Arioch wrote:Another way to do it is to have additional resource types, such as food and metals, and associated infrastructure (farms and mines), so that you can have specialized agricultural or mining colonies. You can also have special resources, similar to those in Civ III-V, that could make otherwise marginal worlds world putting a small colony on. Food and metal resources could be transportable, but I don't think factory production points are really something that should be transferable. Internal distribution of resources could probably be handled automatically by the trade pool freighters (in a manner similar to MOO2), and foreign trade routes could be something that are manually set up (perhaps being built around the special resources).

These are changes that we plan to make to the strategic model in the future.

So in this model would metals be consumed to create production points, or provide some sort of bonus? I agree that the process should be mostly automated; at most it should be orders to the point 'planet X should export production/metals/whatever, planet y should consume as much as it can'. Or even just anything above immediate need is automatically exported to worlds were demand exceeds local supply. Either way I think some sort of system like this would definitely help.

Special/Strategic resources would also be a good addition, though I'd try to make them less absolute than the Civ series. So rather than 'No missiles without Uranium (or whatever)' maybe it could be 'each Uranium resource reduces the cost of missile weapons by a certain % (up to some limit)'.

-Will

wminsing wrote:So in this model would metals be consumed to create production points, or provide some sort of bonus? I agree that the process should be mostly automated; at most it should be orders to the point 'planet X should export production/metals/whatever, planet y should consume as much as it can'. Or even just anything above immediate need is automatically exported to worlds were demand exceeds local supply. Either way I think some sort of system like this would definitely help.

Special/Strategic resources would also be a good addition, though I'd try to make them less absolute than the Civ series. So rather than 'No missiles without Uranium (or whatever)' maybe it could be 'each Uranium resource reduces the cost of missile weapons by a certain % (up to some limit)'.

There are a number of ways to go about it, and nothing's been decided on yet. I kind of like the idea of having food and metals/ore as generic resources (like production and currency) as well have having some specific special resources. Generic resources would just be part of the normal price tag for a unit (a ship might require a certain amount of metals and a certain currency cost as well as the production cost). If lack of something like metals became too restrictive, then perhaps a shortfall in metals could be made up with extra currency, so that the item becomes more expensive rather than unbuildable. Special resources, on the other hand, might be items for trade or which grant special functions or features... or which could be used to limit extra special units (in a similar manner that Civ uses).

If something like metal was introduced thena soft block would be better like needing extra cash to pay for the missing resources. It would represent getting it on the 'interstellar markets' of sorts or the black markets, or even requisitioning it from the population (money being compensation or who ever needs to get paid to get it done).

I do agree with the idea specialized or specific colony outputs. It is true a lot of games gravitate to planets becoming generalists where the player specialises them at a whim. In MOO 2 in the end game all my planets built everything as my economy could afford it, they all got Gaia formed, and then I would assign the workforce to what was needed; flipping from science to production (and vice-versa) as needed. I always preferred the concept of having dedicated worlds that require effort and time to just flip around (with strong biases towards given roles).