BTW, with the new research rules, I haven't had any motivation to move research labs off Earth to the colonies - I can work on multiple projects while keeping them at home.
I have been thinking about that too. Not sure who gave me the idea but I am thinking about having certain astrographic locations that benefit research. A planet very close to a star, or the moon of a gas giant with a strong magnetic field, or a nebula system, or a very cold planet, etc. I need to give this some more thought but it would be cool to have research colonies in some weird and wonderful locations. It would also be better if different locations had benefits to different types of research.
Steve
Another thought along these lines when I saw Elmo's post about specialization: Agriculture. Do you want to put food supplies into the game?
[stream of conciousness]
On the one hand, it would be lots of micromanagement to require the player to build "Farms" (the equivalent of mines or industrial installations), and then need to ship food between planets in the same way minerals are shipped. This would argue in favor of managing it as part of the civilian sector: the civilians would manage creating farms and growing food. This is actually how it's modeled right now - there's even a special slot in the worker allocations called "agriculture and environment".
A side comment: the first thing I thought of when I read the question about specialization was "Colonies already specialize - they have different levels of the the various trade goods, and civie ships move trade goods from worlds with surpluses to worlds with deficits".
So the lowest level step would be to simply make food YATG (Yet Another Trade Good). I don't like this though, since the various trade goods don't have any "flavor" to them at present - unlike minerals, "plastics" and "civilian transport" are identical in game terms. Plus, there's no way to make colonization decisions based on the types of trade goods that will be produced - you only find out trade good levels after the population grows big enough.
How about food an intermediate level trade good (i.e. closer to behaving like minerals): a world has a "food production efficiency" (similar to colonization cost) which can be found out either when the world is discovered or at the time of geo survey. Like colonization cost, it can be improved by terraforming. This would introduce the concepts of "barren" and "breadbasket" worlds. Food itself should probably be managed as a trade good - shipped by civie contracts (although perhaps shipping my player-owned cargo ships would be allowed too). Population growth on a world would by negatively affected by the ratio of food supply to food demand; if there were enough of a deficit then population would shrink and/or unrest would go up. You could also introduce "orbital" (or ground-based) farms (similar to financial installations) as well which would boost food production on a world by a fixed amount (inflated or deflated by the production efficiency, of course).
A really interesting thought would be to decrease food production efficiency as the population density on a planet goes up. So a high-population homeworld would be in danger of starvation and high unrest due to food shortages, and there would be an incentive to colonize/farm breadbasket worlds.
It seems like this sort of idea sets up food as an independent scarce resource in parallel with minerals, with all the tradeoffs and shortages (i.e. reasons for races to fight over territory) that you're trying to set up in Aurora, but as basically lying in the civilian sector. It would also give a reason for planets to go into uncontrollable rebellion based on food shortages.
Hmmm typing the "civilian sector" stuff just now got me thinking about the civies setting up "civilian farm complexes" on habitable worlds....
[/stream of conciousness]
What do you think?
John
