This is something I've been thinking about for a while which has something of an
"I wish I could do x...." thing.
Personally, I would really like to be able to create forge worlds of nothing but industry, or huge planetary scale mines etc.
This desire has only been encouraged by the recent changes which saw the Industrial Planning skill lose the ability to reduce resource requirements, and so propel resource availability and density to the top of the colonisation requirements list.
And the worldgen seems to take great delight in creating systems which are 'perfect' except for....
The basis of the premise would be that colonies could be 'specialised' into a particular role by building industries. So nothing vastly different to what we have already.
But, what if you could build multiples of a given industry structure to gain more output of x at the cost of not being able to do anything else?
ScopeSo, which buildings are you allowed to have multiples of?
There are two ways to approach this:
- Producing buildings only
- Resource collection buildings only
Producing buildings are anything that 'produces' an output that counts towards your faction supply of that resource.
Resource collection buildings are anything that converts a planetary resource into a faction supply of that resource.
BalanceLet's start by saying that we are only interested in allowing this for resource buildings.
What would building an extra mine or farm get the player?
I think that a fair starting point would be to have each extra building add +1 of whatever is being produced.
Okay, so what is this costing the player?
The obvious costs would be firstly the industry slot, which can now no longer be used for anything else so long as this 'extra' building is in place. And secondly the construction and maintenance cost of the building itself.
Do we need to do anything else?
At this stage, possibly not. The player can generate extra outputs by creating specialised mining/farming worlds at the cost of losing the flexibility of having a more diverse array of industries.
That seems like a reasonable tradeoff.
What if we want to include all industries?
This would become more complicated, as we're now doubling up on secondary resources which both have an input and output which come from a faction rather than a static resource. ie; taking a primary resource and 'refining' it into another type of resource, thus something the player can manipulate.
Let us say we're happy with the original setup above of +1 output per extra building.
How do we avoid the situation of the player creating resources out of nothing by doubling up 'refining' buildings?
The most obvious way of doing this would be to have each extra building create an additional +1 demand for whatever resources it requires as an input.
That's neat. But how do we handle nanoforges/synchrotrons etc?
There are 2 possible ways of doing this I can think of, and only one of them seems sensible.
The first way would be to have each nanoforge (I'm going to use 'nanoforge' to mean 'any industry boosting item') to apply it's bonus to the industry as normal, which would allow the player to stack outputs and generate quite a lot of output.
Eg:
Let's take a smallish colony with a single heavy industry with an output of 4 supplies. If we add a red nanoforge it become 5 supplies.
If we then build an additional industry we have 6 supplies, and adding another nanoforge results in 7 supplies.
With green forges this number becomes 11!
With this setup, even a single additional industry with forges would propel the player right to the top of the export charts with only a modest colony.
Even with this small colony we can see this is not the way we want to handle this.
A better way of handling forges is to use the 'best' available bonus and apply that to the whole planet
once while ignoring all the others.
This would result in the same planet above with 2 industries giving a maximum output of 8. (4 base +1 from extra building +3 from green forge.)
Okay, that's more sensible.
How would a bigger colony look?
Let's say we now have a base output of 5 and build 2 additional buildings. So that's an output of 7.
With a red forge that becomes 8. And with a green forge 10.
That is not exactly a trivial output and would likley put the player at (or at least near) the top of the list.
We weren't happy with this before, so why should we be now?
The player will have had to grow thier colony an additional step, which is more of an investment of time in 0.9.1 than previously.
Additionally, each industry takes 4 in-game months to build and requires an upfront cost of 0.5M, for a total investment of 1.5M and a no possibility of having the incredibly useful military base.
Is this a fair tradeoff? Possibly.
One potential means of further balancing extra buildings is to have each subsequent building of the same type cost more than the previous one.
Not entirely sure this would be nescessary, but it is worth thinking about.
What can we do with all these nanoforges that are not being used?
One possible idea would be to allow a nanoforge to be installed in every heavy industry, and only count the 'best' one as a bonus toward exortable output as above.
The other forges could then provide a boost to the number of supplies etc. available to the player via the planetary stockpile.
This would give the player a use for (some of) the rather large number of forges which can be recovered via salvaging.
Is this the kind of thing that anyone would be interested in?
