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C# Mechanics / Re: Potential Changes to Shipping Lines
« Last post by Froggiest1982 on Today at 08:45:58 PM »I'm going for the radical idea now, so please just consider it as such. It popped into my mind when Steve started talking about the shipyards.
What if there were a sort of "installation" that determines how much civilian tonnage a race could have? It could be linked to a new planetary installation or an existing one, such as Spaceports.
This could be player-built or "organically" expanded by the colonies, similar to how it's currently done with installations.
I understand it would be hard to code, but it would also imply using population to maintain the civilian sector, as well as resources and building capacity.
That would limit your growth based on:
Available Population
Available Resources
Build Capacity of the Colony
Eventually, a new tech line, similar to wealth expansion for financial centres, could be created to expand the maintenance capacity of the civilian sector, or again, it could tap into the existing tech for military maintenance.
I can foresee all the potential issues, mainly with multiple shipping lines wanting to build a ship as soon as there is room in the maintenance pool, and civilians consuming all our population. However, a similar limitation to the one for colony immigration/emigration might suffice. You could have the civilian sector stabilized or expanded, ensuring that populations are reserved and no new ships or infrastructure are being built.
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13558.msg169730#msg169730
Not unlike my suggestion here.
Oh, okay. So, now that I have elaborated on that and merged it with your thoughts, you were recommending having a sort of Civilian HQ to pop up in suitable colonies with a given Admin level, which is expanded by the Civvies themselves, similar to how they would expand the mining complexes, right?
I can see the similarities now. However, I think if we go down this path, we will have to cap the number of companies that can be formed on any given colony, which I thought wasn't something many wanted to pursue. There will also be a problem related to the snowball effect, since even CMC can virtually expand endlessly.
I would say though, that it's intriguing and I can see the value in that, both in flavor and actual implementation, since the CMC already exist and might require only tuning the spawn rules.