City Sites:
So this idea is based on my desire (that I have for nearly every 4x game) to have some goal or function besides just building the biggest/baddest warships by expanding as fast as possible and killing/conquering everything I see. Right now that is really the only game play goal based on actual game functions, all others goals are basically just player imagination RP currently.
In an effort to bring more in game RPG flavor as well as relevance to planetary management besides strip mining and facility stacking I am proposing that planets have dedicated and separate city sites. These can act as cities as the name implies but can also serve as any other geographic division as the player sees fit to name them (continents, countries, hemispheres, etc.). Similar things have been attempted in games like GALCIV, but they were generally just cosmetic.
Some thoughts
- A city site is a separate and distinct location on a planet in which population, facilities, ground units, and PDCs are actually located.
- The number of city sites is dictated by population, a new one being available for every 250 million people (this value could be anything and should be modable in game setup), with every colony having one by default (undestroyable). You have to physically build a new city site via construction factories before it is available to you once the population level allows for it. Once it is built is available even if the population justifying its normal construction declines, but you can’t build more if the allowed by population value is equal or less than the currently present value.
- Facilities will be divided into two classes, site specific and global. Pretty much all current facilities will become site specific and located in a specific city site. The new class of global facilities will include things like “planetary transport network,” “planetary power grid,” “planetary weather control” that provide planet wide values and can be built to a level corresponding to the number of city sites. Their values can be improved by research.
- Each city site has can have population, facilities and ground units transferred between them freely at a speed relative to the global transport value (or instantaneously, this could create a lot of micro management). PDCs remain permanent to the city site they were build/assembled in similar to the current game and bodies.
- There will be a population limit to each city site after which there is a moral hit. This limit can be raised via a research option such as “urban planning and management” or some such. This also provides an overcrowding mechanism where you need to spend time to build new city sites or push for more colonists to head for the stars.
- To make the allocation of facilities between city sites meaningful in a gameplay sense there will be a bonus for concentrations of various classes of facilities in a single site. Every 100 construction factories gets a 5% bonus to construction points for example. The city site population limit will avoid abuse of this mechanic.
- Certain things like shipyard construction and the like will still utilize the total of whatever the planet wide values are for population for instance (it will take a certain number of city site workers available off the top of every site). Some other things, like the planetary construction facility queue, will be limited to simultaneous projects equal to the city sites with construction factories (maybe each site should have its own construction queue instead of the planet itself?).
- Along the vein of making planetary management a goal of gameplay in and of itself, I propose the introduction of values such as education, health, culture and others. These will have facilities that correspond to each and have effects on gameplay such as your planetary education value having a positive or negative correlation to academy performance. Or an uneducated workforce meaning you can’t produce certain kinds of components on that planet. Or they can simply be values used for RP only. The corresponding facilities could either be global or city site in scale, so you could have varying values of education between different city sites (this is probably too much micromanagement).
Intended game effects
- For RP purposes you can now have named functional cities on a planet. Or if you fancy yourself a federation of earth nations individual countries under one player’s control.
- If you don’t like using your population as cover you can leave a site empty and put your PDC’s there, naming it “Global Defense Region 1” for instance.
- We could have the density of city cites linked to ecology (based on my biosphere ayatem) so that having every city site packed solid has a stiff penalty on planetary health and moral. Having completely empty city sites act as nature reserves and have a large positive bonus to biosphere health (think “Antarctic Planetary Reserve” or “Olympus Mons Geopreserve” or “Europa Glacial Conservatory”)
- For more RP fun combined with my proposed academy mechanic, you could now have Star Fleet Academy in San Francisco or Cambridge in the UK, or both at the same time (assuming academies are site specific facilities).
- When engaging in planetary combat you will have to target individual city sites, which means you can vaporize the city with the fighter factories but leave the one with the construction factories intact. You can’t just launch an alpha strike of doom against a planet, as at one point the targeted city site is destroyed and all further missile hits are just hitting a crater (though the hits still effect planet wide enviromentals.)
- When a city site is destroyed, so is everything in it. Durability of city sites would be a research improved thing, and their repair would be take place over time based on certain planetary values, not player control (ie your populous rebuilds after a devastating war house by house). If your city site barely survives one strike you could attempt to start relocating population and facilities to another better defended intact one before the next strike hits. Will your refugees make it in time (one reason not to have transfers instantaneous)?
- For ground combat purposes each city site acts as a sort of auto PDC in that it can accommodate a certain number of ground units automatically and gives a defense bonus simulating using the city itself as a bunker (you can have more units at a site, but not with the bunker effect). You can decide to fight in the cities or in the field using a dedicated unpopulated city site, with the corresponding damage to the city if you decide to locate yourself there. Population 0 city sites will not have the bunker effect, so a listening post PDC on an asteroid can still have ground units present as it is a “colony” but won’t be cheating.
- Missiles can only target city sites, not individual ground units or PDCs. Beam weapons can target anything (with their atmosphere penatly of course). This will mean that while you can glass a planets cities at range, if you want to actually take over the planet intact you need to close to beam range to hit actual PDCs and ground units and then invade. This will make planetary defenses of valuable planets more effective as if you are closing to beam range you are going to have to engage said defenses.
Again, my overall goal with this is to enhance the planetary/colonization management part of game instead of limiting it to the generally space military focus it and other 4x games have. Planets would not be just warship factories. At its heart this is sort of like treating each planet like a little system with its own planets, but I think we can preserve the planetary flavor and add gameplay depth in a new layer without just repeating the current layer. Micromanagement is always a problem, especially with Aurora, so let me know have to streamline it!
