FreeOrion

Even if you can Teleport something from point A to point B what ever it is still needs to take a route to get there. Sound waves, Light etc... When you teleport something the atoms that make up the whole still need to take a direct route to get there.. That being said that would still constitute direct supply lines and future military techs could find a way to either intercept the signal or stop it all together.

Those are realism arguments, which don't apply when making a game. Everything can be explained away with some fictional hocus-pocus.

Two old good MoO buildings. Colony Base - because, really, there's not much sense in building a wholeFTL ship if you want to haul a bunch of pioneers to the next planet.
I propose to make it like this: Here SD_COLONY_BASE is a pre-made design with the special hull SH_INSYSTEM_COLONY which have starlane speed 0, fuel 0, low in-system speed and a slot for a normal colony pod.
What it does: allows to colonize the system via building, chaper than a normal colonizer would be - much like in MoO 2. In his case, new building spawns a special ship, decreases population by the amount that will appear in our new colony and removes itself. It's active only if a proper planet to colonize is present in the system and other colony bases (on either stage) aren't, so the player is less likely to build an unusable base.
Why this way: Building is contained by its planet and thus may take away some population and there's no visible unnecessary entities that clutter ship design screen and could be used in any other way.
Unlike the solution in the current ruleset by Bigjoe5, there's no need to care about its misuse: anything with this hull is not going anywhere, ever; and normal Colony Pod cost doesn't matter since it's not built, just script-spawned.
Alternative solution is to spawn otherwise usable intra-system hull with a cheap colony module which is never unlocked and thus cannot be used in any other design.
What it does: Every turn when either focus is "Balanced" it drains some industrial production and produces a fixed amount of population, 0.4 units on planets that have Genome Bank, 0.2 units otherwise. Does nothing if there's no free place for population.
Why this way: assuming that "Balanced" focus means locals are capable of providing care and place for new mouths, and the presence of a Genome Bank means they already know exactly what they want to get and have enough of variants.

Are theses expected to be build on every new colony?

You should maybe explain in a couple of sentences what each of those buildings does. This also goes to BigJoe. It just makes it easier to access these things, especially to people not too familiar with how to set up buildings/techs.

CreateShip is a good way to do this. I'm not sure if that effect was implemented before I tried to make colony bases. However, what is the purpose of the location conditions (aside from "OwnedBy TheEmpire Source.Owner" and "CurrentPopulation low = 3 high = 999", which are obviously necessary)? They seem quite awkward and pointless to me.

I think having colony bases remove population when colony ships don't isn't wise. If such a "cost" in population is considered necessary, it's better for the sake of playability in the meantime, if it gets implemented for both colony ships and colony bases at the same time.


This looks like the kind of building which would have to be built pretty much on each planet on which the player wanted the bonus. In general, FO buildings are more significant than that, and affect large areas of space, or the entire empire. The Cloning Center in my content files is an example of this. Also, is there a good gameplay reason for linking Genome Bank and Cloning Center like that? Having very close interdependencies between buildings creates significant changes in gameplay. At any rate, mightn't it be better to have the cloning center work to it's fullest capacity if there's a Genome Bank anywhere in the empire, instead of just on the planet in question?

Attempt to block multiple bases that may be accidentally made for one target and enabling a base only in a system that have valid targets, not one colony and one asteroid belt (this happened while debugging it ).

You're right, but there's two reasons: first, impact may be greater since building and using a colony ship takes a lot of time, while building several bases to populate the system is quicker; second, it have to be implemented separately anyway (again, the ship is spawned)

Depends on the balance. I suspected the opposite. If by the time both Gene Bank and Cloning Center are built the planet is about to reach its population cap, it was kind of waste - it would be better to build something productive that will remain useful. Also, it eats both maintenance and its own penalty. In MoO they are much more useful, since there are reproduction centers that send their population elsewhere. Which reminds me...
I'm in favour of areas, or 1-2 StarlaneJumps if it's supposed to work via transport (unlike radars, etc), but still.
So, to make it useful we would need some means to export all this people...
I think bilding that moves population away (emigration center) would do, but right now i didn't debugged this one yet
Yeah, IMHO even a bit of overkill. Since it's enough to build this on the homeworld once to affect all fresh colonies without any extra spending.
Why not? Perhaps not 2x, but cross-adjustments that are useful but not "must have" make the whole game less linear.
Depends on the interpretation. That is, it makes sense if such indirect effects cover as much as direct effects of an object in question. If a Genome Bank otherwise is good for the whole empire, then of course it should be good for this purpose everywhere too.
So it's presented this way only because i copypaste my own tests, and i'm more cautious with one-cover-all effects in general (when one thing covers all, there's less need to optimize and compromise, and that's one of the points of strategy IMO).

This is the hull for the colony base. It is never unlocked, so the player can never build any ships with it aside from those which are created via the CreateShip effect. It cannot move out of the system.


This is the premade ship design for the colony base. It cannot move out of the system, but it can colonize any habitable planet in the system.

This is the colony base building. When it is built, it will spawn a colony base ship and then be destroyed. This, I believe, is the simplest way Colony Bases can be reasonably enacted at present. I don't believe any further complications are necessary. It might, is some circumstances, be desirable to build a colony base even when there are no uncolonized habitable planets present, for example if the player plans to create an artificial planet, or annihilate an enemy planet. Therefore, I see no reason to restrict the number of colony bases that can be present. In terms of current playability, there's also no good reason to complicate things by making the colony base remove population from the building planet, since having different rules for colony ships and colony bases only serves to confuse the matter, and furthermore, it has not been decided that building colony ships/bases should consume population from the producing planet anyway.

The most likely implementation of colony ships costing population to produce would be to allow buildings to cost different resources besides PP. So a colony pod ship part would cost 1 population in addition to however much PP, and this population would be allocated to the project in the same way as PP. Furthermore, in the future, the colony base would ideally work without the building being the middle-man, so there's not much point in thinking in terms of the colony base ship being spawned by the building in the long-run.

That doesn't sound like a fun decision to make on every single planet...

You don't need a means to export them. You just need to say that it works on systems within a certain distance or number of starlane jumps, and the player can assume that there's some means to export them. At any rate, anything related to resources shouldn't, IMO, be area of effect, since one of the great advantages to FO's pooled resource system is that you don't need to really worry about micromanage-y details, like import/export across large distances and exact supply routes... this should also extend to things like making sure all of your planets are in range of a cloning center/industrial center/etc. That kind of experience is very micromanage-y and not fun, especially on a larger scale. If you have your doubts, just fire up a game in a 500 star galaxy and try to make sure all your industry planets are within range of a Solar Orbital Generator. Not fun. Matters will only get worse when there are actually other, more interesting things the player could be doing instead, like diplomacy and espionage.


That's right. And more importantly, without any extra micromanagement. Deciding whether or not to build the Cloning Center time and time again for each colony is lame, boring and repetetive. Deciding where to build the Cloning Center once is far better.

Such "cross-adjustments" don't have to be explicit. Instead, there might be a strategic or tactical advantage to having two particular buildings present on a planet without one actually affecting the functionality of the other. Such "compatibility bonuses" should be tactical or strategic, and available for the player to figure out and manipulate on his own, rather than simple, numerical, and force-fed to the player.

Remember though, that when one thing covers all, it greatly increases the strategic importance of that one thing, and therefore the fun of building and protecting it. When there are many boring generic buildings scattered everywhere, the player becomes less concerned with the strategic significance of the buildings and more concerned with using them to maximizing production through micromanagement, which is bad.