Community "Unofficial" expansion

[Green1]

Other Sattelites we (or at least in my raving madness) would love.

Probe team sattelite. Yeah.. why build what you can subvert. Think what the Transformer did to the sattelite in one of the Transformers movies. If you want to get fancy, you could have your own missions, too, in addition to taking over the sattelite or orbital facility.

Reasearch Station. Conducts experiments made better in a microgravity enviroment. SMAX's version of the ISS. Provides research.

Actual bases (cities) in the sky.

One other thing is not actually a platform, station, base, or sattelite would be debris. Particularly if Yang and Santiago go nuts and start blasting things out of the sky. When the Chinese blasted and old sattelite out of the sky, they created a huge cloud of debris that threatened other equipment up there! It has been suggested in the old Paladium Rifts world that even though the setting had futuristic weapons and mechs and such that there was no global communication or sattelites because of some ancient war that littered the orbit with thick space junk clouds. This would be a huge concern.

You could also be devious. Imagine Yang bringing down a orbital city on top of UN HQ! Talk about atrocity!

[Green1]

Triple post.. but I am on a roll.

Secret Project: Space Elevator. No. It should be a facility you can build. A VERY, VERY expensive one- but able to built nonetheless by any base meeting the latitude requirement. Problem is - and why I think the space elevator could cause issues for any empire - is it would be a very ripe target for terrorism. Blow that thing up, you could have a supersonic thousands of mile long nano carbon cord destroying everything in a random straight line as hit hits ground at worst. Yeah. As Roze, the Space Elevator is the first to go if she sees it! Authur C. Clark and others viewed this as a facility. Some paper I have seen even predicted multiples of these on low gravity worlds like moons and dwarf planets.

Enough. I get geegasms when I talk sci fi. Particularly sci fi war in near-mid future era.

[Yitzi]

Sky Hydroponics Lab- I maintain the position food for land bases would not be grown in orbit. BUT- if you actually had BASES in orbit, it would be a base facility. After all, there are no workable tiles in space. Nor do I think Planet's moons have an atmosphere or any tiles that can be worked for nutrients unless you put a pressure on that tile. If anything aerospace complexes would have to ship nutrients UP and be given a PENALTY per orbital lab:) Almost all the transhumanist visions from the 1960s on up envisioned food grown in orbit to support those LIVING in orbit. Larry Niven in a 1980s short story even had one character joke to another on his way to an Earth-Moon L2 station with a hydroponics lab that liquor being shipped up cost as much as replacing a liver from drinking so much liquor! But, the Hydroponics Lab was a base - A moon mining base that caught material launched from a mass driver. They had several hundred hungry workers to feed!

Why would it not be possible to use hydroponics on satellites to grow plants in 24-hour sunlight and a controlled environment for food?

Orbital Defense Pod. SDI/ aka Reagan's "Star Wars" had more applications than just nuke interception. It is the reason Gorby was raising hell. It was also a fearsome orbit to surface weapons platform! Now, you could say with advanced guidance, this could be done on ground, too. But, unlike ground, you are not getting the weapons in the sky with chaos infrantry.

So you think it should be usable to attack ground targets?  I think that would just be too unbalancing from a game perspective...it does, however, have the capability to attack other satellites.

Orbital Power Platform. Now, this is actually realistic AS IS. But, you forget that one of the reasons no one has done this yet in adddition to cost is this can be a formidable weapon, too! Instead of zapping power down to a substation, you could just zap entire cities! EMP blast, eat your heart out...lol.

Again horribly unbalancing.

Now, one thing that could be done to further weaken Cloudbase is to unattach the bonus for Power Platform away from aerospace complexes. Instead, make the bonus from this come from some kind of substation facility. I would not want the juice being zapped down anywhere near my spaceports.

So have a separate facility to serve as an aerospace complex for Power Transmitters.  Could be possible, though if you're dealing with enough larger balance issues to make it the biggest one left then the Power Transmitter would actually be one of the weaker satellites (as while it is important for research or an economic victory, it doesn't help you support more population to use more satellites, and doesn't help much with building satellites.)

Anyone actually use these?  In a perfect world, A real "survey" sattelite would remove fog of war. You would place this in geostationary orbit around whatever region you wanted to keep track of.  Now, if you wanted a basic "whole world" map like what is revealed when you first launch any sattelite without revealing units, you launch it in a orbit that it eventually traverses much of the planet. For this reason, I refuse to play any future tech game with fog of war. Trust me, even in this age we know what is happening across the globe in every city in real time if we want.

Ban the "sensor under the base" trick, and this becomes its replacement.

Probe team sattelite. Yeah.. why build what you can subvert. Think what the Transformer did to the sattelite in one of the Transformers movies. If you want to get fancy, you could have your own missions, too, in addition to taking over the sattelite or orbital facility.

