.
I also think the weapon that opens and closes warp points should be a facility. Maybe it could even scrap itself after use.

Re: Supply questions
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Marty Ward:
Would it be possible to make the stellar manipulation weapons work like mines? You build them, place them, use them and then they are gone. You could build a stellar weapon mine layer but the mines would be expensive. Might limit the use of these weapons to critical situations.
I also think the weapon that opens and closes warp points should be a facility. Maybe it could even scrap itself after use.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>


I assume you want something like B5's jump gate? I've heard that these are being considered, but I don't think they've started working on them. Any beta testers want to comment?

Re: Supply questions
 

What I would like to see is these powerful items not be able to be used on a whim. If you can use one and have a repair bay fix it at no cost in one turn then they lose some of their specialness. You could destroy a planet a turn per ship if you wanted. I thought that destroying them after use would restrict their use to really special tasks.
They seem to strong to me.

Re: Supply questions
 

I think a small modification of social unrest would do the job.... Anyone care to give it a shot?

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What? Why? he really did it? Who Knew? -me 20 min ago

Re: Supply questions
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Nyx:
On the stellar manipulators, can a modder flag them to always have the marker for forbidden technology? Meaning the one that prevents a non-organic race from repairing a damaged seeking parasite on a ship it stole.

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I haven't found any way to make such adjustment. It just isn't included in the code. However, if the supply requirements for Stellar Manipulation components would work, it would make them much harder to use.

Re: Supply questions
 

The problem with making it unrepairable the way its set up now is that flag is only set on unresearchable technology. That means if you can build stellar manipulation you can repair it. That would be a code change to make that work.

Even if you made it a racial pick sort of thing if you picked that area you could research it, build it, and repair it. If you didn't research it you couldn't repair it but you couldn't build it either so its a moot point.

[This message has been edited by Tomgs (edited 10 February 2001).]

Re: Supply questions
 

Why not just alter the Stellar manipulation components to destroy the ship that is carrying them, like the ringworld + sphereworld comps? Alternatively add the Sector - Damage ability to the comp so that any ship in the area is torn apart by the gravitational flux / whatever of the warp point openning / closing

Re: Supply questions
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by jimbob55:
Why not just alter the Stellar manipulation components to destroy the ship that is carrying them, like the ringworld + sphereworld comps? Alternatively add the Sector - Damage ability to the comp so that any ship in the area is torn apart by the gravitational flux / whatever of the warp point openning / closing<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>


With respect to the planet destroying components, I think that is an outstanding idea. But not on my warp open/close ships! Not that.

You should see my empire before I started turning off the SM tech to give the AI a fair chance. My empire would be as fully interconnected as is possible under the 10 warp points per system limit. And, I wouldn't have any warp points leading out that didn't have at least half my fleet sitting there watching to see what came through. Even that one was closed once I became MEE.

Wormhole creation is very, very fun. Under 1.19, it's also very, very unbalancing. I would set all my colonies up to send their ships to my homeworld. Once I had a fair size fleet, I'd open up a wormhole to an enemy system, send the ships through and close the wormhole. Very, very fun. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

This raises an interesting question in my mind: How many of you who use SM like I do would like to see an expensive SM component which could be placed on a ship/base which blocks the creation of wormholes into that system?

Before I found out that the AI doesn't use SM offensively, I had a rapid deployment force ready to respond to any hostile wormholes opened up in my empire. But if the AI (or a human) effectively uses wormholes, I don't see anything to prevent him from annihilating at least one planet per turn by opening a wormhole and then sending everything he has through to destroy a single planet. If he's lucky and the planet is close to the wormhole, he might even make it back through the wormhole after the battle.