Production

[DarthRevansRevenge]

didn't have a good title for this, but whatever

in the Phoenix rising mod, 1 thing that caught my attention was this: for producing units, credits were drained as time went on, not on order. honestly, it feels more realistic. it also always you to cue up what you want, without auto-paying for it. so if you run out of money, production stops; when you get more, it will continue. this feels more realistic, and would help with Dreadnoughts taking forever to build, because you would need other projects running at the same time to keep the Empire going.

also, it had units that gave more money in addition to that. can we see like freighter ships that give more money you have to protect, and refugee(or passenger) ships that give more population?

just suggestions

[t78]

So that's what those freighters were for!

Question is, would the ai use them as combat craft, or could it be trained to retreat them behind military units?

[DarthRevansRevenge]

in Phoenix rising, we never saw them, so either the AI chooses not to build them, or they hide.

if we did that though, the freighters should be pop capped. like at 6-15, so you can't spam money. for population increase ships, i don't know if it should be allowed at all honestly, but it would be fun to have.

also, can we see the space stations get some defensive guns of their own? not many, but enough to hold off a few annoying fighters and corvettes

[Corey]

For the pay as you go model, we used to use that as well but dropped it after initial builds. I kind of prefer it how it is.

also, it had units that gave more money in addition to that. can we see like freighter ships that give more money you have to protect, and refugee(or passenger) ships that give more population?

While we're exploring different methods of getting money, part of the overall goal is to make sure it stays as a challenge for the player and doesn't become so easy to get your economy rolling, especially compared to the AI. There's a few problems with units doing it in this capacity. For one thing, we'd have to balance the economy around them being used, which means reducing the other methods of income. If they're used as a percent increase, certain planets with high credit values would just become incentivized to stack all of them. If done as a flat bonus, the right move would always be to buy the max amount and stuff them as far back as possible, so a significant amount of your economy would always be there and never be at risk, which isn't a behaviour the AI would emulate.

also, can we see the space stations get some defensive guns of their own? not many, but enough to hold off a few annoying fighters and corvettes

Defense stations already have that, but shipyards are not meant to be defense stations.

[nightraven1901]

And I was just getting excited at the possibility of having freighters to protect and such...  But no, aside from them taking a build slot, which is something I hear is to be avoided as the build lists are damn near full as it is, the AI would be utterly useless at commanding them. Which sucks, very hard, because they would be very cool. Alas... On the topic of the shipyards not being entirely defenceless- I agree. I know what Corey's thoughts on the matter are, but I'm not saying add a lot when I say this, I'm talking about the equivalent of half an IPV at most on them, just to add realism to them. No military shipyard is completely without self-defensive options in reality, due to reasons relating to the obvious (which is to say, machine-guns are cheap and plentiful). That said, I'm not working on the team...