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Author Topic: Colony Specialisation via Industries  (Read 3284 times)

Serenitis

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Colony Specialisation via Industries
« on: June 22, 2019, 03:30:24 AM »

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....  ;D

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?

Scope
So, 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.

Balance
Let'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?
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Megas

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Re: Colony Specialisation via Industries
« Reply #1 on: June 22, 2019, 06:23:32 AM »

Losing old Industrial Planning 1 was a bummer.  Not only that, fuel production has higher demand than before, which means you practically need a gas giant or cyrovolcanic world for enough volatiles (+1 with Industrial Planning 2).

If +1 to production means 10x more stuff produced (in terms of lore), not sure if doubling or tripling the industries would help for meeting demand.  Something like 10^2 + 10^2 is still in the 10^2 range.

Player can already have big industry world with Light Industry, Heavy Industry, and maybe Refining, plus obligatory Military Base tax to protect the world from expeditions.

For upgrade items like more forges, I bet they would raise Pather interest.  If that is not a deterrent, then there are currently alpha cores to boost production even higher.

For resource collection building, I can see that raising the maximum limits stockpiled.  Do not see what good it does when you do not need much yourself, and you have waystation to stockpile the things you really need.

However, it would be nice to have a waystation upgrade that stockpiles all of the non-local commodities instead of only supplies, fuel, and crew so I do not need to hunt down every commodity to haul then store for all of my colonies to avert shortages.
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Alex

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Re: Colony Specialisation via Industries
« Reply #2 on: June 22, 2019, 09:08:44 AM »

Spoiler
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....  ;D

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?

Scope
So, 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.

Balance
Let'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?
[close]

Hmm, this was an interesting read. I like the overall idea of specialization; the industry slot limit intentionally leans things in that direction, and what you're suggesting would further emphasize that.

A thought occurs: it seems like it'd be easier all-around to add one or two upgraded versions of Mining and Farming, which would cost an extra industry slot. Then the maintenance and production could be fine-tuned per industry rather than having some general rule (which would also need to be explained), and this steps around all the "what to do about nanoforges etc" issues.

And possibly add Refining to this as well, and Orbital Works could take up a second slot, too. And Light Industry, hmm. Interestingly enough, Patrol HQ -> Military Base is an existing example of "an upgraded industry costs one more slot than it did prior to the upgrade.

The question is, what would make the upgrade worth it? Is, say, just +2 Mining output good enough to make up for not having Light Industry or something else that would bring in income without diminishing returns you're running into by upgrading Mining? I guess there has to be a sweet spot somewhere. Doubling production is clearly too much, since even a small increase gives you more self-sufficiency - i.e. your Mining with +2 produces enough to fully support your Refining, etc.

But how would the player figure out what's better? This seems like it could, at least a times, become just a math problem. I.E. "what's overall best for income, upgrading Mining or adding Light Industry"? That seems like it'd be annoying to figure out, especially since it potentially involves cascading upkeep changes in all your colonies. Currently, it's not as much of an issue - you can usually know which industries are a better fit for a given planet just based on its conditions and hazard rating.

Going back to (and contradicting) what I said earlier, one way around this might indeed be giving such a bonus to production that upgrading an industry is *clearly* better, income-wise. Be kind of weird have say 20 ore production, though... I'm not even sure how well the UI would handle displaying that much.

Thoughts/ideas? Not committed on any of this, obviously, but I like the general idea and it's interesting to think through.
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Recklessimpulse

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Re: Colony Specialisation via Industries
« Reply #3 on: June 22, 2019, 09:33:40 AM »

Eh I think where on the resources - or  + scale could answer that question. If you have a Lava world where transplutonics and metals are just laying around to grab (+3) to both it should be worth it to upgrade keep up with demand from worlds that actually grow if say you want to play nice with the Luds and Hegemony and not use free port or Alphas at least that's how I'd value specialization over another industry.

