Okay, second try at my engineer post. Steve and I talked about this off-line, and I told him I'd repost, but then I got distracted by work. Go figure.
I?ve been thinking about this area as I began thinking about the plot for a new campaign. It occurred to me that I rarely actually use engineers, and so I set out to try to determine how useful they actually are.
When I analyzed potential uses for the engineers, I realized there were only a couple of situations where it made sense to use them instead of construction factories. If I missed something, anyone, let me know. Basically, I decided engineer divisions (ED?s) were only useful to construct something that can?t be built and shipped from somewhere else, at a location where there are no construction factories. The possibilities I came up with are:
Building PDC?s in locations where no population is possible, like an airless moon or asteroid; or
Building PDC?s on a frontier planet where the population is low and there aren?t going to be any construction factories anytime soon; or
Building Terraforming Installations (TI) on newly discovered planets or new colonies that don?t have factories.
I can?t really think of any other reasonable uses for ED?s, aside from maybe supplementing colonial construction capacity. After all, almost anything else you might want on a colony or outpost, like a Deep Space Tracking Station, can be built at a central point and shipped to the desired location a lot easier than it would be to ship ED?s along with raw materials to the desired location and built whatever it is on site.
Given the above I decided to look at how long it would be for a mid-to-low tech ED to build a PDC or TI. The results were interesting. For a somewhat standard PDC at 16,500 tons with armor and ten large missile launchers, it would take a single ED over one hundred and twenty years to build it. For a stripped down PDC with no armor and single medium sized launcher (a colonial protection unit at 1,050 tons), an ED would take around twelve years to build it. For a TI, the ED would take fifty years.
Now, these times are all for one ED, and in almost any situation a player would deploy more. But even for five or ten ED?s the time is still prohibitive, to the point that I?m not sure anyone is using them. Ten ED?s could build my stripped down PDC in a little over a year, which isn?t too bad, but it is still just one, and it did take ten entire divisions to do it. Ten ED?s would take five years to build a TI, which isn?t totally unreasonable, but again, it would just be the one, and there are better ways to do it, like terraforming ships.
I think this is why I don?t really use ED?s, but admittedly I don?t know what everyone else?s preference is. There is a solution, but it is opening a can of worms and may not be easy to program (I tend to raise issues that create a lot of work for Steve, I see it as a calling <G>). Simply raising the productivity level of the ED?s isn?t a solution as it would conflict with the balance with construction factories. The only solution that would make ED?s viable, IMO, is to create prefab?s. Prefabbed installations would cost the same as regular installations but wouldn?t take as long to build, perhaps 60-75% of the time to build. Prefabbed installations would take the same amount of space to transport as regular installations, but would have to be ?installed? at the destination before they would work. Under this scheme the only unit that could install prefabbed installations would be ED?s. Even active factories couldn?t do it, it would require an ED. The time to install should be enough that it wouldn?t make sense to prefab an installation then install it with an ED and save time over the normal build process.
Really, this is an area that has bugged me for a long time. Currently in Aurora you can pick up and ship a mine or factory or research lab or infrastructure and it is working on day one after it reaches the target. That isn?t really realistic, but I always figured that installation was included in the shipping and loading/offloading time. If prefabbing is included in the game we could change things so that the only installations that can be shipped are those that are already in a prefabbed form, whether they were built that way or converted by ED?s. This would be more realistic, and would make ED?s essential for any expanding power.
Kurt