Freighter Network

[Magnum357]

I'm working on a personal mode of mine and I was wondering if anyone out there has made a robust Freighter Network for any modes for SE4? Ya, I know you can easily just place a ship over a planet and its bloakaded, but I was hoping to make some sort of feature that would allow you to make a Fleet of Cargo/Transport ships for your empire and have to move them from plnet to planet in order to create resources for your empire. If this can be done, it would keep your Empire size somewhat limited to the size of your Freighter Network and would give more incentive for small Police ships to guard against other empires rading them or if you have Priates in your mode. Granted, this would probably be impossible for the AI to use correctly, but would be a neat feature for multiplayer.

Any ideas on how this could be done?

[Urendi Maleldil]

You could mod-in remote resource generation into the freighter hulls. That way they'll generate resources for every uninhabited planet they orbit. Or you can add resource point generation to each hull. That would make them generate resources all the time.

It's not exactly what you describe, but I think it gets a similar idea across. As far as I know, there's no way to make ships gather a fixed number of resources while in orbit around an inhabited planet.

[Suicide Junkie]

The main problem is that they don't have to be moving, and can just sit in a 1000-ship stack over your homeworld.

You could make some satellites with the fixed resource generation abilities.
Then if you limit satellites to just 1 per sector, you'd have to spread them around nicely to get the income.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

That's an idea.

[Magnum357]

I'm a little confused. Would these Satilites harvest/mine resources out of a planet or would they just spit out resources wherever they are placed? Also, how would the Freighters be used in all this? How would they get the resouces from these "Satilites" or whatever you want to call them so that the Empire could use it? One of the points I wanted to use about making a Freighter Network was that you have to send Freighters to places to get the Resources and able to have them get attacked by someone.

Or maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way. Is SJ saying the Satilites ARE the freighters and they are placed over certain sectors to produce resources?

[Magnum357]

How about this idea. Create a component that is able to harvest resources from a planet or astroid cluster, but is destroyed after use. Only Freighters would be allowed to use the component and would have to return to the ship yard to get the component repaired so that it can go harvest again. Now the question is can your script in a way to get the component after one turn to destroy itself after it pulled the resources you wanted.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

"Destroyed After Use" only works with components with abilities that can be activated (eg Stellar Manipulation, Emergency Movement and such). It won't work on remote resource generators.

Satellites are a hull type; small immobile pods that you can deploy in space. You can fit weapons onto them and use them as defense, or sensors or remote resource generators and use them for civilian purposes.

There is no way in hell you'll ever going to get a freighter network to work without having to use more workarounds than is really warranted.

(Oh, and btw, you can edit your posts so you don't have to post again if you want to say something after you've posted)

[geoschmo]

You could make the freigter hull generate resources as was posted earlier, and then just make it a rule for your players that they must make the friegthers actually move around. There is no way to force them to move them in the game mechanics, But it would be fairly easy to verify. If you warp into an opponents system and he's got hundreds of freighters sitting around he's basically busted.

Get a group of players to buy into the idea and it could be quite cool actually.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

"Yarr! Life as a pirate be good these days, now that thar-them freighters actually carry resources! Yarr!"

[Puke]

this would be a pretty heavy game change (and its not a totally original idea), but how about this:

planets generate a minimal ammount of resources. to get more resources for your empire, you have to recycle ships. recycling will give you more resources than the original construction cost.

Freighters could be of three types - an all organic hull, an all mineral hull, or an all radioactive hull. It would have to have built in movement, and such. colony worlds could have "freighter construction" spaceyards that are good for constructing nothing but freighters.

The reason you recycle them at your homeworld instead of where they were built, is that your homeworld starts with a recycling faciltiy that gives a significant bonus to recycling income. It may not be proffitable to recycle the ships without this bonus.

The reason that you would want to build a limited freighter spaceyard instead of a general purpose spaceyard, is that freighters would take a year to build at a regular yard - but a freighter yard would have 10x the build rate. due to the high cost, freighters would have to have no maintenance.

also, the high cost (and relative short build time) of a freighter is a reason that you build and recycle them, instead of just building and recycling regualar ships (which would also be good for combat, or whatever).

cheers