It takes some work to get a 250% hazard rating world to grow and even then not at the rate of a nicer world using the same methods.
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Megas

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Re: Colony Specialisation via Industries
« Reply #4 on: June 22, 2019, 09:43:17 AM »

Upgrading would probably be a case-by-case basis.

I would upgrade Mining if it means I can colonize resource-poor planets and still meet demand due to extra production and/or reduce or eliminate the drug demand (without resorting to cores).  It might even be worth an industry slot.  Right now, I need to find planets with abundant resources to meet demand.  +1 being the minimum for ores and volatiles is an annoyance.  One game I tried, had a nice Terran world close to core for farming and dumping Industry on, but there were no nearby systems with sufficient ores or volatiles to meet demand for other stuff.  It would be a lone planet far from other colonies I would build.

My first priority is obtaining self-sufficiency and meeting demand, especially for Waystation and military assets.  Profit is a close second.

I think +2 production for Mining upgrade might be too good.  Now player can colonize that 50% Terran world with -1 all resources and still meet demand for everything that is not food.  +1 would probably be more useful.

If I do not abuse alpha cores to run worlds, then I like to avoid Pathers if I can.  It is nice that Pathers can be avoided, even if it is a bit tricky to do so.  Fuel Production or Heavy Industry with upgrade item means there is little else I can build without getting Pather cells.  With 6 aggro industry, I am limited to Farming, Light Industry, Commerce, and Military Base.

P.S. Silly Suggestion!  Merge Waystation and Commerce.  Make Commerce the upgrade to Waystation.  In addition to +1 stability (and possible other bonuses), it stockpiles all commodities in colony resources (if demand is met), not just crew, fuel, and supplies.  Make it easier for player to mitigate shortages without traveling all over the place to haul enough stuff for all colonies.
« Last Edit: June 22, 2019, 09:48:12 AM by Megas »
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SCC

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Re: Colony Specialisation via Industries
« Reply #5 on: June 22, 2019, 10:32:00 AM »

Specialisation makes sense, if it makes vastly more money. Currently the game only pretends the scale is power function (or exponential), when it's actually linear (unit of size 4 isn't the size of x^4, but 4x, thus only 33% more valuable than a unit of size 3). If the scale was, say, square, specialisation would be much more desirable. If you had 3 industries, each producing size 5 unit of goods, you would make 3*5*1000=15 000 credits, assuming same values for simplicity sake. If you switched one of those industries for a boost for another, then you'd make 2*5*1000+X*1000, X being the size of the bonus, thus the bonus would have to be +5 to make the same money back. Not more, just the same. However, if scale was replaced with one that has faster growth...
Well, what growth? Power function and exponential might be too extreme for now. Let's stick with a geometric progression for now; initial value of a=150 and common ratio r=2 with size serving as the number of the term. 3*150*2^5=14 400. What if we took out one of the industries, but one of the other got a +1 bonus? then it's 150*2^5(1+2)=14 400. Already the same money, with just +1 size bonus, because that upgraded industry makes as much money as two other not upgraded industries, and with +2 bonus it becomes four times as good, and so on. This gives an incentive to upgrade existing industries, because it doesn't make them only a little better (with bonus decreasing as natural production increasing), but always making them 100% better.

Also, I really like Megas's suggestion to make Commerce an upgrade to Waystation.

Megas

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Re: Colony Specialisation via Industries
« Reply #6 on: June 22, 2019, 10:56:42 AM »

Come to think of it (which I did not think of earlier), problem with merging Waystation and Commerce is 1) Waystation has heavy demands while Commerce has none and 2) Alpha core bonuses.
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BringerofBabies

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Re: Colony Specialisation via Industries
« Reply #7 on: June 22, 2019, 04:52:25 PM »

The Waystation's demands are of the things it stockpiles, so presumably if Commerce was stockpiling everything it would be changed to demand everything, which would have the side effect of increasing the market size - I don't know if that would be too strong a buff (especially after in-faction upkeep bonuses are applied), but I imagine it would be enough to retain its value as an industry slot.
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Serenitis

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Re: Colony Specialisation via Industries
« Reply #8 on: June 23, 2019, 01:55:26 AM »

