Designable facilities in SE5!
 

I just got to thinking today, how odd it is that in SE4, so much detail goes into the strategy of ship design, while facilities are just built from a list. Doesn't this seem odd, given that facilities are much larger and more complex than starships? Well, I have an idea that *should* be possible in SE5, given what Aaron has told us so far... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

You know how in SE5, planetary cargo will be sharing space with facilities? And presumably since we can define our own unit types, all unit types can use all abilities, right?

You see where I'm going here? I'm suggesting replacing all facilities with weapons platforms! :eek: Just rename the unit type "weapons platform" to "city" or something in the new Labels.txt and you should be good to go, ready to create WP components that mine minerals, perform research, act as spaceports, and do all the other functions of facilities. Heck, "facilities" per se could be removed entirely from the game and replaced with "planetary developments", a unit type that can encompass cities, facilities, and weapons platforms! The beauty of this is now you could DESIGN YOUR OWN FACILITIES IN-GAME in the same way you design ships, so for instance you could design a "city" facility that contains everything you might want on a planet, and then fill your queue with that facility, and the planet develops rather realistically with minimal effort - and if SE5 lets you refit non-ship units (which I would imagine it does, given that you can define your own unit types), you could REALLY have some fun - you could CUSTOMIZE the "city" levels found in Proportions to suit your particular needs! 8-O

Aaron (or anyone else for that matter), care to comment? See, I do truly live up to my name as the Mod Advisor, don't I? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!
 

Hey thats indeed a friggin nice idea.

Maybe there should be generel facilites and a tech area where you could choose in which way to develop your generel facility. So could research and enhance them to i.e. create 1000 research points and 100 shield points or maybe 500 research and 500 mineral production http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!
 

Wow what an amazing concept! Ive seen games where you can research tech and then design ships, and design weapons, and design units. But I cant think of any game that has ever let you design facilities.

A home-system facility design which is focused on that purpose for maximum output. A colony Version with less output but a point-defense gun and a shield.

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!
 

This could mean that you can build some "facilities platforms" in a construction yard, load them into a transport and deploy them into a just created colony... and that's quite strange.

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!
 

Hmm, does this mean we could also cloak planets?

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!
 

You can cloak planets in SE4. You have to mod in a cloaking facility, but doing so is quite easy...

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!
 

Wha? Since when?!

I remember talking about it a long time ago, but was told the cloaking ability doesn't work on facilities/planets.

[edit]
I knew i wasn't crazy http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
ooooold thread
I guess MM added it in a patch then...but still no unclaimed cloaked planets (cloaking without a facility)

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!
 

Actually... stick a cloaking storm in the same sector, and the planet is invisible. I believe the bugs associated with that were fixed as well. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!
 

I'm having trouble thinking of how this would be used... Wouldn't you need "facility components" added. Lessee... wood, nails, doorknobs...

Also, most facilities just kind of have only one ability, so what design aspects would you add or upgrade. About the only things that come to mind are increased capability, and damage resistance - both of which can already be done by creating levels for each facility and upgrading as desired.

What am I missing?

Slick.

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!
 

He explicitly mentioned Proportions cities. He was not speaking of basic facilities such as Mineral Miners, Organics Farms, etc., but far more complex things. Certainly, you could make basic facilities. Or you could make more advanced ones. The choice would be yours.

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!
 

Components exclusively for facilitie design. Now that is an interesting idea. I can see the learning curve for newbies becoming a lot higher. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!
 

I think that more complex isn't necessarily better. You have to keep the game accessible to new players. This would seem to be another layer of complexity.

Wildcard [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/icon46.gif[/img]

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!
 

From the way he described it this would be something introducted purely in a mod.

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!
 

Arcologies anyone? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

If you *really* want to prevent that, though, just make them something ridiculously (actually realistically?) huge, like 10,000,000 kilotons - IIRC Aaron said he was going to use signed long integers for everything, so that means EVERYTHING goes up to plus or minus 2 billion! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/shock.gif

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!
 

This is a wonderful idea. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

I kind of like the possibility of loading every facility from a planet onto a big transport and plunking them down on a new planet. It will sure speed up the time it takes to fill up those sphere worlds. [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/icon26.gif[/img]

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!
 

Does it really matter? I mean we're talking empires that in the late game can blow up and re-build entire planets here, and can build sphere and ring worlds. Making a modular city (to be transported and assembled on site) sounds pretty trivial, and even a completely built one wouldn't be -that- bad.

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!
 

Although facilities and cargo will take up the same space on a planet - I don't think that facilities will be treated as cargo.

I'd prefer not to see designable facilities in SE:5 myself.

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!
 

