Orders for ships: How about an editable order sequence like Stars! -- That is the one feature of the game that I really liked. You could create a complete sequence of actions and 'apply' them to any given ship. It would be really great to be able to tell a transport in SE to go to here, pick up exactly this many mines/sats/troops, go to here, drop this many mines/sats/troops, etc. You could hve one transport handling many types of cargo at once instead of crudely picking up all it can carry of ONE cargo type and dumping all it carries of that ONE cargo type. This degree of automation would reduce 'micro-management' dramatically in SE V.
Resources: You know, the 'Value Improvement Plant' strikes me as stupid and I've modded my SE IV to have seperate facilities to improve each resource. I put them in the upper three levels for each resource extraction field since the Robotoid Factory is always a better choice than any of the specialized facilities, and it actually makes
sense to combine those abilities since automation can improve all forms of production/harvesting.
ConVersion could logically be split up as well, but the hardcode would have to be changed to allow it. There are lots of good applications, too. Organic races ought to be able to convert organics to minerals early on, for example. Call it 'bio-mining' where they have the plants extract the minerals from the soil and then harvst and refine them.
Other types of conVersion should be very rare and difficult. Converting anything to radioactives, for example.
As for 'Soylent Green'... that's an 'ethical' thing. There ought to be a racial trait, call it 'Xenophage', where your race regards other races as food and is willing to eat them. This would provide extra food when you capture alien populations (boosting population growth) but would make most other races hate you and affect diplomatic relations very badly. Resistance on conquered worlds would logically be much more persistent and desperate, too. I suppose you could logically let these races have a special facility to convert population to organics to represent other uses of the corpses. We use 'everything but the squeal' with pigs, as they say.
It has been asked more than once in the beta forums why the 'advanced storage' trait doesn't affect ship cargo like it does planet cargo. Keep asking. MM will notice sooner or later.
As for regenerating shields, I was thinking that Temporal races need some defense advantage. Self-regenerating shields would be a good one for them. Shields normally regenerate after combat anyway. It makes sense for time manipulation to let you get regeneration in combat more easily than other races. Give them a same sized shield generator that also does regeneration. No need for extra component.
[ March 10, 2003, 00:38: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]