Re: Commerce
One of the things I'd be inclined to do is to change Commerce from industry to structure, just to remove the dis-incentive to building it.
If you wanted to create an incentive, the easiest way I can think of would be to add a passive income to it. Pretend it's all the ground rent and tarrifs coming from the traders and going into the local treasury (ie; you).
Spoiler
I did a little playing with this and found that an income value of 1 means that on an empty world with no other materials or skills available, commerce will still cost you money to run. But as you unlock skills and gain access to resources the maint. cost decreases while the income increases, and eventually it will start making money. Less hospitable worlds take longer to flip this around the higher the hazard.
Any value greater than 1 leads to almost always making a profit.
Whether this is a direction that's useful or not is up to you.
[close]

Right now, I need to find planets with abundant resources to meet demand.  +1 being the minimum for ores and volatiles is an annoyance.
This is p. much the primary driver here. Just upping the minimum requirement to run your stuff makes finding somewhere to settle at all that much more difficult.

A thought occurs: it seems like it'd be easier all-around to add one or two upgraded versions of Mining and Farming, which would cost an extra industry slot. Then the maintenance and production could be fine-tuned per industry rather than having some general rule (which would also need to be explained), and this steps around all the "what to do about nanoforges etc" issues.
If you can have a building that costs >1 industry slot, then there's no reason not to go down that route instead to remove the nanoforge issue, and reduce screen clutter.

Quote
The question is, what would make the upgrade worth it? Is, say, just +2 Mining output good enough to make up for not having Light Industry or something else that would bring in income without diminishing returns you're running into by upgrading Mining?
This is one of those "it depends" answers.
If you don't have reasonably easy access to a decent source of materials, then I'd be inclined to say that 'spending' your limited industrial capacity on a way to meet your mineral demand would be a much better choice than diversifying into another type of production.
Both increase your in-faction 'needs met' counter, but the extra mining would let you run a refinery properly, which would let you run h. industry properly, both of which also add to the in-faction counter as well.
Which links into:
Quote
Going back to (and contradicting) what I said earlier, one way around this might indeed be giving such a bonus to production that upgrading an industry is *clearly* better, income-wise.

I would be absolutely 100% fine with being able to upgrade industries at the cost of more slots.
Just throwing ideas around....
Spoiler
Mining:
First Upgrade (Automated Mine)
Adds machinery input
+1 output
-1 industry slots (total req. 2 slots)
Increases maintenance to *1.3

Second upgrade (Deep Core Mine)
Increases machinery input
Additional +1 output (total +2)
-1 industry slots (total req. 3 slots)
Increases maintenance to *1.5
[close]

Quote
Be kind of weird have say 20 ore production, though... I'm not even sure how well the UI would handle displaying that much.
It probably would look a mess tbh. And after a certain point you'd have to display a resource icon with a number, or a different 'large amount' icon to avoid a solid line of overlapped images.

If you're ever planning on introducing 'nanoforge' items for other industries, that would also be another route to help the player work with the minimum +1 resources required thing.
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Recklessimpulse

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Re: Colony Specialisation via Industries
« Reply #9 on: June 23, 2019, 07:55:28 AM »

I wonder if mining specialization should only increase one type of resource as well it seems a bit too powerful if upgrades all the resources on a world.
« Last Edit: June 23, 2019, 07:58:38 AM by Recklessimpulse »
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Alex

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Re: Colony Specialisation via Industries
« Reply #10 on: June 23, 2019, 08:27:17 AM »

Re: Commerce
One of the things I'd be inclined to do is to change Commerce from industry to structure, just to remove the dis-incentive to building it.
If you wanted to create an incentive, the easiest way I can think of would be to add a passive income to it. Pretend it's all the ground rent and tarrifs coming from the traders and going into the local treasury (ie; you).
Spoiler
I did a little playing with this and found that an income value of 1 means that on an empty world with no other materials or skills available, commerce will still cost you money to run. But as you unlock skills and gain access to resources the maint. cost decreases while the income increases, and eventually it will start making money. Less hospitable worlds take longer to flip this around the higher the hazard.
Any value greater than 1 leads to almost always making a profit.
Whether this is a direction that's useful or not is up to you.
[close]

Hmm... I just need to think about it more at some point. It feels like it could be something more interesting, maybe; just "more income" could certainly be workable but I'd almost rather not have it in the game if it's not adding much.

