Some more random suggestion I had:
1) Track fuel expendiatures. Unless I memorize the numbers, I don't have any indication of whether I'm gaining or losing fuel overall from my stockpiles. Would be nice if you had a little indicator like with wealth so at a glance I could compare it to last year's fuel levels.
2) Some sort of screen that shows what upcoming "events" are. For example, "planned" production end points, shipyard modifications, research projects.
I'm envisioning something like the events list but for the future:
Current Date +5:
1 Construction Factory produced.
Freighter 001 produced.
Current Date +20:
Joe Schmoe's Research Project Completes
Current Date +160:
Shipyard 001 completes new slipway.
Basically this would REALLY come in handy when you're trying to decide how much time to speed ahead. I hate advancing 30 days only to realize that my research project completed after the first 5 days and just sat idle for the remaining 25. Plus it'd be a great way to see in one place the timing of certain events.
3) Graphs & Other excel fun
Would be nice to be able to pull up historical trend graphs. You can somewhat do that now with Wealth but it would be nice to see things like:
Population levels over the past Month/Year/5 Years/10 Years
Mineral Stockpiles over the past 5 Days/30 Days/6 Months/Year/5 Years/10 Years
Fuel Stockpiles
Industrial Capacity (would be nice to identify periods of dips in productivity due to population/mineral/wealth
Wealth Trends
Now I know a lot of this information is linear and on a short view can be extrapolated, but it'd be nice to see whether things like moving to a bunch of colonies improved wealth overall or be able to track mining rate vs. industrial rate to determine if you will need more mines to maintain your growing industry or if you can afford to spare some for distant mining colonies.
One thing that I'd LOVE to know and can't really figure out (without sitting down and actually taking notes every hour increment) would be whether my mining colonies are doing a good enoug job supporting my industrial capital. Sometimes they maintain a constant mineral supply, sometimes I get spammed by Mineral Shortage. I'd like to know if it's more efficient to ship my mines to a richer planet and mass drive them home OR to just keep them at home and thus eliminate transit time of mass driving.
4) Biological Weapons, Plagues, and Medicine
This would be a pretty big implement, me thinks, but it'd be interesting and challenging to encounter situations where disease (from natural events or weapons) is ravaging your colony so you have to start producing medical supplies and building medical facilities to counter the disease/toxin.
For the purposes of writing, I will use the term "disease" to represent toxins, bacteria, virii, and other biological weapons.
Medical Facility would be a "factory" with it's own worker type (Medical Personnel) that could produce generic medicines or specialized products.
General Medicine would be a product that would slowly be consumed by colonies (I'm thinking at a rate of one unit per Million per month). Now it's assumed that medical supplies are produced on the back end so for established colonies (i.e. >25 mil) it's not very necessary. The generic medicine would provide a small boost to growth rate based on Medicine Tech level and % of population supplied. So let's say 5 tech levels that add +5, +10%, +15%, +20%, +25% to growth rates, and this would be reduced accordingly by not having adequate supplies. So if only 1/2 the population is supplied with level 4 medicine, the total bonus is only +10%. Finally, medical facilities would be able to instantly identify a disease hitting your population/ships/GU.
Generic medicine would just cost wealth to produce as organic matters etc. aren't really tracked.
When a disease is encountered, it would trigger a research topic (probably the new Biological/Genetics area) that would let you research a vaccine/antibiotic/antidote (abstracted into generic name "cure") in your medical faciliteis. These diseases would be tracked, so if your colony is hit with Space Measels but you cure it, you might want to have a stockpile on hand if/when it resurges.
I'm thinking chances of disease outbreaks would be dependent on infrastructure & population levels (overcrowding would greatly increase the chances of a plague), morale (unhappy workers aren't cleaning themselves properly). If possible, would also like infection to be a part of planetary gen, so some worlds are just prone to producing dangerous living conditions.
Generic Medicine would also be consumed by ground units during combat, and being supplied with extra medical supplies could add a bonus to defense as they can treat wounds better and send injured combatants back into the fray faster. This would be a minor bonus, but hey, every little bit helps!
As an alternative to having to track another resource, Medical Facilities could just support X population (based on tech level). For disease identification, it'd be 100% if everyone is covered, 50% if only 50% population is covered etc.This would be a monthly check, so if you're not fully covered a disease has time to spread a bit before being detected.
On that note, having a medical bay on ships would allow them to function in place of medical supplies. So for example, a single medical bay could represent 10 units of "medicine" a month. This could be applied to both planets or for ground troops. Like medical facilities, they would instantly identify any disease encountered by the crew or any GU/civilians transported on board.
