FreeOrion

The buildings need a lot of work, but I'm not really in any position to do much about it (artist, not coder).

Instead here's a list of the buildings currently available with suggestions on what should be done for them:

* designates a building that is currently of questionable or dubious value; probably better if it gets nixed or added later

Buildings and Suggested Uses
Imperial Palace
Designates the location of the home world special (?)
Observatory
Shipyard
Allows the construction of ships in a system.
Bioterror Lab*
Merge with projector
Bioterror Projector*
Merge with lab
Autolab
Autofactory
Theorem Prover
Lighthouse*
Heavy Mining Processor
Clean mining?Acess to the core of a planet and all the benefits that come with it?
Industry Center
Asteroid Mine*
Could be easily covered by a tech advancement, or by the ability to colonize asteroids.
Megalith
Seems to behave like a habitat and mega mall.
Collective Thought Net*
Rename to Virtual Reality Net. Too many meter oriented buildings
Genome Bank
Anti-Gravity Well
Perhaps this could eliminate penalties from planet specials
Planet Ring*
Replaces space elevator; Dramatically reduces costs
Space Elevator
Reduces costs of ship building(?)
Commercial Union*
Deep Green
Paradise Planet*
Caducean Institute*
Living Planet
Orbital Gardens
Enclave of the Void*
What?
Looking Glass*
Monument to Exodus*
PsiCorp HQ*
Espionage related? Somebody has clearly jumped the gun.
Artificial Blackhole*
Replace with Star Gate; a building that allows instant jumps through star lanes.
Hyperspatial Dam
Miniature Sun
Economic Sinkhole

I had to stop going over the list after a certain point, there are just too many things to cover.
As it stands, some of the ideas are altruistic and even novel, but poorly conceived and implemented. For example, somebody thought it would be cool to have an artificial blackhole, but didn't consider the consequences of what it might do in game. It's clear because checking the data files reveals that it just adds a large production bonus, hardly befitting of such an advanced concept.

One of the big problems buildings have right now is that they are generic. All they do is grant a modifier to the meters that already exist, but none of them do anything that bends gaming rules or create interesting strategies. Better buildings shouldn't give bigger bonuses, they should enable more powerful strategies, like a stargate allowing instant transmission between two systems for example. I think we can all agree that 10 well developed buildings are always better than 20 poorly conceived ones.

Another problem is that there are way too many that do things that, say, a tech advancement would do better. Meter oriented buildings are not bad, but generally I was under the impression buildings should permit something dramatically different from what colonies are normally capable of, but they aren't, which goes back to the genericness problem. Less really is more in this case.

Civ based inspirations I don't think will be useful for FO, which means concepts like wonders are not useful. "Wonders" are buildings that are somehow more special and unique than other buildings, which doesn't make sense, because FO gives equal weight to all it's buildings.

Lastly, content will obviously be added as steps in the road map are taken, so one shouldn't for instance, think up an espionage related building before espionage has been worked out.

I hope nobody is offended, but there is clearly a problem here that can't be ignored. These are a few ideas to get the discussion started, and I leave you to think up the rest. Right now, it would be best to figure out which buildings are useless and define how they affect game play. It's in my best interests to do this, because then no time has to be wasted drawing icons for useless stuff. It's in the design team's best interests, because this is going to cause problems for ongoing content additions later if it's not fixed now.
The buildings we have now are kind of an blueprint for what will come later, so keep that in mind when brainstorming. This really can't wait until v1.0 for polishing.

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Buildings are really really unfinished, I think that if a building actually dose something its safe to assume its just test code. I can't see anything in the roadmap for when they should be finished but brainstorming never hurts.

And remember the golden rule, no building should be built at every colony.

Anyway I can think of possible uses for these:


Merging is probably a good idea, but Bioterror labs have a lot of potential so I wouldn't think of nixing them. My suggestion is that Bioterror labs slowly add to an empire stockpile of bioterror, in the espionage screen you can see how much bioterror you have and use some to spread a tailored virus to a verity of useful effects. The downside is that spies might discover your labs leading to unrest, and foreign civilians demanding their governments take action against you.

There is something fundamentally cool about an interstellar lighthouse, we should find something useful for it to do. Extending a colonies supply range for a very large cost is an option, too expensive to use everywhere, but not too expensive to extend your supply to that uninhabitable checkpoint when it really matters.

All production ceases, farming, mining, production, research, etc. Instead citizens generate happiness that radiates out from this planet and helps other colonies. It may need tweaking for balance.

