Re: Freighter Network
 

Puke, great minds think alike. SJ and I were having a conversation about this very a little while ago. Your idea is almost exactly what we came up with. I was thinking you wouldn't need to have the freighters be more expensive though. Say the freigthers are cheap enough to build at a colony in one turn. Then you build a stream of them and send them back to your homeworld to be scrapped. There is nothing to stop you from building them at your homeworld too, but if you do the percentages right, say 120% scrap return, then you aren't exactly going to get rich by just building and scrapping merchant ships at the homeworld. You'd need lots of colonies sending streams of them home to expand your empire. Plus if you are building merchants at home you aren't building war ships or colony ships. And that's a bad thing. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

For it to work though you'd need to remove the orbital yards from the mod. Otherwise you could get around having to travel by building a bunch of space stations to crank out merchants.

Re: Freighter Network
 

or at least remove the orbitals ability to build freighters. in stock, very few things use organics. you could remove orgs from ships entirely, and use it as a pre-req to build freighters.

orbitals would have a 0 organic rate.

Re: Freighter Network
 

Better change that organic rate to 1. 0 would mean that the organics cost is completely ignored in construction, both in time to complete and in resources actually paid.

Re: Freighter Network
 

So you are saying a yard with organic rate of zero can still build with organics? I don't remember hearing of that before.

Re: Freighter Network
 

Yes. It will build with an unlimited number of organics and won't count against your stockpile.

Re: Freighter Network
 

It works the same with two build rates at 0 - both resources will be completely ignored for construction at that location. All three 0's will cause no construction to occur at all, however.

Re: Freighter Network
 

That's interesting. I'll have to remember that. Might be a way to take advantage of that in a mod.

Re: Freighter Network
 

If that's the case, then you can have something like the following:

-No resource production facilities
-Homeworld type spaceyard (call it a "Spaceport") constructs at a rate something like 2000/100/2000
-Spaceport produces 2000 organics/turn, and can store 2000 organics
-Spaceport has scrap efficiency of 110%
-Spaceport takes an extremely long time to construct, basically limiting it to Homeworld-only until expansion reaches the point that you can afford to spend time on building another one.
-Colony type spaceyard (call it "Launch Pad") constructs at a rate of 0/2000/0
-Launch Pad also produces 2000 organics/turn, and stores 2000 organics
-Freighter hulls cost 2000 organics
-All other hull types cost some amount of organics; say a Frigate could be 50 organics, a Heavy Carrier could be 500 organics
-Remove organic cost from almost all other components; "rare" components could have an organic component
-Add in freighter components, which "cost" some amount of minerals and/or radioactives; colonies with Launch Pads produce these at no mineral or radioactive cost. Colonies with Spaceports produce these at cost, but value is gained from "trade".
-Remove Resupply Depots, and replace with Carrier Battles-style supply ships/bases. These hulls will have some maintainence cost, all other hulls will have 100% maintainence reduction. The idea here is "maintainence" = "supply".
-You can keep orbital yards, but only at extremely low organic production, say 2000/25/2000; organics becomes a metaphor for manpower, so an orbital yard depends on the manpower from the Spaceport it orbits to construct.

So that's a very, very rough outline of what could be done. I would have to think some more about what to do with "extra" facility space on colonies, the base construction rate for colonies (without Launch Pad) and a bunch of other stuff I probably can't imagine right now. But that's the start of an idea.

Re: Freighter Network
 

And if you only have the ability tag for one or two resources? Will that work to prevent construction with the other resource(s)?

Re: Freighter Network
 

The absence of a space yard ability is treated exactly the same as 0 for that ability as far as build rate is concerned. The only difference is that a 0-rate space yard will enable scrapping, mothballing, retrofitting, etc., but a component with no space yard abilities at all will not.