General Building Ideas

Ideas for improving Starport:GE

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duece
Posts: 2117
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2006 11:39 am

General Building Ideas

Post by duece » Wed Sep 05, 2012 7:47 pm

There are a lot of opinions about what colonies and the building process should be like, but one thing everyone can agree on is that colonies should have variety. Building is funner when it results in a system with colonies of varying functions with their own complimentary strengths and weaknesses, and the combination of possible research discoveries and planet layouts result in a lot of diversity between planets.

The problem is that instead of having a mixture of functions and roles, colonies tend to end up all having the same job and just differ in their overall quality. The most obvious (and convenient) way to address this is by dealing with the unbalance between planet types and the ineffectiveness of most colony special buildings. The point of strengthening weaker planet types isn't to make them more similar to the commonly used types, it's to make them more viable so that their niche values come into play. Not too long ago, the reproduction rates on deserts, volcanics, and greenhouses were increased a lot, that was a very important first step, and now a second round of upgrades is in order with a focus on establishing the niche roles of these types. In most cases, these planet types had these roles at one point, but slowly lost them as a result of the many changes over the years.

So I'll break it down type by type.

Deserts:
- Incorporate the equivalent of commodities market level 3 into every refinery 3 building, the commodities market research would boost its effectiveness. This should apply to every colony, but it would have the most profound impact on desert types.
- Increase refinery storage capacity to 150,000 of each resource.
- Increase metal ore production by 25%.
- Increase spice production by 25%.

Why? There is an expected niche of colonies that are profitable based on selling resources, and deserts are meant to specialize in that role. But because of the unreliability of getting commodities market and it's ineffectiveness at lower levels, people don't plan on using their colonies this way. The increase in refinery capacity improves the convenience of having a colony operate this way, and the boost to spice production would add a further boost to its effectiveness. The ore boost is necessary to improve the military effectiveness of desert types.

Volcanic:
- Increase uranium harvest rate drastically so that it is 1/2 of the equipment harvesting rate.
- Increase anaerobe and oil harvest rate by 10%

Why? Volcanics should reliably have a role as weapons producers, but their poor uranium harvesting is a bottleneck that breaks them. The ana/oil boosts would help their viability without being as dependent on research luck.

Greenhouses:
- Reduce the effect of drag on solar cannon by 25%. This should be done for all planets, but it will affect greenhouses the most.
- Boost the function of ion tower building so that it also allows an extra 15 ground cannons to be placed. (This can be explained as the tower hiding the cannons from UN scanners).
-Increase metal ore production by 15%.

Greenhouses have the ability to go undiscovered when built away from other planets, but because of their inability to do anything it ends up being a 'so what?'. Their theoretical purpose on permas is primarily tied to war strategy but they're so weak militarily they aren't worth bothering with. Greenhouses should offer a way to 'root in' to a territory, which is currently the domain of rocky types. This idea is to strengthen greenhouses militarily in a way that is different from rockies, ideally the best researched greenhouses would be better than the best rockies, but should also have a higher risk of not working out. The 15% increase in ore, and the 15 additional cannons would help get this result, and the reduction in drag to solar cannon would increase its range which is badly needed on greenhouse types (and large planet maps in general).

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