Change Rules for Blockades

[dmm]

I would like to see changes in the rules for blockades. What do you all think about the following suggestions?

1) Only functional warships may blockade. A functional warship is any vessel (ship/fighter/drone) with some sort of ship-to-ship attack strategy and capability. Vessels with "Don't get hurt" strategy cannot blockade. Vessels with no movement or no functioning ship-to-ship weapons cannot blockade.

Seems like this should be easy to implement in the code. It's just one small subroutine.

2) Blockades should be "leaky," and the degree of "leakiness" should depend upon several factors, including: the number of enemy functional warships in the planet sector, the number of friendly functional warships in the planet sector, the planet size, the presence of (and maybe even the range of) weapon platforms, the presence of mines and sats, and the domed status. (Domed colonies should be easier to blockade.)

This would be also fairly easy to implement in code. Again, just another subroutine, slightly more complicated than the one for #1.

3) Blockades should isolate the colony. If it doesn't have sufficient resources available (either through on-world production or through leaks in the blockade), then bad things should start happening: construction should halt, facilities should break down, and people should starve (in that order).

A very nice aspect to this is that blockading a border colony that consisted solely of a shipyard would prevent the colony from hurry-producing a ship to break the blockade. On the other hand, you couldn't blockade it forever while you brought up troops from 20 systems away, because the shipyard would break down and the people would starve. Eventually there'd be nothing left to take over. (Although they might riot before that and join you.)

At first this sounds hard to implement in code, since it seems to require keeping separate track of resources available to each blockaded colony. However, there is already a subroutine that checks for insufficient resources on an empire-wide scale and then inflicts damage commensurate with any shortfall. So SEV would just need to do this first with any blockaded colonies, one by one.