Chiralos
Merchant Princes
4
|
Posted - 2012.03.03 01:46:00 -
[1] - Quote
I think that being able to set up specialised manufacturing facilities turning out unique designs would be a great addition to EVE (eg proposals like this one).
One of the problems is, what is going to distinguish player customised ships and modules ? Altering ship or module attributes is really hard, because the system that has grown up over the years is very complicated and manually balanced, and it would probably require radical database work. Custom paint jobs are in the pipeline, but really you want something non-cosmetic. There's no upkeep costs in EVE, so lower (or higher) use of consumables or maintenance or reliability or fuel consumption can't be a distinguishing or balancing factor. There is manufacturing cost (or component amounts), but there is a limit to how much you can cut this before you hurt the game's economic balance.
Maybe you can play with the mix of components, or the way they're put together. Here's some ideas.
1 - Specialised BPOs
An invention-like mechanism allows the creation of specialised BPOs, of two sorts (see below). One allows specialised production lines, the other specialised ship production. When installed in an array or production line, the BPO should be vulnerable to destruction (or maybe some sort of theft by hacking).
2 - Specialised production lines.
A specialised production line BPO allows the creation and operation of a production line that can only produce the BPOs product, but which as a time or material manufacturing bonus. The size of the bonus would depend on the capital spent on the production line (which could be a starbase assembly array or station production line), getting more economy of scale and mass production into EVE. These facilities could produce ordinary, modules, ammo, rigs; or specialised ships. In the case of specialised ships, the manufacturing bonus depends on the ship design (see below).
Perhaps there should be some ramp-up time on the bonus (days or weeks), to put some strategy into their deployment.
BPOs could be pulled out of a facility and be used to create and run other facilities, but a BPO of exactly the same type (same product, same bonus) would be needed to run the facility. Perhaps at creation time there would be an option to put a unique manufacturing stamp on the BPO, meaning that facilities created with that stamp would need to be run by a BPO with that stamp.
2 - Specialised ships.
These would be ships would produced from specialised ship BPO. This idea is that the BPO would be for a particular fitting and custom paint job. The ships produced would have modules and rigs baked into their manufacture - a bit like rigs but you can't remove them, period (destroyed modules could be replaced only with exactly the same module). The advantage would be they can be produced on specialised manufacturing lines, and thus get a material or time bonus (and a custom look). The size of the bonus could be modulated by the degree of specialisation in the fitting - full bonus if all slots are filled, no (or very small) bonus for an unspecialised design.
For frigates there wouldn't be much point since they're so cheap anyway, but for battleships, T2, T3 and capitals this would be quite interesting I think. In the case of T3 the production lines would take the inputs to the subsystems and produced the specialised ship, doing the subsystem construction "internally". Down the road I would love to see something like this in a major industrial expansion. |