Finally, biological weapons. Once a disease is encountered (or researched as part of the medicine track) it could be loaded into a missile warhead and used in combat. I'm thinking 3 seperate strategies could be used for various biological weapons:
1) Anti-Ship Biological Missile- designed to punch through ships and spread disease. This would damage enemy crew severely while only minimally damaging the enemy ship. Several strategies, for example using this to destroy the crew combined with boarding strategies could make capturing ships much easier (as long as you don't accidentally kill off your own troops with your own disease. Medbays could count towards resistance on both ends).
2) Planetary Dispersal - targets population centers and hits against their growth rate and damage their infastructure. Imagine sending in a cloaked ship to launch a deadly disease into their capital and sneak away as a precursor to starting a war. When war starts the NPR can't mobilize and churn out the ships as it's too busy trying to keep it's people alive on the planet.
3) Ground Combat - used to damage enemy troops.Very low chance of spreading to population.
Now, this is just one suggestion for breakdown. Another idea would be to just have a single "biological warhead" and build a missile around it. So putting one in a ship-to-ship missile would make it
So, I've illustrated how you could stop a disease from killing your own people and how to use it to destroy your opponents, but what is a disease? I'm thinking they would have stats. Random stats generated on game start ups OR you can engineer your own stats as a design project. I'm thinking:
1) Spread Type: Contact or Airborne. Contact are cheaper, and easier to quarantine. Airborne are more dangerous, harder to quarantine, and much higher spread rate. This works both for and against you. So contact warheads (i.e. it has a liquid that has the disease inside and splashes on the enemy) would only hit the effect area, but then when your troops march in you don't have to worry about spreading it back to your own guys. Airborne would devesate enemy troops/crews/populations but there's a risk that when you march in, you can get your own people infected.
2) Spread Rate: How fast does it "grow." Some abstraction is needed so this is a cumulative effect. A highly infectious disease that kills very quickly (like Ebola) would actually have a very low "growth" rate as those infected would have less chance to spread. Anyway, by their nature, toxins would generally have the lowest spread rate while virii would have the highest (due to the mutations). Now, you could engineer a toxin that spreads faster then a virii based on how your research progresses, but assuming equal tech levels, it would go toxin < bacteria < virus.
This would ALSO dictate the chances of spreading it between colonies. Any ship that lands at a planet infected would have a certain percentage based on the spread rate of picking it up and transporting it to another colony. Airborne elements would get a huge bonus to their spreadrate across sectors. So while a contact toxin might only have a 5% chance of being picked up by a passing ship, an airborne one might have a 50% chance.
Spread Rate would be an estimate as actual rate of spread would depend on variables like target infastructure/lifesupport/medical facilities/overcrowding etc. For a simple approach, it's fine having it linear (i.e. infects 5% of population a month.) But for more advanced it would be interesting to see both an exponential growth and a cap on infection (i.e. at most only 40% could become infected).
3) Impact: I'm thinking 3 things should be impacted by infection: Population Levels (i.e. how many people die from it), Productivity Levels (if everyone's out with the flu, they can't build your warships), and Morale. These should be cumulutive effects, so a "Death" virus would also impact Productivity and Morale.
So again, 3 "kinds" of impact:
Morale - weakest type. Basically it just makes people miserable. Could be useful depending on what morale impacts.
Morale & Productivity - medium level. Dibilitating but not very dangerous. Would lower factory productivity, crew & GU reaction time.
Morale, Productivity, and Death - most dangerous - would kill people.
This should be staged accordingly. So a death virus would kill 5%, reduce productivity 10%, and morale 20% (arbitrary numbers, I know it would be super powerful this way) . So Morale impact would be x2 productivity impact which is x2 death rate. As a balancing point, the more dangerous a disease is, the lower it's spread rate.
4) Type: Toxin/Bacteria/Virus - toxins would be the "safest" to use as they would have no variables really, just potency. Bacteria would be the middle ground and viruses would be the most "dangerous" to use as their stats have the highest chance of "mutation" (i.e. altering their effect).
5) Strains - this would be both in the player's hands and the AI. The player could alter diseases similar to ships, but bacteria on a low chance and virii on a high chance could "create" strains during their infections.
So you might have though you released a contact, low-spreading morale virus to destablize enemy ground troops a little before a big fight, but when your troops land suddenly they're encountering a deadly airborne beast! Your medical "database' would register it as a new strain and you'd need to start researching a cure for it.
Finally, you'd be able to quarantine planets to prevent AI ships from spreading disease. This could also be used to prevent AI ships from going to a colony that is in a dangerous situation. Even if not quarantined, if the disease outbreak is known to the empire (i.e. medical facility ID'd it) then it would factor into the AI's "danger rating."
So, that was a huge text bomb so here's the summary:
New Element: Disease - subdivided up into toxins, bacteria, or virii. For the purposes of this idea, all three will be referred to as "disease", even if it's a toxin like mustard gas.
New Installation: Medical Facility - would either operate like a factory to produce cures and generic medicine OR would just "support" X population, like infastructure does. Would also be used to identify diseases. Until a medical facility encounters a disease, the infection will be unknown to everyone but an observant player.
