Do Planets need Cargo facilities?

[Suicide Junkie]

Maybe, you should have to have a spaceport, shipyard, or 'enhanced' cargo facility, in order to put mines and stuff in orbit.

OTOH,
I imagine it would be fairly easy to have fighters with VTOL, but runways are really cheap too. You could use civilian airports, roads or highways as runways for fighters, and not have to worry.

If its got its own engines, it seems reasonable to assume it can take off on its own.

The problem is when the item you're launching dosen't have its own engines. If you launch something from the surface without engines, there are few options.
- Goes up & comes down. Crunch. No good.
- Fling it hard enough that it doesn't come back down. The sat goes off into space, and dosen't stay in the area long. no good
- use a moon to slingshot the object into orbit. Most planets don't have moons in SE. There would also be a good chance of the moon later flinging the object in or out.

[Spyder]

Don't forget Asimov's 'Tethered' space station....a Space Station that is tied to the earth and a massive elevator moves between the two...you could do a lot from there....

[jimbob55]

An alternative to all this realism stuff is to assume that the launch facilities are abstracted into your civilian infrastructure.

The sharing of resources between planets is carried out by a civilian merchant navy that you don't see. The storage of your basic resources is carried out by civilian infrastructure as well. It is only when you want a large surplus storage capability that you have to build storage facilites. There may be hundreds of small shipyards churning out merchant freighters, but they aren't capable of building military ships.

You are in charge of the top level of government which means you play with the millitary and planetary production. Lots of little organisations have to exist to support that infrastructure but they are abstracted into population and happiness.

It may be that making cargo storage a requirement to launch fighters, mines + sats into orbit would help game balance. That's fine with me.

[rdouglass]

I could live with the Cargo Fac a requirement to launch fighters / sats / mines. Right now the way it stands, I don't care much for it - too easy to launch 100 sats and mines per planet (with the current bug IIRC) and defend the planet that way. Build, launch, build, launch, rinse and repeat... Of course, if the AI used 'stuff' the way humans do, we would be on equal ground.

I guess if the bug for max units in space is fixed, that would control it a lot...

[Sinapus]

That also might help explain the millions of people pulled off a planet per turn.

Hm... you know, that complaint about the transport minister sending a transport to a planet, waiting, loading population the next turn, waiting then going on to the nearest planet with <500 million people might just be realistic. It might very well take .3 years to get all those people loaded up onto a ship before you send it off.

I use the transport minister since it seems to be pretty good at spotting planets w/high population and low population. I just manually load/unload the ships usually and check it to keep it from depleting a small world w/1200M people. It's actually a bit faster than manually doing everything since I don't have to search around for a high population world.


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"What do -you- want?" "I'd like to live -just- long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors come with too high a price. I would look up into your lifeless eyes and wave like this..." *waggle* "...can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Morden?"

[Commander G]

quote:

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Originally posted by Spyder:
If so, what for? It seems to me that you are in a constant state of production and those items which you produce are constantly being offloaded onto ships. My planets all have one cargo facility, but, I hardly ever see it used and I believe that the included cargo storage of many of the facilities would be adequate.....?

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Getting back to the original question. If you are playing an email game against other people, cargo is a big consideration for planets. Weapon Platforms take a lot of space 200KT each. They make it very costly for a planet to be taken out by ships. One escort can bomb out an undefended planet. Weapon platforms work really well for defense because they cannot be specifically targeted in the game (some planet hits get applied to them). While satelites can be used instead of weapon platforms, Satelites can be specifically targeted before the planet. While seekers cannot target Satelites, point defense can be used to attack satelites. By the way, when designing a Weapon Platform, be sure to consider changing your Mount size. Weapon Platforms have a special Large Mount for 200Kt (ships must be 400 KT to get a bigger mount) that increases the size and damage of the weapons. It might increase range too. One big weapon applied to one defending component is more likely to take it out on the first shot, a big factor in battles since compents are fully functional until they exceed their damage tunnage.

[Triumvir Emphy]

What could be a more enticing trap than a home world with no number in the top left corner, enemy assumes no ship's, no sat's and no bases. But as sneaky as you are you have built one or two extra storage facilities and have them brimming with fighters and weaps platforms. Now he can assume you have a certain kt worth of defenses, but as most people don't use storage facilities he will be sadly mistaken on the size of your defense.

[Drake]

That sounds somewhat sneaky, and is nice to imagine, but I'd rather not give my opposition a chance to attack a HW planet in the first place. I especially wouldn't waste facility space on a HW, which should be a good resource producing planet for you. If you're overflowing with resource production, go build some more ships and attack his HW instead.

-Drake

[rdouglass]

I agree with Drake. The best defense is always a good offense.....