Arioch wrote:zolobolo wrote:1. Reduce replenishment speed of munition for Tinker Forgery so that rockets are not clearly the best way to go when outfitting Tinker ships.
This is like saying we should remove the Ashdar Colonials' bonus fighters because it makes carriers the best option for them. That's by design. The Tinkers Forge gives them a special bonus for using missiles and fighters. If you don't like using missiles or fighters, you're probably playing the wrong faction.
In case of Ashdars, their fighters cannot fulfill most of the combat roles thanks to some changes to their loadout as they were OP before. They are not effective against PD, starbases, invisible ships, heavy shielded vessels nor ships/fleets with high PD capacity. They are a bonus to the faction in one combat area but absolutely need support from other weapon types and fleet elements which is a good thing
Same goes for stargate, Orthin busbars, Human preference for energy weapons or cloacking device of Gremak: they give the faction advantage in one distinct and quite narrow aspect of combat and thereby leave all other options open.
In case of Thinkers, there is nothing else that makes logical sense to use (even if the tech is aquired for free, it will need to be refitted once better missile tech is available and is usually not woth the time, money and metal)
I do not propose taking away the bonus, but reducing it to a level where other combat options are still viable in comparison. The player (or AI) can still decide to outfit Tinker ships with only missiles if they so desire but their combat efficiency would drop after base munition+2/3 salvos in this case which I find is appopriate given their balls to the wall configuration and even make engagements more interesting when playing with such a stretegy in meand. They would still be able to fire afterwards but with less capacity then before. Currently, the bonus just feels too handfisted: it effectively disables munition counter for Tinker ships which feels too much conssidering that the main emphasis in the game is on ships design (and accompanying tech) and using these ships in combat. In tinkers case: design is fixed in a way and their combat roles as well thereoff
If the player really wants to keep firing with only missiles for over +3 turns as Tinkers, they have the option to invest in additional munition (a tech which is currently fully negated by this bonus)
Arioch wrote:
zolobolo wrote:2. Have space habitats increase max population of the planet they are attached to automatically. This would both reduce Micro and make it more easy for the AI to utilzie this fucntion as all they need to do is attach the station to a planet. Also: If the effect is applied, have the AI buleprints contain habitats sometime
This is a decent suggestion, but the problem is that Tinkers space habitats can move. This leads to some potentially confusing edge cases where it's not clear when population should be automatically loaded or unloaded. I think it's better if the player does it explicitly.
The idea is not not have them load pop at all. By affecting habitability of the planet directly, the above cases do not matter.
The positive affect would be applied the same way consrtuction modules are: if station is deployed to a planet, its affect applies to said planet
If station is then not attached anymore (due to being destroyed or moved away in case of mobile stations), the effect is gone, and the pops start to starve untill they fit into the base habitability capacity
Arioch wrote:
Asteroid Stations replace regular Space Stations; they're not supposed to compete with Starbases. It's true that the extra armor is not very useful on a civilian station, but the advantage of an asteroid station is that they're cheaper than regular space stations.
The cost of building a regular space stations is negligable and thus also the potential benefits of having an asteroid base instead (even if the player runs across a planet with this attribute).
Having an space station above a low-production planet also does not make sense as it does not reduce production time, and the reason for why to have them: the ability to produce larger (and more production costly) ships, means they are even less likely to be build above non-production focused planets. Thus the second benefit is also negated
The tech, art and code is already in the game, but the two benefits this object provides are negated by its role and function - chaing its function would make it a viable component and the tech not sitting in the research queue (unresearched) in each game