If you've built this you've founded the Psicorps, yes those Psicorps. The bonus should be espionage related, either it creates psychic agents or it works like bioterror labs and adds to a global stockpile. This can be used for special psychic espionage attacks, or just to increase the odds of a normal mission. The downside is that the PsiCorp is a fascist organisation that treats its members like pawns and non-psychics like cattle, it will attempt to overthrow the empire its a part of, but probably wont be more than a nesence.

I'm not sure how this will work with an alien race that has total loyalty, or an alien race that's naturally psychic? Maybe screw realism for the former, and the latter get one the bonus equal to X psicorp HQ(s) from the start without the penalty.

The bioterror projectors just exist now because there's no other way to have a localized bioterror effect from a player-chosen source location. Eventually we'll have spies, which will probably have the ability to use bioterror against planets. When that happens, we won't need the projectors, and the lab can exist as an enabling building that lets spies do the dirty work. Exactly how enabling works or what form it takes is to be determined, though, along with the general mechanics of spying.

[Edit] This is describing the Observatory, not the Lighthouse.
The lighthouse has an obvious use, which is improving the detection range of nearby planets. Assuming galaxy map detection and stealth work roughly as expected, this should be quite useful to be able to build. It also has obvious analogs in other games, from Starcraft (missile turrets are detectors) to Alpha Centauri (you can build sensor arrays on the map). Having to place these at a particular location makes them significantly different and more interesting than having a tech give a uniform bonus to all planets' detection. [/Edit]

For stargates, we just need a "Move Object" effect. Stargates could then be created as a building that has the move object effect that acts on all ships in the system. Their destination could be done most simply by having a (single) stargate exit building, that just serves to locate the exit point of all stargates for an empire, or we could add a way to chose a target object in the UI for buildings, which would have various uses beyond this particular example.

In general, it's not necessarily ideal to make any possible building into a tech. Having some things be buildings has strategic consequences. Buildings exist on the map, in a particular location, can be captured or destroyed, and must be built using production that is a different resource than research and which may be more difficult to get to a particular location. If more techs give bonuses to research and more buildings give bonuses to minerals and industry output, then focusing more on one or the other is self-reinforcing, making a high-research or high-production strategic choice possible to set up for players. [Edit] Addendum: Techs will also probably be much easier to steal by espionage than a building. If your empire is weak in espionage, you might be better making buildings you can protect than researching a lot of techs that you will just have stolen by other empires. [/Edit]

Also, changing buildings doesn't require any programming... Buildings are just data, with a relatively simple format. The most complicated part is effects and conditions on them, but even those aren't really programming or even scripting (if there's any distinction between the two...). The documentation for how to code buildings is poorly maintained, but it could be freshened up should there be people interested in working on them.

Just a quick point. I'm confused between the lighthouse and observatory, because it sounds to me like they do the same thing, no? I'm not against having detection buildings at all, I'm against replicating the same building over and over.

Bioterror stuff ought to be merged. I never understood the point of having two bioterror labs when there are hundreds of other buildings and ideas that might be waiting to take it's place. It seems espionage related, so it should go under the greater umbrella of espionage related buildings, in that it does something unique for spies. What that is remains a mystery, it's one of those buildings that jumped the gun.

Psicorp is a good idea, but it's content that was added far too soon, IMHO. Meanwhile, there are other buildings that would be more meaningful right now, such as a stargate, and no, I think having jump gates and star gates, and hyper gates, and other extensions of the same concept are just as bad as the problem we have now. In fact, it's the same, so we really want to avoid that.

ONE stargate would be enough, to clarify.

There aren't a lot of things buildings can do right now. There are only a few meters and planet specials, and many advanced concepts that we could play off of haven't been worked out yet. (like unrest and morale for example)
I was going to suggest a virtual reality net, but I have no idea what it would do.

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Oops! Yeah, I was describing the observatory, not the lighthouse. I believe the lighthouse *was* about extending fleet supply lanes, or possibly system supply. In any case, this is still something useful for the game now, so I don't see a reason to remove it.


There's no hard cap on the number of buildings in the game, especially now when we have not put any balancing effort into things. In the particular case of bioterror, we likely won't have the projector after the relevant game systems (espionage) get added, so it's not really a long term issue. For now, there's no way to have a bioterror-like effect without a building to house the effects group.

In a more general sense, there are two bioterror buildings because I was pondering the idea of having an enabling building (the lab) and an actual doing building (the projectors. This is analgous to requiring an engineering bay in starcraft before you can build missile turrets. Both are buildings, one does something, the other lets you build the one that does something. Granted, we already have techs, but as noted above, there are strategic differences between techs and buildings that enable the player to do other things.


