Geoff the Medio wrote:eleazar wrote:Shipyards are supposed to be a rare, significant, expensive construction. It seems artificial that a player has to choose between putting a shipyard in a stupid place, or not having a species available for new colonization. Chances are that most of the time you gain a planet with a new species, it won't be a great place for a shipyard otherwise.
Making it possible to put any accessible race onto a colony ship will require user interface support for making this selection... Can you, or someone else, suggest a way to do this that doesn't involve popups every time the player orders a colony ship to be built? (There are a few options I can think of, but I'm not sure what's best, and any of them will be a bit more complicated, particularly for new players...)
I agree having a pop-up every time a ship is built is troublesome. I would suggest two ideas.
* When you enqueue a colony ship, you can't build a "generic" ship, but must choose between a "Bulrathi Colony Ship", a "Psylon Colony Ship", etc. Of course you would only be presented with possible options. This is easily justified, as it's hard to imagine a colony ship that works equally well for sea creatures and lava-world aliens.
* If that's too constraining, then just choose the species at the moment of colonization. Not as realistic, but if there has to be a pop-up, that's the best time for it.
Geoff the Medio wrote:eleazar wrote:Conceptually it seems silly to that a shipyard can use the resources from many solar system, but can only populate colony ships from the local planet.
Especially if there's no migration system, "realistically" one could argue that shipping around colonists requires specialized ships to do so, which is part of why you have to build the colony ship in the first place. As such, you could only build colony ships containing locally-sourced people...
Yeah, you could, but it wears pretty thin when you consider that you can have multiple species in the same system.
Bigjoe5 wrote:Are you suggesting that it should be easy for the player to get colony ships with new races? That a player could just capture some fringe world and be able to build a colony ship with its race immediately?
That's a legitimate concern. I too would not want the capture of a single enemy colony to allow the capturer to immediately spam a bunch of colony ships of that species.
But i'd deal with the issue in another way. Something like the
allegiance and
ethos systems i've proposed would deal with the problem in IMHO an interesting way.
Taking over a colony, especially in a protracted, bloody way would tend to make the inhabitants hate your empire, i.e. have a negative allegiance. If you immediately colonized a bunch of worlds with that species, you can expect riots and rebellions, maybe even violent break-away planets in the heart of your empire.
If, on the other hand, the captured colony hated their former empire they would tend to see you as deliverers, and might start out with a high allegiance.
But even so the ethos system makes it difficult to be a successful "collect them all" empire. Just because you have access to a species, doesn't mean it can be happily integrated into an empire-- especially in large numbers. Each species would have certain preferences toward war/peace, industry/environmentalism, elitism/enfranchisement, science, expansion etc. An empire that too often violated the ethoi of too many of its member species would find itself shredded by rebellions.