[DirectorTsaarx]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
You can give a resupply facility a negative amount of resource production. It does work. It's like maintenance for facilities. There owuld be a couple of wierd things though. If you can get past them though it will approximate what you are wanting I guess.

First of all, it would cost you resources every turn the resupply facility is in operation, not just when ships are refueling. And it wouldn't cost you any more to refuel a bunch of ships than it would to refuel one, so it wouldn't be a true "resources to supply" converter.

Secondly in a regular infinite resource game it would be cheaper to put a resupply depot on a low resource world than on a high resources one. Just as a resource extractor produces less on a low resource world, the negative production on the facility would be factored by the value of the planet. On a planet with all zeros it would be free to operate.

Thirdly in a limited resource game, the facility would actually improve the value of the planet it was on, just like a value improvement plant. But it would work on a fixed rate instead of a percentage like a value improvement plant does.

Geoschmo

I'd never even considered modding the current game to include paying for supplies... sounds like my initial thought holds true, that it's fairly useless unless resupply depots are changed to produce limited amounts of supply. Which isn't likely to happen as a patch for SE4; but maybe for SE5 (which, if all the way-out ideas on the forum as a whole are implemented, could really be micromanagement hell... but we'd probably all still love it )