Yes, just follow the instructions from my previous post, except replace 'player' with 'neutral'. Also, I'm glad to hear that someone actually uses the 'costs supplies' option.
Right, I was wondering if I can set that in the settings JSON so it starts out that way in new campaigns
- The Omnifactory will float around a random star from the list of all generated systems (excluding the player's spawn location). You'll have to hunt it down before you can use it. I'm tempted to make it only appear when you get close to its location.
'Only appear when you get close' is cute in design phase but frustrating and unfun in gameplay phase, generally. It works for 'secret room with weapon behind hidden door' but even that is cheap design cop-out to actually designing clever secrets behind geometry in level where you would not look around, for example.
Secondly, 'random star' is fine in general but finer control will be needed ... restrict to systems with station owned by faction, one of a list of system, specific system, etc, for mods
- The station starts out neutral and non-functional and is only good for item storage at first. You will need crew, supplies, and lots of time to bring it back to an operational state. Once it's repaired it will switch ownership to your faction and you can use the factory functions.
Sounds appropriate in gameplay and lore sense, hard to believe Sector factions would leave a working autofab with reverse-engineering capabilities lying around unused ...
- Produced goods are free, but crew and supplies are required to construct them in the first place. Higher level crew will either work slightly faster, or be more survivable if an industrial accident mechanic makes it in.
Industrial accident mechanic ... I'm generally very against RNG shafting you throughout normal course of play. Chance of that should only be if state of omnifac is not ideal in the first place, ie, not enough crew to supervise safely -> accident chance.
It might be cute to make the crew at the factory require supplies/day, and have accidents if there are none, but that becomes too involved, imo.
- Weapons and ships are no longer automatically produced. Instead you place an order with the factory, and if it has the required supplies it will attempt to create those goods.
So long as I can order 40 railguns at a time
Also, 'attempt'? RNG creep does not fun gameplay mechanics make. If I have enough crew and supplies then it should build it 100% of the time.
- Newly created ships are mothballed and heavily damaged. This represents the Omnifactory's inability to make perfect replicas of a ship (it's not in great shape after sitting abandoned for 200+ years), meaning your crew has to go over new ships with a fine-toothed comb to find and fix any construction errors.
- The Omnifactory will be upgradeable. Basic upgrades will be things like faster production, lower supply costs, less damage to created ships, that sort of thing. There are some other, more interesting upgrades, but they definitely count as feature creep and probably won't make it into the next version. One upgrade I do hope makes it in is remote communication with the Omnifactory, so you can place an order from another system and pick it up later.
'Heavily' is how much though. Many ships cost in the order of 75% as much to fully repair as they do to construct, and up to 25% of hull cost to bring to Veteran CR from mothballed.
If I have to pay twice as much for a ship made at omnifac I and most players will hunt stations instead, yes, because convenience of made-to-order ship is offset by inconvenience of finding initial ship, paying for it, carrying it, acquiring cash/supplies for construction, cash/supplies for repair and CR recovery resulting in net negative in both cost
and convenience.
50% extra cost total? Maybe at the start, unupgraded, but even that's high considering everything else necessary to build and fly combat-ready ship out of there.
Configurable in settings.json, I think, for the different levels, based on % extra cost on top of base hull.