| SolidSamurai (Fearless Blue) | Monday, October 11, 2010 - 10:36 am 
Don't get me wrong, I haven't actually tried out the space program feature yet - but I was considering the potential of space to include a few new mechanics.
Colonies.
Yeah, potential colony locations would consist empty territory devoid of population.
The idea behind colonies is they aren't necessarily countries - they have a population of a few thousand at most. Of course, they can eventually grow into countries - but in order to trade on the world market, they need to be connected to space, otherwise they are left with running on self sufficiency.
Some colony locations are considered to be less habitable than others - hence this induces higher 'maintenance' cost (essentially a fee on all indexes for the colony). The money in the fee is spent towards raw materials needed to keep the population alive.
Death rates can be much higher on colonies for the above reason.
When you settle some population on a particularly far away colony and then export products from it, the fees increase and so the price increases.
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Perhaps new raw materials can only be acquired from colonies - which in effect could be used to create new (higher tier) supplies, weapons, etc.? Theoretically, this is why space has been given investment in the real world.
Of course, the above would be going the eve online economic angle. One product that is a higher tier than another would end up being worth 1000 times the price. But in this way, you could include 'technology' into the game.
Perhaps a 'research' corp is needed to discover a way to acquire the new raw materials before another corp can be built and used to harvest said raw materials.
The research corp can be given a task which is like a contract - once the task is completed, the corp closes automatically and any left over cash remaining in its coffers is given back to the colony.
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To distribute population to a colony, you need (of course) carrier shuttles.
Sample New "technologies" (higher tier products)
- Freight shuttles (carry more than carrier shuttles?)
- Advanced efficiency weapons. This differs, depending on what you apply the AEW to. Ie., attack drones with AEP might be able to attack at greater range. Aircraft carriers with AEP might be able to move faster. Of course, there's a cap to AEP.
- FTL drives. Yep, sci fi. FTL drives mean you can settle in colonies even farther outwards with less fees. Granted, if shuttles can already move damn fast in the current game - FTL drives just make them move faster. FTL drives are upgrades that can only be applied to shuttles and/or other space carriers.
- Laser defence systems. Lasers can make it even harder for other players to bombard you with strategic weapons. However, they each consume large amounts of electric power and are thusly a bit like corps in themselves (give them a new name; like defence networks or something).
- Population Aggression Enhancers; special forces (or whatever) can deploy them against enemy population centers to increase the chance of rebellion. Of course, this adds a whole new 'sabotage' angle to the game. Another one could be 'entropic nanites' that basically just jack up fees and cause weapons to be de-activated against player will.
- Biological warfare? Can lead to a new type of disaster. Simple relief isn't enough to quell this - it's a virus outbreak! Hence, the player needs to maybe ramp up the health care budget. When they click 'relief' many of their existing military units are incapacitated as they are forced to go to work quarantining large swathes of the population. If not handled, other things can happen again like rebellion. There's also 'zombie virus' meaning the military needs to engage hordes of zombies that grow larger and larger to consume the populace - zombies work like military units except the player needs to work actively to quarantine his existing population centers with garrisons and then attack any hordes that show up with his own units (air forces typically damage the country side though) - he can see them with regular radar planes but a new technology like 'satellite scan' or whatever, could help too in that it's faster.
Zombie hordes are only different from military units in the sense that they have no weapons and their numbers are usually much greater than an actual MU's max capacity. This doesn't make them stronger though - a single heavy tank at 100 fighting level could probably take on maybe 200 zombies (defending wise rather than attacking - since a tank usually attacks from range).
Military units and garrisons are never lost to the virus - unless, I don't know - it's product is higher quality by a factor of double the unit's fighting level?. Jeeps and other such weapons that people would hardly ever use are probably one of the most useful things when moving to battle hordes - defensive batteries are practically inert to hordes, since they are made to recognize specific targets such as enemy weapons and missiles.
A player that's inactive against a zombie outbreak will have his country taking regular quarantine procedure. Quarantine procedure is like garrison deployment and it's handled in the disasters section of the country page.
So yes, bio warfare can potentially do more damage than a nuke for less cost, but they are typically harder to hit with. They require special forces to deploy and spray population centers. Also a bit of player activity can really nullify any attempts. Since they involve SF units, they can be done in a sneak attack (I believe SF units can do sneak attacks, right?).
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Genocide.
Countries that suffer population losses due to selling typically experience migration losses for a period of time - the same should apply to warfare and especially bio warfare. Effectively, a country can be reduced to 0 population and become utterly abandoned (although inflicting such on a country is costly and it cannot be done through 'pillaging' a recently conquered one). In this way, it can become something similar to available territory for colonization. |