I don't think of it as jumping a gun, since playability isn't a priority at this stage. Having a building in the text file now doesn't mean it's expected to stay there until v1.0. It's just there for the mean time to doing something different from "+5 to Farming", which is rather important given the current limited range of options of what buildings are actually capable of doing in terms of significantly altering gameplay.

I'd like some buildings and techs that significantly alter how the game is played, in terms of mechanics or just strategy. The former can't really be implemented yet, but the latter might be, in some cases. Just because a building does nothing but alter a meter doesn't mean it is strategically uninteresting; A building that gives a bonus to a particular meter could actually be quite significant if it's difficult to boost that meter by any other means if the game, as currently coded, was filled with balanced and thought-out content.


In this case, I agree. Psicorp doesn't really do anything interesting; it's just there because someone thought the concept of a Babylon 5 corps of psionics was interesting, but the building itself has no mechanical interesting features (unlike the bioterror buildings).


The problem with stargates is that we need to alter the effects system to be able to implement them. Note that all the buildings that are currently implemented are done with the effects system we have now. I'd definitely have already added a stargate or similar type of building to the game if the effects system supported it.


The is pretty much why buildings are boring and generic now, and why little effort has gone into them. There's not much that can be done until the code is expanded.

Along those lines, if there are specific requests to be able to make a specific building that makes sense with the level of currently-coded game systems (eg. not requiring an espionage system to be designed and written), I can prioritize adding the effects or conditions necessary to do so.

This is easiest if no UI modifications are required, so for example, a stargate that automatically moves all ships in its system to some other specific system is easy, but a stargate that requires a destination to be selected is not. If a stargate just creates a wormhole, where a wormhole is a zero-length starlane that connects to systems that are too far apart to have a regular starlane, then we'd need to modify the code to allow creating wormholes (which would be complicated and likely require UI modification) but the actual ship movement would probably be pretty simple and not require much modification, as the pathfinding algorithm should automatically take the zero-length wormholes / stargates into account when planning ship routes.

So... I guess the message is that if you've got a bunch of interesting buildings that need to be added, perhaps start a discussion about what the building should do, and I can discuss whether this is feasible now, with minor modifications, or not until major modifications to the effects system are done. If you don't have any replacement buildings thought up, then why are you so concerned about removing ones that we have now? If they suck, they'll be removed eventually, but having them around now doesn't really hurt anything, does it?

Well, maybe not for you, but it will hurt a little for me, as soon as we start making building icons. I don't want to make icons that will probably end up in the trash later, and if it can be handled eventually, I supposed it can be handled now too. It would be very helpful if time was spent talking about it rather than painting about it is all that I'm saying.

Of course I do have some ideas of my own for buildings, the star gate of which was an example. I was assuming it would only affect travel times of ships going through currently existing star lanes, like a star lane accelerator. I understand the system needs placeholders and is limited by the concepts that exist currently.
It wouldn't really make sense to create new buildings now that would have to wait until a much later point in the development process. Getting rid of some however, even though there is no hard cap for the computer, is easier for humans to keep track of and easier to develop better, I'm sure you'll agree.

I found it curious why there wasn't more weapon or defense oriented buildings either, even in this stage. You wouldn't be holding out on us would you

Such a discussion about a specific building would probably go under content creation. Or would it be brainstorming?

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Content creation should be fine. I don't think it makes sense to have a heavily-moderated content creation board... It's not like most game design issues that are trying to answer a specific question. Rather, we're trying to come up with a bunch of new ideas... it's much more open ended.

It might help to have a high-level "how should we design buildings?" thread, though, in which to discuss overall how buildings should be made. I'd like to have that be partly a strategic discussion, where we discuss what sorts of strategies to create for players in the game through the included techs, buildings, specials, ship parts and hulls, etc. An example of that is the production vs. research tradeoff mentioned above. Unfortunately I think the same problem of lack of implemented systems prevents that from really happening at this point...

That sounds like a good idea.

Another thing, aside from having dozens of similar buildings, was I kind of sort of wanted to avoid was copying too much from MOOII, Civ, Sid Meier, etc. The more originality the better, but maybe that's just me.

edit:



In honor of that thought, I put a short wish list right here. Obviously, the rules for these aren't implemented, and I wouldn't want all of them added necessarily, but if in the future you should be looking for inspiration...

