[Taqwus]

Some notes regarding the Moo2 model --

Note that there is much less sense of facility competition in that game; every colony can eventually have one facility of every type you've ever researched. In addition, for research, production, and food, you allocate colonists; buildings serve primarily as force multipliers and, in certain cases, can produce flat rates (e.g. a certain farm type producing a fixed amount of food per turn IIRC). Spies were merely produced, and didn't require any infrastructure before or after, beyond taxes, if memory serves. And so forth.

This means that you can get away with having far fewer worlds than in SE4, where facilities compete for space, and not all planets are suitable for all tasks. You must find mineral-heavy planets and mine them early. You must devote space to research, and eventually intelligence. And the limited space per world, and their different values, means you generally have to have multiple planets in a system to ensure resupply depots, space ports, ship yards, system computers, and everything else. IOW, you must colonize quickly to compete; this is one reason why the "build five shipyard bases immediately on emergency build" idea makes such a large difference.

Including labor would be a good thing. Facilities, at least, should take population to operate and support, based on type (hrm. Perhaps not all facilities should be the same size, either; wouldn't a shipyard and all its infrastructure take both more space and more labor than a research computer installation?). Maybe each should even have a minimum and a maximum amount of manpower that can be devoted to it in order to function.

Stop me before I start suggesting numerous pie charts and sliders and complex multi-tasking labor-allocation schemes. ;-)


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-- The thing that goes bump in the night