Ophiuchus wrote:I think that location should be important. And some systems (or clusters of systems) should be more valuable than others.
Right now having a high number of planets in a system with a gas generator makes it much more valuable.
However, if we are decoupling the GGGs effect on each system from the presence of a given building in that system (because the current GGG effect is triggered by a central building that affects many systems), we are effectively removing the locational importance. I mean, some systems will still be better than others, but you won't need to take care of that, you just build your GGG central building somewhere and make sure it is connected to every system with an outposted GG on it.
If we want to make necessary to think about where to place the central GGG (as we are supposed to do with the collective network building) we need to come up with something new. But we don't have to think about this with the current GGG mechanic.
If we want to make necessary to think which GGs do we outpost... This is more interesting. Right now we don't do this neither (just outpost at least one GG on each of your systems with one or more colonies, and build a GGG on it; only thing you need to decide is which one put upper in the the queue, the one with more colonies in its system; yeah, the no-brainer issue), so if the solution we devise to fix the no-brainer issue has this same problem, then we wouldn't be worsening anything, only improving. But since we are here it would be nice to give it more strategic importance to all this.
Ophiuchus wrote:Setting focus of planets should also matter IMHO. Setting focus of a planet should be important. I think the current mechanism does this nicely.
Agree. It forces/invites you to open the objects window and do some filtering to quickly find the systems that will get more benefit from switching planets from research to production, in those moments when you need more production; and viceversa, if you need more research you prefer to first switch the planets that are not in GGG systems.
The problem then is that we need/want the GGGs to have some effect on the production of the planets in systems with outposted GGs. So I like you suggestion:
Ophiuchus wrote:So how about target snowballing by doing a split? Remove the GGG building, give a +5PP bonus system-local for every gas giant outpost without the building (So exactly like now, just you dont need the building and the bonus is halved). And add a (once-per-supply-group) gas refinery building which adds bonus PP scaling up to a certain number of GG outposts (e.g. the basic building supports up to four gas giants in your empire, so if you have three gas giant outposts in the supply group it would bonus target +15PP).
The number this scales with could be upgraded by tech and/or an more expensive building. E.g. the basic building supports 4 gas giants and costs 200PP, the upgrade building supports up to 10 extra gas giants and costs 400PP).
What I don't like about this is that it uses fixed numbers, that can be balanced only for specific galaxy setups.
I say it would be better to just give a fixed bonus for the industry-focused planets with an outposted GG in the system (if supply-connected to the central GGG building), either a fixed +5 (balanceable) or a number dependent on the size of the planet (+2*Size, this I like it more because it alse makes importante the size of the planets, not only their number). Dividing this bonus between the planets and the GGs themselve would be optional, not really necessary to fight the snowballing problem).
Making this bonus upgradeable with more techs is an option, of course, but that would need new techs (a new branch hanging from the Gas Giant Generator tech, independent of the Solar Generation tech that currently follows the GGG tech), and doesn't really add much to the game (but hey, I have nothing against it, the same could be thought of the upgrades for the industrial center building and we have them).