If you can have a building that costs >1 industry slot, then there's no reason not to go down that route instead to remove the nanoforge issue, and reduce screen clutter.

Well, you currently can't, but you also currently can't add multiples of the same industry; adding either would be some amount of trouble :)

This is one of those "it depends" answers.
If you don't have reasonably easy access to a decent source of materials, then I'd be inclined to say that 'spending' your limited industrial capacity on a way to meet your mineral demand would be a much better choice than diversifying into another type of production.

Would it necessarily, though? It also depends on the number of colonies you've got, what else is being produced elsewhere, etc.

I would be absolutely 100% fine with being able to upgrade industries at the cost of more slots.
Just throwing ideas around....
Spoiler
Mining:
First Upgrade (Automated Mine)
Adds machinery input
+1 output
-1 industry slots (total req. 2 slots)
Increases maintenance to *1.3

Second upgrade (Deep Core Mine)
Increases machinery input
Additional +1 output (total +2)
-1 industry slots (total req. 3 slots)
Increases maintenance to *1.5
[close]

(Thumbs up for the MoO2 reference!)


I wonder if mining specialization should only increase one type of resource as well it seems a bit too powerful if upgrades all the resources on a world.

Oh, hmm, that could be really interesting. "Specialize in mining volatiles" - perhaps even at the expense of no longer extracting the other stuff - but getting considerably more volatiles.
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Megas

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Re: Colony Specialisation via Industries
« Reply #11 on: June 23, 2019, 09:44:11 AM »

Oh, hmm, that could be really interesting. "Specialize in mining volatiles" - perhaps even at the expense of no longer extracting the other stuff - but getting considerably more volatiles.
That would be handy at gas giants where finding a decent one with +1 or +2 volatiles and not too high hazard is hard.

Although it would be nice if specializing in ores affected both ores as they go hand-in-hand (for Refinery).

P.S.  Or just have mutually exclusive upgrades where you get that +1 to that one resource you really need to meet demand.  Upkeep (and maybe demand for something) is higher to somewhat offset the extra profit.
« Last Edit: June 23, 2019, 09:49:25 AM by Megas »
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Serenitis

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Re: Colony Specialisation via Industries
« Reply #12 on: June 25, 2019, 09:13:03 AM »

I wonder if mining specialization should only increase one type of resource as well it seems a bit too powerful if upgrades all the resources on a world.
Or just have mutually exclusive upgrades where you get that +1 to that one resource you really need to meet demand.  Upkeep (and maybe demand for something) is higher to somewhat offset the extra profit.
I'd be totally down for this.
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Megas

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Re: Colony Specialisation via Industries
« Reply #13 on: June 25, 2019, 01:08:38 PM »

If mining upgrades should take another Industry slot, then perhaps a way to do that is a new Industry (or Industries) that requires Mining built first, much like how Waystation requires Spaceport before player is allowed to build it.

In other words, instead of trying to make Mining take more than one industry slot, new industries with Mining prerequisite can be added instead to eat more slots.
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SCC

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Re: Colony Specialisation via Industries
« Reply #14 on: June 26, 2019, 09:59:51 AM »

I started writing another suggestion thread...
Quote
Currently, there's not much point to making a military base colony to free up an industry in a bigger colony, it just doesn't pull off the same numbers. There would be a point, though, if smaller colony's military base used the bigger colony's patrol size modifier for its patrols. It would also help with some of the core systems' defences, since they have colonies like that, even though it's not very effective.
...but what if this was achieved through some military base specialisation? You get a colony that's basically only military base, sure, but your bigger, more useful colony is free to get another moneymaking industry.