New Population Type: Medical Personnel - would work in medical facilities. Overall would probably be a pretty small part of the population but should be tracked none-the-less.
New Ship Component: Medical Bay - ship/base mounted medical facility.
New Missile Warhead: Biological Warhead - allows you to launch "diseases" against ships, GU, or planets. The missile would be built using current methods, but a biological warhead would also allow you to select a "payload" from a list of researched disease. Based on the warhead size it would factor into the payload's growth rate, so small missiles would be useful against crews & GU as they'd damage the target but have a low chance of starting a plague, or you could create massive planetary bombs that would infect millions of people at once.
New Research: [Disease] Cure - when a disease is encountered, a research path would be generated. Researching a new disease would be based upon the complexity of the target (weak, contact, slow spreading, toxins would be "low" complex items while deadly, airborn, fast spreading, virii would be "high" complex items). Once a disease cure is research the population gains resistance based on either medical facility support or production of cures. Researching strains would be 1/10th the cost of the initial disease.
New Research: Biological Weapon Engineering - this would actually contain a cluster of projects (similar to cloak theory or jump point theory). You can research:
-Toxic Biological Weapons
-Bacterial Biological Weapons
-Viral Biological Weapons
-Contact Dispersal
-Airborne Dispersal
-Mutation Control (starts out with high chance of mutation and you can research this to lower it by 5% increments)
-Morale Impact (starts low, gains by a linear amount each level)
-Productivity Impact (same as morale)
-Deadly Impact (same as morale)
-Growth Rate (starts out very small and goes up)
New Design: Biological Weapon - drop downs would allow you to select: (note I'm using arbitrary numbers for now to illustrate the various impacts)
Type: (Toxin/Bacteria/Virus)
Dispersal: (Airborne/Contact)
Mutation Rate: (x0.9, x0.85, x0.5 etc.)
Morale Impact: (x1.1, x1.2, x1.3, etc.)
Productivity Impact: (x0, x1.05, x1.1, x1.15 etc.)
Deadly Impact (x0, x1.025, x1.05, x1.075 etc.)
Growth Rate (x1.1, x1.25, x1.5 etc.)
And that would give you the disease stats. I'm thinking that Toxin/Bacteria/Virus would all start with basic stats:
Toxin:
Morale Impact: -5% annual from target
Productivity: -2.5% annual from target
Deadly: -1.25% annual population
Growth: 0% growth
Mutation Rate: 0% growth
Bacteria:
Morale Impact: -10% annual from target
Productivity: -5% annual from target
Deadly: -2.5% annual population
Growth: +5% growth
Mutation Rate: 5% per year
Virus:
Morale Impact: -5% annual from target
Productivity: -2.5% annual from target
Deadly: -1.25% annual population
Growth: +20% growth
Mutation Rate: 20% chance
Airborne and Contact would alter things accordingly. I think Contact would be "no change" whil Airborne would add x1.5 to both mutation and growth rate. So an airborne virus would have a 30% growth and mutation rate.
By default, until you research into productivity and deadly, the x0 would zero out the impacts on those two things, so a low-tech disease would make people miserable but not kill them. Not saying it's more difficult to make a non-lethal disease then a lethal one, but for both game balance purposes as well as the understanding that it's easier to research non-lethal diseases because you don't risk your staff dying from infection
. As for toxins, at least as a low-tech their growth rate and mutation rate would be 0% as it's a stable element and won't "spread". I'm thinking that radiation damage from missiles could also be tracked like this.
As a potential growth, perhaps nanomachines could be researched that would still have a 0% mutation rate but a higher growth rate. But that's getting a bit far ahead.
New Event: Outbreak - random chance with modifiers for a disease to hit a colony. Variables that would influence it would be overcrowding, low medical:population ratio, lack of medical supplies, hostile environment would increase chances while the opposite would decrease chances. So although RNG is involved, it's still preventable.
If an outbreak occurs, it would not be indicated on the map nor the player notified until either a medical facility detects infected population (% chance based on population coverage) or a ship with a medical bay "docks" there and interacts with the population. Could provide a bit of a challenge if an infection spreads subtley for the player to try and find the origin of the outbreak.
New Action: Quarantine - infected colonies could be quarantined with a check mark on the Economics screen to prevent AI ships from landing there. This could also be used by the player to control AI access to colonies. As player can choose to ignore quarantine or not, if you don't want the AI going to a colony for whatever reason, you can "quarantine it". A quarantined colony should have some sort of indication on the system map (perhaps the "blue ring" is surrounded by another red ring.
New Notes: Infected - basically anywhere that lists crew, population, or GU would need an indicator to show that the unit is infected. Perhaps a % could be combined so you can see just how bad it is. Low % of infection has a lower chance of spreading, after all.
Anyway, that's all I have for this for now. Hope it helps!
