Shipyard Mod Idea
One of the cool things about some past sci-fi movies has been the CGI when they show a giant starbase in space contructing a ship in space (I think they did this in one of the Star Trek movies with the enterprise). However in SEIV almost all the construction is done planetside by planetary shipyards. Yes, I realize you can put shipyards on ships. But they are slower than planetside based ones, making them useful only when you have no planet near the fighting or are building a ring/sphere world.
I'd like to move the construction back to space stations. So I'm thinking I'd make my mod so planet-based ship yards only construct about one third to one fourth of their current speed, and the space station components can construct twice as fast as they do now.
Then at the beginning of the game, expansion with colony ships is not as fast and furious, and there is a calculated decision of whether to use the planetary ship yard to build a space station and use that to build colony/attack ships or pump out some of those first or just build the colony ships at the slower planetary rates.
I'd also mod the starbase research tree to give you larger construction components than the 400kt base one for the larger space station sizes. (E.G. a 800kt component that produces 50% faster and a 1200kt component that produces 100% faster).
Also since this key component is moved off-planet, they would need to be defended slightly differently (they could normally be as much 4-5 spaces away from the planet where the weapons platforms are). This would make satellite defense a little more important and also allow for the strategy of attacking an oponent just to wipe out the production bases and move on. Similar to a pearl harbor sneak attack (just get the carriers) or an allied bombing raid on production centers. Now you pratically have to defeat the entire planet defense structure. (which is still there but defends all the planetside facilities)
This makes raiding as opposed to full war a lot more feasible.
What do you people think? A good idea?
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