I've come up with an idea for a new mod I'm working on that might make non-combat ships more valuable, but I want to run it by you guys before I start experimenting with it.
Right now the only way to destroy a person's economy is to start glassing planets. The mod I'm working on makes planets much more resistant to ship weapons, and I started thinking that it would be cool to somehow have a player's economy depend also on cargo ships.
It works like this:
- make everything a little more expensive. (not sure how much yet)
- increase cost (and build time) for resource storage facilities
- add resource storage ability to standard population transports (either on the transport hull itself, or on the Cargo Bay component)
- reduce transport hull maintenance costs dramatically
Increasing build costs should make resource storage more important, and having resource storage attached to population transports that cost next to nothing to maintain should encourage a player to build more.
Players will move them around from planet to planet because, if you've got transports anyway, why not use them to move population around and make your planets more efficient?
It also works with the AI because all you have to do is get them to build more population transports.
This might work well with something like the economy of scale mod, where ships can get really expensive. Want to screw up someone's economy? Destroy all their transports so they can't save up resources to build anything.
Logistics/Freighter mod idea
Threaded Mode