Construction

posted on August 15th, 2009, 5:30 pm

I understand that this might be a little far-fetched, but I hoped it would start some kind of a discussion

Just have a Construction Depot where all construction ship go to after  they finish their build assignment. Kind of like a yard rally point but in reverse. There they recrew and take on supplies.To  have a  automatic Build que type like a  yard would  unbalance  a bit the game I feel. You should have to plann your builds carefully and moniter as well.  With this feature it  would take the burden to  manage  your assets well out of the loop . Although I would welcome the automatic return to your  starbase or designated spot.

The problem, or rather issue, was that the way construction ships currently work is annoying. You send it off to build something, and it does so. But after it finishes it just sits there doing bugger all and is easy to forget about.
One solution was to have a kind of "build list" for construction ships. I assume this would have to work in a similar way to the old "Age of Empires" series where you place "foundations" and the worker unit(s) go around building each in turn.

What I thought would be really interesting though, is something similar to what Pappy mentioned above. The basic idea was to have a central "construction" station that construction ships return to after finishing a job, rather than just becoming sitting ducks (Well, unless you're playing Klingon...). Obviously this would be lovely, but there are some other issues to consider then as well. For instance, if you have a limit of one station how do you stop a construction crew working on an outpost from returning half way across the map and getting killed in the process? If there's more than one, where do the ships "return" to?

I thought that if one is going to go to so much trouble changing how construction works, why not go all the way?
How about just using the facility itself as where you go to construct things? The feature would have to be merged with the Starbase/Outpost you start with, and the facility would have to be able to construct several things simultaneously - but that's okay, we have the Klingon shipyard to work with.

So the steps to building say, a mining outpost I imagine would look something like this:
(Assume you're at the very start of a game, after selecting an avatar)

• Select starbase
• Go to build menu (would probably have to be separate from the ship-building menu that already exists)
• Select structure
• Place "ghost" structure as normal
• Watch as a construction ship leaves the starbase and travels out to fully automatically construct the station
• Watch as said ship completes construction and returns to dock with starbase module

As I wrote that i thought of some other things, such as an "emergency recall" button that cancells construction and perhaps some other very basic controls (could literally just be "stop/go" and the aforementioned "run away"). I reckon beginning with one or two, the "construction modules" would service one construction ship each and add onto the outpost/starbase in a similar fashion to the old A1 crew modules.

This would really bring another realistic element of strategy into the game - construction ships would require escorts via the "guard" function, although before this can happen I'm pretty sure pathing needs to be refined a little. Or is it map-making? Something like how the scouts sometimes get stuck behind asteroid belts, totally unaware that they aren't actually doing any scouting would completely destroy a player's chances of construction.


So... Anyone? Even if it's "please don't write any more excessively long posts"?

EDIT: Right, yes, and I think it might actually be easier to implement a "construction build list" on top of this. Maybe.

posted on August 16th, 2009, 1:41 am

A Set build list would be cool, but you would have to make sure ships stay out of that future construction zone.  Maybe you could set "No fly zones"?  Basically a buildable(temporary) barrier that lasted as long as you set a timer to?  It could work just like the asteroid berriers we already have.

Then we could also have more complicated shuttle traffic. 


Now hers an Idea for a future race, or federation Idea for build lists:

How about a mono-rail type system that you build off of your starbase?  So your construction units crawl on these rails and you build your stations off these rail.  You would have to buy more rail to expand off your current starbase, or you could detach a piece of the rail, and transport that somewhere to build a new base.  Of course you could dock to the rail and repair your ship.  This would allow you to have a build list, where you could assign building projects to different parts of the rail.  You could say that section C is going to be a ship yard, Section B is a turret, and Your construction ship is building a sensor  section A.  To get to Section C it must folow the course and build A and B before it can Go to C.


This could also be changed to noxter terms.  They could grow vines, or tendrels and grow stations off this rather than building it.  You would have a circulation of nourishment(drawn from nebula, or moons) that had to be focused on a specific point on the tendril to make your station(or what have you) Grow.

posted on August 16th, 2009, 11:35 am

I see this getting too complicated in the future...

posted on August 16th, 2009, 9:44 pm

I see this getting too complicated in the future...

But complicated is gooood

posted on August 18th, 2009, 4:45 am

I think that the noxter vines idea is interesting. However maybe to put it into more realistic terms (as the whole vine thing would be extremely hard at best i bet), the following ought to work:
What if the noxter "constructors" have to deploy an "umbilical cord" or something to mining stations either directly or indirectly, then you could build "material depots" that afford a link back to the mining stations within an area (and thus allow building). Connections to more stations increase available resources and thus increase construction speed. It would certainly give a more literal embodiment to the notion of "Supply lines". What do you think?