Small Mod Experiment

[Fyron]

Hoping to stimulate the dormant creative juices I know are still laying around here... Let's try an experiment.

Post a relatively small mod idea you would like to see implemented, and someone else (or even you) can help out, implement the feature, and post the resulting mod. Implemented mods should include a readme file detailing how the feature was implemented.

Examples should be somewhere around the scope of these concept mods, or a bit more in-depth. If this works out, we can build up a similar repository for SE5. Major overhauls on the order of "make Adamant for SE5" are beyond the scope of this experiment.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

'Palace' facility. No requirements for what it does.

[Ed Kolis]

Heh, that's a bit vague...
/me cooks up a Palace facility that looks and behaves exactly like a Space Yard, only it has a different name

Seriously, Golden Eclipse has some "imperial manufacturing/research/mining/etc. capital" facilities much like Galciv does, and those seem to work pretty well - what they do is provide a huge system-wide bonus to whatever type of capital they are (I think they start at 100% ), but only one is effective per empire (if that requirement actually works - if not, the new facility counting functions from v1.52 should take care of that!). So you start out building all of your capitals in your home system probably (or maybe you don't because they are pretty darned expensive), and reap huge bonuses to production, but once your empire expands enough you might find some super-mineral-rich system that you want to designate the new mining capital - well, you scrap the mining capital and build a new one in the super-rich system!

So a "palace" facility could work like that - maybe instead of a 100% bonus to one thing, it could provide like a 25% bonus to everything...

Or it could improve happiness in the system... or maybe even provide resistance to boarding/subversion for all nearby ships (not sure how you'd do that though...)

But in any event it would have to have one of the following to prevent abuse:
1. A "one per empire" requirement
2. An exorbitant build and/or maintenance cost, so only large empires can afford more than one. (Those nobles do need a lot of bling bling to get by )
3. A special negative resource production ability which depends on the number of palaces in your empire (using the new facility counting functions) - you might be able to have one palace maintenance free, or two for 10000 resources per turn, or three for 50000 resources per turn, or four for 250000 resources per turn...
4. Some other negative effect - maybe it produces 10000 negative research points (decadence implies laziness) or 10000 negative intel points (prime target for terrorists)... or maybe it reduces the planet's or system's space yard rate (see the negative research rationale)...

So yeah, Narf, your "palace" idea really raises more questions than answers

[Ed Kolis]

Ah, here's another idea... I've been playing Metroid Prime 3 lately, and this sort of idea was implemented in Anacreon, but what if there were some sort of chemical (call it "Phazon" since that's what Metroid calls it, or "Spice" like Anacreon does - a Dune reference I imagine ) that you could give to your people or to your ship crews or troops or whatever to make them work harder or fight better or whatever. (I imagine this would be like a "knockoff" of Organic tech in the sense that Dark Nova's Symbiotic tech is a "knockoff" of Organic tech - a ruins or researchable tech which is inferior to the "real McCoy", but can also be used by Organic races to further boost their advantage.) Anyway, the real trick with Phazon or Spice would be that it's a drug - if you give your people too much (like with Phazon) or your run out after they've been accustomed to receiving it (like with Spice), then Bad Things Happen. Like, people start dying, or your ship crews or troops desert or fight at greatly reduced efficiency, or whatever.
I guess the challenges with implementing this idea are:
1. How do you do a turn-by-turn check on the "corruption/addiction level" of all those planets or units?
2. How do you follow through with the consequences of the corruption or addiction, either positive or negative?
3. How do you report back to the player that all this is going on behind the scenes, since you can't customize the planet or unit reports?
4. The hardest of all - how do you keep it interesting enough for the player so that he can't too easily min/max and find the "optimal" chemical production level, while still preventing a micromanagement nightmare - "oh no, I have to scrap this facility / move or mothball this ship / whatever so I can alter the production level for XYZZY system because something in the universe changed - or else my whole economy collapses in 5 turns!"
I *suppose* it could be done through event scripting, though... anyone wanna have a stab at it? Might be fun

[se5a]

QNP - with two different size engines for each engine type(fryon, have you updated that imagemod yet?) and with a decent supply usage implementation.

[AstralWanderer]

narf poit chez BOOM said:
'Palace' facility. No requirements for what it does.

In a similar vein, Brothel!

More seriously, how about a research lab component that provides extra RPs when placed near an astronomical anomaly like a black hole? That would provide one good use for those systems!

Another would be a diplomatic station (a la Babylon 5) which can provide trade income and (perhaps) small diplomacy/intelligence bonuses with "nearby" AI races.

[se5a]

does the "one per empire" thing work?

[Tnarg]

I would still like to see a "Soylent Green" facility modded in. Turning population into organic resources for those races that like to eat their victims or would rather use their captured victims to help with their new organic ship hull construction.

1.Could only be place on a planet that has more than one type of population.

2.Consumes 1 population per turn and produces 1000 organics
Consumes 5 population per turn and produces 8000 organics

3.Empires that utilize these facilities automatically take angery diplomacy points from all other empires.

[Ed Kolis]

AstralWanderer said:
Another would be a diplomatic station (a la Babylon 5) which can provide trade income and (perhaps) small diplomacy/intelligence bonuses with "nearby" AI races.

Funny you mention that, here's a similar idea I posted a while back at se5.com:
http://www.spaceempires5.com/en-US/node/2684

Should be possible with the next patch now that we have the facility count functions! Has some details that need to be ironed out but it might prove viable at some point...

[Raapys]

Space Monsters!