Posted by: QuakeIV
« on: September 12, 2018, 10:11:35 PM »I personally like Steve's concept of just grappling them with cargo shuttles and hauling them aboard. It's far from crazy and seriously punishes unguarded mass driver systems.
If, eventually or immediately, mass drivers are to be replaced with civilian shipping, I would suggest colonies just set a "target mineral level" where civilians will look for colonies with more than their target minerals (ignoring amounts that are insignificant) to deliver to colonies below their target minerals. An amount for infinite should be included for pure destination colonies.If Steve goes this way, there should be both upper and lower bounds, and we try to keep between them. In fact, if the current colonization control is kept, then I'd like to see that there, too. It is quite annoying to set an overpopulated colony as 'source' only to have it switch to 'destination' because the civvies took too much.
drop the minerals off at the nearest populated colony within the system.I must object to this behaviour. The nearest populated colony is pretty much guaranteed to be the wrong destination. Further, unless it considers jump travel, it will fail as mined systems don't always have populated colonies, and if it does, then the nearest colony has a 50% or greater chance of being in the wrong system. Finally, if body motion is turned on, nearest won't even be a consistent location.
drop the minerals off at the nearest populated colony within the system.I must object to this behaviour. The nearest populated colony is pretty much guaranteed to be the wrong destination. Further, unless it considers jump travel, it will fail as mined systems don't always have populated colonies, and if it does, then the nearest colony has a 50% or greater chance of being in the wrong system. Finally, if body motion is turned on, nearest won't even be a consistent location.
Stealing mass driver packets is cool but I don't think gameplay would benefit considerably or that it would even be a smart thing to do in game. If you want to steal an enemies packets you're going to have to go into hostile territory with a freighter and warship protection for maybe 300 tons of minerals every 5 days. And there's the question, if someone is stealing your mineral packets, why not just turn the mass driver off and wait for them to leave? It's what the player would do if a hostile alien was stealing their minerals. Then you have to have the ship continually place itself between the two bodies to steal the packets, does this take fuel? What if the ship isn't fast enough to get between the two planets when they change their position? It opens up continual cans of worms for something that most players (I think) won't use.
TMaekler's suggestion about ship module mass drivers is very interesting, because that would create a some good gameplay decisions. It could be a massive ship module that's meant to be stuck on space stations. Do you set up a more automated empire that uses a lot of mass drivers and requires a lot of space stations but leaves a ton of breadcrumbs for aliens to follow, or do you use less conspicuous freighters instead? A logistics train based on ship based mass drivers would also have the disadvantage of being crippled if a single link is broken. You could even mix them, using ship based mass drivers in a dead end sector and freighters on the frontier.
Maybe just remove MD from the game, replacing the contracts for the delivery of ore for civilian shipping companies ? And to make for them small (1000-2000 tons) cabotage trucks ?