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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Author Topic: Splitting Production (Hulls/Weapons/Fighters as unique buildings); also delivery  (Read 572 times)

angrytigerp

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So the whole "Heavy Industry", specifically the "Custom Production" part is super cool. Within the bounds of what blueprints you've found, of course, you can make ANYTHING you want to help kit out your personal fleet. Awesome!

... Buuuut, I find it a bit too convenient the way it works right now. As it is, as we all know, you just have a production capacity defined by number of Heavy Industries (and, if I understand it correctly, colony size), you click on whatever you want from a couple vulcan cannons to an Onslaught or two, and presto it appears magically in your chosen 'delivery site'. Cool and all for the ease of use, but not really immersive in my earnest opinion.

First of all, I wonder if it is at all a possibility to divide the three production categories (fighters, weapons, and hulls) into three unique structures? I am a fan of the idea of having a sort of 'classical' space empire where you have planet X that is known throughout the galaxy for its weapons, planet Y for its shipyards, etc. As it is, adding Heavy Industry is pretty much a given on ANY colony I conquer or start, because it just adds to my generic flat cap of production.

I realize the goal is to minimize death by interactive menus, but I wonder if it can't be done to have each of your planets selectable from a list (maybe a scrolling list like the Fitting menu has), and then the main part of the screen populates with applicable tabs? So you can select "Hulls" only if the planet has a "Shipyard" industry; you can only select "Weapons" if the planet has a "Weapons Plant" industry; and "Fighters" if there is a "Small Spacecraft Factory". Then you can have generic "Heavy Industry" as a structure that specifically adds to your Production cap; so if planet X has a Weapons Plant, and can produce $80,000 of goods, and you add a Heavy Industry that adds a 1.5X multiplier or something, you can therefore produce $120,000 worth of weapons a month. Something like that.

As for delivery... I understand that this part's trickier, and it might seem like an unfair RNG penalty if it gets accosted by a Pirate fleet, but it'd be cool if planets either kept manufactured goods on-site; OR if the player ordered a gathering point, they were placed into a convoy of suitable size and for the total value of goods. Obviously, you can very easily shove $80,000 worth of high-cost weapons into an Expanded Cargo Hound or something, but for simplicity's/balance's sake (to avoid the unfairness implied above) just have a gate where <$10k is a collection of small freighter ships capable of carrying the goods ordered (Shuttles and Hounds, etc.) with frigates in the escort force; $10k-$35k is a few destroyer sized cargo vessels with a mix of destroyers and frigates escorting; $35k-$60k is cruiser cargo ships and similar escorts; and $60k-$80k is transported by Atlases et al and escorted by at least one Capital warship and applicable escorts.

Or have it by percentage (to scale with the Heavy Industry upgrade thing I mentioned above). Whatever works. Maybe have fleet size, composition, and quality dictated by the source market's Fleet value.

I can imagine warships being delivered in mothball status with a similar tier-ing of escorts, ditto fighter LPCs.

I just find it too brutally dishonest to the meta that I could, say, establish a colony in literally the corner of the sector, have a few core world colonies that can put down serious production numbers, and at the end of the month... the goods they produced just magically appear in my destination colony. Seems a bit immersion-breaking to me.
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