Designable facilities in SE5!

[Ed Kolis]

I just got to thinking today, how odd it is that in SE4, so much detail goes into the strategy of ship design, while facilities are just built from a list. Doesn't this seem odd, given that facilities are much larger and more complex than starships? Well, I have an idea that *should* be possible in SE5, given what Aaron has told us so far...

You know how in SE5, planetary cargo will be sharing space with facilities? And presumably since we can define our own unit types, all unit types can use all abilities, right?

You see where I'm going here? I'm suggesting replacing all facilities with weapons platforms! Just rename the unit type "weapons platform" to "city" or something in the new Labels.txt and you should be good to go, ready to create WP components that mine minerals, perform research, act as spaceports, and do all the other functions of facilities. Heck, "facilities" per se could be removed entirely from the game and replaced with "planetary developments", a unit type that can encompass cities, facilities, and weapons platforms! The beauty of this is now you could DESIGN YOUR OWN FACILITIES IN-GAME in the same way you design ships, so for instance you could design a "city" facility that contains everything you might want on a planet, and then fill your queue with that facility, and the planet develops rather realistically with minimal effort - and if SE5 lets you refit non-ship units (which I would imagine it does, given that you can define your own unit types), you could REALLY have some fun - you could CUSTOMIZE the "city" levels found in Proportions to suit your particular needs! 8-O

Aaron (or anyone else for that matter), care to comment? See, I do truly live up to my name as the Mod Advisor, don't I?

[Ragnarok-X]

Hey thats indeed a friggin nice idea.

Maybe there should be generel facilites and a tech area where you could choose in which way to develop your generel facility. So could research and enhance them to i.e. create 1000 research points and 100 shield points or maybe 500 research and 500 mineral production

[Gandalf Parker]

Wow what an amazing concept! Ive seen games where you can research tech and then design ships, and design weapons, and design units. But I cant think of any game that has ever let you design facilities.

A home-system facility design which is focused on that purpose for maximum output. A colony Version with less output but a point-defense gun and a shield.

[FLX]

This could mean that you can build some "facilities platforms" in a construction yard, load them into a transport and deploy them into a just created colony... and that's quite strange.

[Lemmy]

Hmm, does this mean we could also cloak planets?

[Fyron]

Lemmy said:
Hmm, does this mean we could also cloak planets?

You can cloak planets in SE4. You have to mod in a cloaking facility, but doing so is quite easy...

[Lemmy]

Wha? Since when?!

I remember talking about it a long time ago, but was told the cloaking ability doesn't work on facilities/planets.

[edit]
I knew i wasn't crazy
ooooold thread
I guess MM added it in a patch then...but still no unclaimed cloaked planets (cloaking without a facility)

[Ed Kolis]

FLX said:
This could mean that you can build some "facilities platforms" in a construction yard, load them into a transport and deploy them into a just created colony... and that's quite strange.

Arcologies anyone?

If you *really* want to prevent that, though, just make them something ridiculously (actually realistically?) huge, like 10,000,000 kilotons - IIRC Aaron said he was going to use signed long integers for everything, so that means EVERYTHING goes up to plus or minus 2 billion!

[Kamog]

This is a wonderful idea.

I kind of like the possibility of loading every facility from a planet onto a big transport and plunking them down on a new planet. It will sure speed up the time it takes to fill up those sphere worlds. [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/icon26.gif[/img]

[Phoenix-D]

Ed Kolis said:
Arcologies anyone?

If you *really* want to prevent that, though, just make them something ridiculously (actually realistically?) huge, like 10,000,000 kilotons - IIRC Aaron said he was going to use signed long integers for everything, so that means EVERYTHING goes up to plus or minus 2 billion!

Does it really matter? I mean we're talking empires that in the late game can blow up and re-build entire planets here, and can build sphere and ring worlds. Making a modular city (to be transported and assembled on site) sounds pretty trivial, and even a completely built one wouldn't be -that- bad.