Third Party Station

posted on March 12th, 2012, 2:12 am

This is reminiscent of Birth of Federation where you had minor races, and would probably fit into a minor race feature request.

I was thinking a station that served as a diplomatic trade site. The station is heavily heavily armed, and does catastrophic damage quickly. However, it is destroyable. Therefore, better to do business then attack it. It cannot be captured.

The station is always AI operated.

Essentially, every faction will have three 'actions' which will be selectable by buttons, to do trade with this station.

One option will grant you resources, another might give you a nifty technological special gained through an exchange of information, and maybe an 'other category'. Unsure.

The trade will require you to select a button 'begin trade negotiations'. Depending on which of the three choices you pick, the 'trade negotiations' will take a corresponding amount of time. The trade negotiations might 'fail' or be successful. So, we pick which of the three options has a 80% success rate, to 50% to 20%. (If they fail, you can just select the button again.

Questionable what the trade does on your part. Perhaps for the technology, every 'attempt' costs a very small amount, and if successful, a small amount of supply is added in. I would say supply is best. Maybe 10 supply, 20, and 30 or something.

From here, I think it also good to say that only a scout can negotiate with the station. The station will attack anything other than scouts, construction ships or miners. All other destroyers, cruisers, or battleships will be destroyed.

Or for the three actions, perhaps they are all different specials. No resources. Not sure.

This could be setup in the pre game settings maybe? Where you select whether this station will be present. Or perhaps we create a couple maps specifically designed to include this station.

um, yeah pretty early stages of an idea. but this way, we could really get ideas going for other specials. The specials could be a way of getting factions to get tricks they wouldn't normally use. We could copy the specials for every faction, or give different factions different specials/trades. I.e. federation might approach the station with certain requests, where as Klingons would want other technologies. Feds might want shield boosters whereas Klingons want big guns.

Borg don't trade. Perhaps we can give one borg option. The station doesn't shoot at the borg scout. The scout gains a scanning device that gives the borg some equivalent of a special in adaptation. Making it stronger against something this that or the other thing.