SE4 Advanced brainstorming

[Fyron]

You have to have a movement point to colonize, so the colony pod will need an engine.

Population can't grow in cargo.

I don't believe anyone was able to get something like the infiltration bay to work, especially for use over enemy planets.

Web mines won't work without causing actual damage. You can make engine-only damage mines, though. None of the damage types that do not do physical damage work on mines.

Weapons can't generate resources. You can make a "scrap mining" type of facility that produces extra resources but lowers planet value (VIP ability works as a negative), but that's about it.

There is no way to implement scanning of other systems, short of cloaked drones. They will hit any mines present, unless you want to make all drones skip minefields in settings.txt:

Drones Can Be Hit By Mines := True

In SE5, you can make a new drone unit type that skips mines, while leaving the others as normal, but such fine-grained control doesn't exist in SE4.

Autolaunching units can be accomplished via repeat orders, though I'm not sure you can do it for planets in sequential movement games, due to launching immediately.

[Urendi Maleldil]

Just keep brainstorming. I want to hear every idea no matter how outrageous.

[Gandalf Parker]

Psychology: a facility that will boost Intell projects in that system

BioTech: cheap facility to increase the tolerance rating on a planet instead of terraforming it

Psych/BioTech: levels needed in each in order to create a cyborg facility which will increase construction rates of space yards

Psych: a "self-help" facility which improves the planets stats in areas such as suicide and accidents caused by depression. Shows up as an increase in "luck". (lowers chance of bad events in that system). overlaps abit with religious trait

[Urendi Maleldil]

Web Mines are good. I haven't finished implementing a good warhead and mine system yet. They'll probably exist as Ion Warheads just to be consistent with existing SE4 tech.

I already have several facilities in the Psych area that lower anger, increase production, and decrease the chance of bad events or intel. It might be interesting to have a mobile ship component that does something similar.

[Urendi Maleldil]

The organic racial trait and the psychic racial trait depend heavily on the Biotech and Psychology trees respectively. I currently need more low-end (1-5) and high-end (20-30) stuff for normal races on those trees.

I also haven't settled on a ship hull size scheme yet. Right now I'm using stock hulls. Like regular SE4 they get progressively bigger. But this may change. What do you think?

[Suicide Junkie]

Gritecon style hulls are a good alternative.

Use maintenance reduction abilities and component scale mounts to make the average ship cost (ie build time) be proportional to size squared.
The average ship maintenance cost can at the same time be proportional to the square root of the size.

Then you can give all the ship hulls right from the beginning, and they'll get used.

[Urendi Maleldil]

That's not a bad idea. I may do something similar, but I probably won't use the system as it is. I want to avoid scale mounts. Just a personal preference.