FreeOrion

Sorry about the bad pun.

An idea occurred to me when catching up with they Dyson sphere thread: When you get to the late parts of the tech tree you should be able to unlock prohibitally expensive and utterly useless structures.

For example a special construct that causes a star to pulse in the sequence of prime numbers, why on earth would you want to build something that large, expensive and useless and possibly ruin the environment of the (hopefully uninhabited) planets nearby? Simply to say we're the kind of empire who has the technology to do this and the kind of loose cash that means we can waste it on a project like this.

Other examples may involve actually figuring out the entire sequence of Pi, then carving it onto the side of a planet as a seqence of dots and lines (...|.|....|) until the end.

Seeding life around the galaxy with some junk DNA containing a nebulous generic moral message. Or possibly a joke.


Basically these are those amazing precursor artefacts that humans tend to discover in a sci-fi novel then spend the rest of the book trying to figure out the amazing technology behind it and why it was built, in this case it was expressively built as a obstentasious show of wealth and technology.

Maybe they could add to your score and achievement so they're not totally useless.

Isn't that a reality argument Still if you prefer just replace it with some other expensive high tech obstentasious waste of money.

I'd rather have a lot of cool techs that are useful, then those ones that are useless.

Um...I'd lose respect for the game if I were playing it and suddenly was able to build something huge, costly and useless. Maybe one, ONE joke construction, like a death star in the shape of a monkey head or something. But that's about it.

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Photobucket account for FreeOrion and List of Techs and Icons

[[[===LEAN, MEAN, PURPLE AND GREEN MACHINE===]]]

Actually they could be useful in a Monument sort of way/increasing Imperial pride

You could also have a number of "monuments" that are essentially built with waste (ie because you are in government type X, a % of your production/research is diverted to certain "monuments")

[so you end up with solid depleted Uranium statues of an Emperor, or cities made entirely of structural cheese*, because some idiot in the Senate wanted to celebrate his region's cheese production]

*requiring a "Waste" tech of 'structural food'

Actually a positive bonus for moral is a good idea, but I wouldn't like the thought of useful. They may increase moral but they're still to expensive to be useful for anything except showing off.

I also never thought of it in junk techs, but rather these got unlocked by normal techs along side useful projects. For example take artificial heavenly bodies, it unlocks artificial planets, it could also unlock a planet sized machine that dose nothing except confuse archaeologists. That's not to say junk techs are a bad idea, just not the one I had.

Shrinkshooter, why would you loose all respect?

Not ALL respect. But a good amount. It would just take away from the game for me. We have all these long, thought out discussions on what goes in the tech tree and how to design ships and what will make something good or better, and to ruin it we toss in useless, expensive structures that serve no practical purpose. I know people are going to disagree with me, but on this subject I really don't care. From my perspective, throwing in such things devalues the hard work other people have put in to making/designing/thinking up structures that serve a purpose. And if you're going to ask "why?" my answer would be "it just does." But that's only one aspect. If you're going to go ahead and build a useless, expensive, time-consuming structure, you're done with the game. Just finish the game and start a new one. Sitting there uselessly making structures for me wouldn't be fun, just boring and pointless. Because I'm making the assumption that if you have the time, money and resources to make something like that, you have no better use for your resources, and so you've finished the game. If you haven't, don't build useless things and work towards finishing the game. I mean, you'd be sitting there, playing an awesome freeware game with cool ships, nice looking planets, a well-thought-out system and a sweet tech tree, and then suddenly this gem offers you the ability to build structures that serve no purpose.

I don't like fillers in my TV series, do you?

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Photobucket account for FreeOrion and List of Techs and Icons

[[[===LEAN, MEAN, PURPLE AND GREEN MACHINE===]]]

This is definitely stuff for a mod. Adding techs and buildings, that take an enormous effort to research, but don't do anything can be easily done at this stage already.
Including this in the main release doesn't make much sense to me, though.

It's called sandbox gaming. Some developers had the foresight to understand that some people just like to play around without any goals in particular. Useless buildings make sense in the context of a game that isn't goal oriented, and there is no high score, where the only objective is to model something to your own heart's content.
Freeorion could implement a sandbox gaming mode, but I'm pretty sure that when most people download this game, Sim City is not what they're looking for.

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Photo-dump.

Musings

and we already have one. But I don't think they would be useless completely, they might not give you a military or strategic advantage equal to their cost, but they would be worth a crapload of points towards your score.

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Computer programming is fun.

I guess a wonder counts as a useless tech, however it still does something good since other players are effected by them in those games that have them.

Sorry, waste of a post, but......

I just got the pun in the thread title...It's a TERRIBLE pun!!

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

I know.

You could almost say that it's cruel and unusual pun-ishment.

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.