Minefield (damages ships that have traveled through the starlane to the system)
Jump/Warp Dissipater (Slows enemy ships down)
Planet based defense system, or super weapon.
Star Gate
A fleet coordination/academy building.
A morale altering building. (If morale ever gets implemented)
A re-education camp, propaganda machine or mind control device.
A trade center/bank whose effectiveness is proportional to the number of allies you have.
A bulk transmitter (somehow improves the efficiency of supply lines, mining, resources)

Though I'm still in favor of adjusting and tweaking the ones we do have, instead:

The Heavy Mining Processor has something to do with the core or mantle of a planet, whether it has a deletrious relationship or a beneficial one, or even if it is just necessary.
Instead of using the gravity well as just a space launch pad, perhaps it fixes/inhibits/foregoes the penalties of certain planet specials as well.
Single bioterror lab that allows/strengthens acts of genetic warfare and protects the system against it as well, maybe with additional benefits like research.
Autolabs and autofactories drain the colony do something painful in order to get their jobs done, but where you could have both on one planet without completely cancelling eachother out.
A space elevator that opens up lots of different avenues across the board.

It occured to me that building that get their bonuses based on forces present and acting outside of them can be interesting, such as a bulk transmitter that gives a +10% bonus to every colony in the system for every colony in the system rather than a +2 bonus. Just a thought.

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There are a lot of boring and generic and duplicated-but-with-new-names buildings in previous 4X games. Avoiding this by having buildings and techs that do significant and interesting things like changing the game mechanics for players is something I'd like to work towards.

True. Some of those ideas, however, recur in science fiction quite a bit and are hard to ignore, between anti-gravity wells, and virtual reality nets, and stellar converters and star gates etc. It's hard to come up with anything that really hasn't been done before, originality/innovation usually comes when the same old idea has a new twist put on it.

How about an alien management center? MOOII has done addressed this. It could function more or less like a concentration camp, instead of a DMV.

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I'm actually not that concerned about coming up with novel fluff / descriptions for game content. Sci-Fi and Sci-Fantasy are old enough and popular enough that we won't have any really new story ideas, no matter how long we tried to create some. More important, to me, is that the building or tech be notable as game content; as long as the building or tech has an interesting purpose in-game, it doesn't matter what story fluff we use to describe it (assuming that story fluff is reasonably well written and consistent with the rest of the fluff and the function of the content in-game).


What would the function of a concentration camp be for players? Since we have a one-race-per-planet rule, after capturing planets with a particular race populating them, I don't think we'll need a building to keep the race isolated to that planet... But if you had an empire goal to kill the population of that race, then such a building could perhaps be employed to kill them off without whatever rebellion consequences would normally be associated with starving or the various downsides of bombarding a planet you own from space to kill its population. The concentration camp would prevent or significantly reduce the race's migration off the planet (to other empires' planets of that race, perhaps) and reduce the population by some amount each turn until they're all gone.

This could even be useful in the game as it exists now, if you want to kill a planet's population off. Presently there's no way to do this without starving your whole empire. When blockadable resource sharing rules are implemented, you could employ an enemy empire's ship to stop food from getting to a planet, but that's not really a practical method.

First off, I can't believe I said "done addressed this" like a redneck.

Now that I've pointed that out and gotten it off my chest, a concentration camp is an ingenious device. I would also think there would be another benefit involved as a trade off for sacrificing citizens under your control (whether they come willingly or not), as well as eliminating unwanted denizens.

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Well you could make it an extreme form of slavery, death through overwork rather than executions.

Still I'm not convinced its the best idea, depending on how the multi-race system works it might be better off if the player just selects a policy rather than builds a building.

Thanks for your ideas and suggestions on this Josh, I think it will help get a constructive discussion started. While buildings are perhaps not as fundamental to the game as the combat model, the sooner we begin the better.

One building that has bugged me is the first one on your list:


Using this building to control the homeworld special sounds like a good idea. Definitely better than adding +2 to max construction! However, I propose that the name of the building be changed to Acropolis of Unity, as Imperial Palace is too much Chinese specific. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it would be similar to calling the building the White House or Palace of Versailles.

If we can set aside half of the buildings, or more, it will help us concentrate on the essential ones better. I agree with your selection of starred buildings, removing them will make finishing the remaining ones that much easier.

Also, I'm just wondering, are there any buildings that people are really attached to, or that come from the original MoO games, that should not be changed? If so, then preserving them should definitely considered. I don't know of anything like that, but then again I haven't been here very long.

I think you're thinking of Forbidden City. Imperial Palace is a generic term, not specific to a single country / culture.

Also, the building could perhaps change the empire's capitol, once appropriate effects are implemented. It would not change a homeworld, which should eventually be race-specific (not empire-specfiic) and would not be changeable in general.