How would that work (I've never watched Transformers)?  Just subvert other satellites?  Interesting idea, but without any "distance to HQ" concept it'd be very difficult to balance so it's neither too weak nor two strong.

Reasearch Station. Conducts experiments made better in a microgravity enviroment. SMAX's version of the ISS. Provides research.

So a satellite to boost research?  Seems to me the Power Transmitter has that function fairly well covered already.

Actual bases (cities) in the sky.

That'd change gameplay so much that you're better off just making a new SMAC-inspired game (thereby also avoiding all the difficult coding involved.)

One other thing is not actually a platform, station, base, or sattelite would be debris. Particularly if Yang and Santiago go nuts and start blasting things out of the sky. When the Chinese blasted and old sattelite out of the sky, they created a huge cloud of debris that threatened other equipment up there! It has been suggested in the old Paladium Rifts world that even though the setting had futuristic weapons and mechs and such that there was no global communication or sattelites because of some ancient war that littered the orbit with thick space junk clouds. This would be a huge concern.

You write it as a mechanic, and it may be implementable.  But remember that this is a game first, so ideas aren't worth much unless they have mechanics involved.

Triple post.. but I am on a roll.

Secret Project: Space Elevator. No. It should be a facility you can build. A VERY, VERY expensive one- but able to built nonetheless by any base meeting the latitude requirement. Problem is - and why I think the space elevator could cause issues for any empire - is it would be a very ripe target for terrorism. Blow that thing up, you could have a supersonic thousands of mile long nano carbon cord destroying everything in a random straight line as hit hits ground at worst. Yeah. As Roze, the Space Elevator is the first to go if she sees it! Authur C. Clark and others viewed this as a facility. Some paper I have seen even predicted multiples of these on low gravity worlds like moons and dwarf planets.

Most of the bonuses are faction-wide, so making it a facility causes balance problems.

[Kilkakon]

How about we give satellites armour and weapons, and put them in the workshop?

Perhaps seperate out the aircraft and spacecraft parts of the aerospace complex to two different facilities?

All too complex without exe editing, those things, though.

[Green1]

How about we give satellites armour and weapons, and put them in the workshop?

Perhaps seperate out the aircraft and spacecraft parts of the aerospace complex to two different facilities?

All too complex without exe editing, those things, though.

You have read my mind. Before I got offline, I started thinking just about that. It would have to have a rocket chassis and would give something more interesting to make than just a misslie with different reactors.

Yitzi.. do not worry. I know a good majority of these things are dreams and unrealistic to implement. Hell, I was considering jumping on CFC or Firaxis forums about it for Civ 6 or a third Civ 5 expansion. No one has done future tech right. The Civ series really needs to update how they handle these things and it's space based warfare in particular. We live in a time that we will see a majority of these things in our lifetime.

Now, you mentioned that most of these things would be better served in a SMAX - inspired game. I agree because of coding. I agree. However.. there IS one loophole for any future project I think could be exploited to add cool stuff like this. Basically an external program. Thing is, no one I do not think has thought of it. It still may not work.

Let me explain. SMAX outputs and recieves information, if you set it that way, to TCP-IP. This information I think contains all current game data. It works (in theory) by tricking the game into thinking it is playing MP then altering game information and sending it back. You could have an external program get all this data and add the orbital/moon-planet stuff on top of it. Of course, it will have it's own AI that reads what the game AI is doing and cooperates with it. It could also send information that affects the map and world in game and vice versa to the external program suborbital world. Units could be erased from SMAX and put into the external program. The advantage is that you have the code in whatever programming language you are profecient at and the community has the source code. Disadvantage is, I may totally be ignorant and wrong and this could never work.

But anyways. I love talking dreams.

But- back to reality.

*Yeah. Sensor under base is an EXPLOIT. Pure and simple.
*Let me think for a second in game terms about orbital debris clouds. Some real life sattelites DO have a limited amount of propellant to be able to boost to get out of this. In game terms, this probably is handled out of game. Still, I like the mechanic and most sattellites are sitting ducks. Maybe set up that for every debris cloud there is a percent chance equal to the number of clouds a random sattelite gets destroyed. Orbital defense platforms can take out these clouds. Maybe there is a way for ground missile to do this too.

[JarlWolf]

Trust me, even in this age we know what is happening across the globe in every city in real time if we want.

We have instant communication technology yes, but we don't have omniscience for even our planet yet. And there is ways to scramble or distort a Satellites communication as well, and provide cloaking measures. As for SMAC/SMAX though (most likely SMAX) the technology would be apparent, but I think that with the ultra detailed satellite mapping allowing basic omniscience, there would be disruptions due to solar flares, or even some form of GPS scrambling technology.

[Yitzi]

How about we give satellites armour and weapons, and put them in the workshop?

Making them just a different chassis?  That would be essentially a different game, though, it'd be better to design a game from the ground up to be able to include satellite warfare.

