Colony ships, for sale cheap!

Quikngruvn · #1 January 16th, 2002, 09:30 PM

This has been bugging me for while, so I figured I'd vent and get feedback....

Colony ships are cheap. Very cheap. Too cheap, IMO. Thus, extremely rapid expansion and development.

I'm curious to see how a game would develop if colony ships were more expensive (specifically, the colony module). But this is where things get murky for me. Since I have neither the time nor patience to experiment with the cost of colony modules, I'm leaving this open for discussion. From where I'm sitting, one could increase the cost of a colony module from anywhere from double to (an extreme of) ten times the current cost in all resources.

This has probably been discussed before-- has anyone actually tried a mod where the colony modules were buck-expensive (where everything else is unchanged)?

Quikngruvn

geoschmo · #2 January 16th, 2002, 09:41 PM

Not a bad thought. You could really go higher than 10 times if you wanted to. I am not sure what the absolute limit is in the components.txt file. It would definetly be an easy way to slow down expansion and stretch out games.

Would give more of an incentive to capture planets instead of glassing them.

You would need to consider ship maintenance though. If you went very high on the cost of the colony comp, you could conceivably push the maint so high that an empire just starting out could not even afford to have one, and thus you would never be able to get beyond your homeworld. You could add an ability to the colony component to reduce ship maint to counter that I guess.

Geoschmo

Fyron · #3 January 17th, 2002, 01:01 AM

quote:
You could add an ability to the colony component to reduce ship maint to counter that I guess.

If you do that, then what's to stop someone from making a Baseship with a colony module on it and getting low maintenance fleets? You should increase the size of the colony module by 600 kilotons and the colony ship by 620 kilotons and give the colony ship itself reduced maintenance. That way, you couldn't stick the colony module on a small war ship, like a light cruiser, to get a fast colony ship. The extra 20 spaces would allow more room for accessories like supplies, solar sails, cargo bays, etc. With huge colony modules (800 kilotons), you could still put one on a baseship to get a high initial population, but it would be slow and high-maintenanee.

dmm · #4 January 17th, 2002, 01:05 AM

I was going to try to argue that maybe the colony ship only carries enough stuff to "bootstrap" the colony. So that, instead of carrying housing modules, it carries a ready-to-assemble factory that makes use of local resources. But then I was unable to explain how they could make fully-functional domed habitats for 100,000 people in 1/10 of a year. That would be SOME factory!

So, instead I'll argue that private sources -- banks, merchants, industries, and the colonists themselves -- bear most of the cost of a colony ship. The cost paid by an empire is only the cost of subsidizing the colonization. In contrast, military ships are paid for entirely by the empire.

What do you think of that idea?

dmm · #5 January 17th, 2002, 01:12 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
You should increase the size of the colony module by 600 kilotons and the colony ship by 620 kilotons and give the colony ship itself reduced maintenance.

But then you could use ramming colony ships for warp-point defense in the early game. And in general, they would be very hard to kill with an early-game warship. Although that might lead to some interesting games.

Fyron · #6 January 17th, 2002, 01:23 AM

I said to incease the size, not the hit points. These huge colony ships would still be as vulnerable as the regular colony ships.

quote:
So, instead I'll argue that private sources -- banks, merchants, industries, and the colonists themselves -- bear most of the cost of a colony ship. The cost paid by an empire is only the cost of subsidizing the colonization. In contrast, military ships are paid for entirely by the empire.

What do you think of that idea?

That's a good idea, but it kind of misses the point. The point of making colony ships expensive is to slow down the incredibaly rapid rate of expansion, not just to make you spend more money.

[ 16 January 2002: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

dmm · #7 January 17th, 2002, 01:41 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
I said to incease the size, not the hit points. These huge colony ships would still be as vulnerable as the regular colony ships.

Aahhhh, I see.

quote:
Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
That's a good idea, but it kind of misses the point. The point of making colony ships expensive is to slow down the incredibaly rapid rate of expansion, not just to make you spend more money.

I was just trying to justify the current costs. I think the problem is more in the speed of building structures than in the speed of establishing colonies.
Example: You establish a colony on a huge world, and start building mines. [Edit: I mean mines as in mining facilities.] In only 30 years, you've covered the entire surface with mines. What??!! Holy Cow! that's a lot of mines!
Another example: In the same turn that you colonize, you can fill up the colony with settlers (from transports) to its max pop. What??!! Where did all that housing come from?
Sooooo, what you really need to do is to make all planets hold 6x as much stuff, decrease the capabilities of all facilities by 4x, get Aaron to add housing facilities to hold pop, and change the pop production bonuses to fit this new model. Then find some people who like to play excruciatingly long games!

[ 16 January 2002: Message edited by: dmm ]

Phoenix-D · #8 January 17th, 2002, 02:10 AM

"You should increase the size of the colony module by 600 kilotons and the colony ship by 620 kilotons and give the colony ship itself reduced maintenance"

Why bother increaseing the size? Just stick the reduced maintaince on the ship hull itself (ala the bases). No muss, no fuss, a warship with a colony component pays full price.

Phoenix-D

geoschmo · #9 January 17th, 2002, 02:13 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
If you do that, then what's to stop someone from making a Baseship with a colony module on it and getting low maintenance fleets?

Good point. You could apply the maintenance reduction ability to the hull instead of the compponent. That should eliminate that problem.

Geoschmo

Quikngruvn · #10 January 17th, 2002, 04:32 PM

Ah, great minds think alike.... Making the colony ship hull low-maintentance sounds like the trick. And a player could still get a slightly-faster colonizer with a warship hull... though with the maintenance as high as all that, I don't see why.

I was wondering if a player could try the argument the other way around, by making a warfleet of nothing but low-maintenance colony ship hulls, but a colony ship is required to be at least 50% colony module, so that scenario is not viable.

Now... how buck-expensive to make the colony module....?

Quikngruvn