"Unit construction only" Space Yards

[geoschmo]

Ok, from the title of this thread it may not be clear what I am talking about. It has been discussed in several mod threads that it would be neat to be able make a component for a ships that could construct units but not be able to build ships.

The problem is even giving them a slow construction rate doesn't eliminate the possibility that given enough time a ship or base could be constructed.

Someone, I can't remember who or in what thread, mentioned controlling it by resource types. That is, creating a class of yards that was not capable of constructing all three resource types, and then making what you do not want constructable require the resource that this ships cannot build with. I want to discuss this in a little more depth.

My thought is that this would be easier than it appears on the surface. By simply editing the Vehiclesize.txt file and adding 1 organic and 1 radioactive to every hull type that you want to have a standard yard to be required to build you would work for the ship end. Then it would be a matter of making sure that your unit only required one or two of the resources.

For some units this would be easy. Mines for example already only take minerals and rads, so you could add construction of these two to the mine layer component and you could then build mines onsite, but not build ships.

For fighters it would not be so easy, since they have components taht require all three. You would have to modify all the components you would want to be buildable by the mod fighter builder. But it could still be done. You might even end up with race specific yards. Mineral/organic for the organic races, mineral/rad for the crystal races, and probably the standard ones too.

You can also make these specialized yards ship only, or conversly make the standard space yards base only. This would require a base to build a ship, but a ship could be used to build a unit. A logical progresion I think.

I think this idea could be applied to a lot of mods. Sci-fi cross, P&N, Monsters.

I think maybe the AI might have a problem with this though because they may try to build a ship on one of these unit only yards. There would be nothing to restrict putting a ship in the queue, it would simply never get built because the yard caouldn't make use on of the required resources. So this may have to be for human play only.

Comments?

Geoschmo