Perhaps seperate out the aircraft and spacecraft parts of the aerospace complex to two different facilities?

This could probably be done with exe editing...keep it in mind for when someone asks for submissions for exe editing goals.

Let me explain. SMAX outputs and recieves information, if you set it that way, to TCP-IP. This information I think contains all current game data. It works (in theory) by tricking the game into thinking it is playing MP then altering game information and sending it back. You could have an external program get all this data and add the orbital/moon-planet stuff on top of it. Of course, it will have it's own AI that reads what the game AI is doing and cooperates with it. It could also send information that affects the map and world in game and vice versa to the external program suborbital world. Units could be erased from SMAX and put into the external program. The advantage is that you have the code in whatever programming language you are profecient at and the community has the source code. Disadvantage is, I may totally be ignorant and wrong and this could never work.

The problem is that the game stores its own information until you save it; you'd need something that can modify the information in SMAX, and at that point you might as well just build your own SMAX clone (if necessary, have it check for ownership of SMAX itself to avoid copyright issues), and use that.  Your idea would probably be more work than doing the whole thing from scratch.

*Yeah. Sensor under base is an EXPLOIT. Pure and simple.

It's on the list of things to be banned by the rules of SMAX 1.5.

*Let me think for a second in game terms about orbital debris clouds. Some real life sattelites DO have a limited amount of propellant to be able to boost to get out of this. In game terms, this probably is handled out of game. Still, I like the mechanic and most sattellites are sitting ducks. Maybe set up that for every debris cloud there is a percent chance equal to the number of clouds a random sattelite gets destroyed. Orbital defense platforms can take out these clouds. Maybe there is a way for ground missile to do this too.

So destroying a non-cloud satellite creates a cloud, and each cloud attacks a random satellite with a certain chance of success, and destroying the cloud again would get rid of it?  Doesn't really seem that realistic (if the orbital defense platform can take out the cloud, then it could have done so when originally attacking the satellite), and could result in a point where the clouds make all satellites impossible (as they destroy more satellites and proliferate as fast as they can be destroyed), but it might be codable.

[Green1]

Yeah. You do bring up some good points. I have always wanted the orbital/ moon/planet stuff to have been expanded on. But, then again to really do it justice would be extensive. It would be best to totally start again with another engine with support . Nice to know what we can and cannot do. But, can you blame us nerds for wanting more complexity and dreaming?

Well, to start, I think it is time for the Cloudbase Academy and it's connection to orbital cheese to be lessened. I still think Cloudbase should be the word for guys that love big air. But all those minerals and nutrients? My proposal: Cloudbase should still give you all the aerospace complexes to make your air units uber and help you versus folks dropping drop troopers into unguarded bases. But, receiving power and nutrients and minerals is a bit too much. Either tie that ability to another existing facility or add another. Once again, though you are looking at UI. It would be really cool to have a on/off switch for this rule in game under options to please any purist sandboxers who do SP and do not care about balance.

[Yitzi]

Well, to start, I think it is time for the Cloudbase Academy and it's connection to orbital cheese to be lessened. I still think Cloudbase should be the word for guys that love big air. But all those minerals and nutrients?

Well, part of my plan for SMAX 1.5 will be to severely depower satellites, so that'll help a lot with that even without the air/space split.

My proposal: Cloudbase should still give you all the aerospace complexes to make your air units uber and help you versus folks dropping drop troopers into unguarded bases. But, receiving power and nutrients and minerals is a bit too much. Either tie that ability to another existing facility or add another. Once again, though you are looking at UI.

Actually, there you wouldn't be.  Unlike the civ series, there's no "city view", so all you'd need to do is add the functionality to one of the "blank" facilities...probably not extremely easy, but feasible without bothering with the UI.

It would be really cool to have a on/off switch for this rule in game under options to please any purist sandboxers who do SP and do not care about balance.

I figure the switch would determine whether an aerospace complex gives the satellite bonus, and then anyone who wants to play the old style can just disable the new "space" facility.

[Lord Avalon]

In "reality" a base could be built around a sensor, just as cities have developed around forts/castles.

What if in addition to being something a former can build, a sensor were also a base facility, and therefore something a base could put up after being established, and something which a probe team could sabotage?  Possibly also something that has a chance of being taken out by artillery or air strike, because it's sensitive equipment on an exposed tower.

[Yitzi]

In "reality" a base could be built around a sensor, just as cities have developed around forts/castles.

What if in addition to being something a former can build, a sensor were also a base facility, and therefore something a base could put up after being established, and something which a probe team could sabotage?  Possibly also something that has a chance of being taken out by artillery or air strike, because it's sensitive equipment on an exposed tower.

What you're describing seems a lot like renaming the Geosynchronous Survey pod and putting it lower on the tech tree.

[Lord Avalon]

Ha, go figure.  I never build those.  But why shouldn't a base be able to build sensors?  And if it needs a tech, it should be a beginning one.