With some slight changes to the game this could be very interesting. We'd need to factor in things like efficiency of extraction and 'pollution' so you could have a choice of various techs that produce more ore/radioactives but also pollute more vs. less effective but 'safer' techs, and also special techs to compensate for pollution. Then you could design facilities according to your personal approach. Eco-friendly and expensive, or cheap & dirty, etc.

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!
 

Couldn't "Designable Facilities" as weapons platforms be modded in now with SE4? Especially with the new generate points abilities.

Just make the Facility weapons platforms much larger than the regular platforms and the resource generating components larger too.

Too bad we can't add a lot of the more advanced facility-only abilities, but we could at least make basic resource, research, and intel facilities.

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!
 

Pretty sure that generate point abilities do not work in cargo.

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!
 

Hmm,

Didn't Aaron say something about colonies on Worldships/Orbitals? If facililites are cargo couldn't a facility component that allows increased Pop make these into Colonies http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/shock.gif. This could really make games much more complex and what about truely nomadic races, they could finally be implemented properly! [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/icon27.gif[/img] Though I think Malfador will probably use components on the vehicles directly for space bourne colonies.

Cheers http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image.../beerglass.gif

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!
 

I think it's a very good idea, because:
a) it will ad more complexity without excessive micromanagement. And complex things are best.
b) you'll be able to fit facility cost to your construction rate (no more wasted construction points).

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!
 

FYI, I gave Aaron the heads up about this thread. I thought this idea was worthy of deeper discussion and had interesting possibilities. But the thread seems to have died as fast as it sprung up.

Oh well, maybe it's just the weekend that pushed this thread back to page 2.

Cheers! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!
 

Thanks David! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!+cargo
 

something that was brought up breifly in the aaron hall chat sessions which comes to mind. there should be cargo with different types of flags and tags. Thus a fighter would have a certain cargo tag which gives them the following effects :in a fighter bay a fighter would have full cargo weight (mass), while in a cargo box it would take up 1/2 mass but would not be available during combat (due to the boxed nature of the fighters). Some facilities would have a flag or tag which would prevent them from moving off planet but would still take up cargo space (because their delicate or to bulky or cant be broken down to fit into regular cargo containers). no more worries about moving cities or facilities from planet to planet (although you could always make them mass hugely). This way it would make transporting populations harder as they would take up more cargo space if you didn't use proper life support cargo spaces. cryo freeze might lessen the space for pops but would not be good for anything else...
personally I think weapons should be modded the same way.
weapon flag#1 can target target types #2,3,4,6 thus blurring or taking out the traditional drone/seeker/etcc..
therfore you can create a seeker with a shipsized profile.
or a drone with a seeker sized profile.

anyways just some thoughts

ggm

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!+cargo
 

Makes sense.

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!+manufacturing
 

Something that has always bugged me about se 4 is the way the resources, production and supply has been handled by the game engine.I always felt that the one space yard per planet limitation was a bit weird. Why should a planet have only one factory but dozens of resource producing facilities. When I think of proportions with its massive megopolis's etc which produce massive resources but have no (zero nil) manufacturing capability. It hardly seems right. Historically it has been the center of an empire which supplies the manufacturing whereas the outscirts supply the resources. It would be nice to be able to build facilities which are like moo's robotic factories on a planet instead of having to build space yards.
Which brings me to a second point about ships and supplies.
why do ships need maintenace if they've got supplies, it's artificial. This was poorly done in SE (sorry Aaron, god of programming). What's the difference? Supplies should be manufactured goods for the maintenance of ships and have to be stockpiled. no more maintenance (ie how does it get to the ship? why does the ship not need to process the raw materials for replacement parts and food and medicins?). Plus when a ship runs out of supplies it doesn't blow up randomly from a fleet. If it's out of fuel it doesn't move. out of ammunition it doesnt fight.if its out of food the crew dies. If its out of parts then every component should have a percentage chance of breaking down per turn. It doesn't explode....
I also have a gripe about population. The population on non-atmospheric or hostile atmospheric planets and storage capacity of a planet should be determined by it's surface area, (or volume for you sauran sssla types). As long as you build domed facilities or habitats you should be constantly be able to increase your population. Given the right technology and caves the moon should be able to hold a enormuse amount of population. facilities should be able to mod for increases in pop in many circumstances. Hirise megopolises or subterranean coves should both increas the planetary limits.
Lastly would be nice to manufacture robot populations as a seperate population type. Like in moo1 population should give a small manufacturing component to the planet ( not a percentage). added with factories and planetary yards this would give a total manufacturing capability. Maybe add a requirement that each facilities have a minimum population to run them at full efficiency, then pro rate the manufacutring or resource production down for shortfalls in work force


just some more ideas

ggm

Re: Designable facilities in SE5!+manufacturing
 

with this in mind maybe population on a planet should just have a cargo component???

ggm