Pacifists and Planet Busters

[bvanevery]

Well, "empty slots" can go away.  There's no reason a modern computer has to have a finite number of units.  Or, the finite number can be quite large, larger than what anyone will practically use.  32 bits would be overkill for manual specification.  16 bits is probably sufficient.

By the same token, the idea of retiring or obsoleting units doesn't make any modern sense.  That's like the player manually garbage collecting everything.

You might have piles of unit designs and 1 you want to get to though.  I'm thinking you'd have a full screen of unit thumbnails, rather than just the small window in SMAC.  Unit design would definitely be its own entire screen, you wouldn't be looknig at the map.

This is even assuming that designing units, or even having units, is important to a 4X TBS game.  I've often thought that we've been made to count "one by one" about far too many things.  If you want to send 200 units of force into a fight, you don't really want to have to push around 200 units to do it.  You want more abstract notions of controlling force.

[JMN4444]

That probably makes sense. There had been lots of instances where the workshop gets filled up with unnecessary units that you won't likely use. Especially if the reactors come crashing by..... ECM garrison, Trance garrison,  ECM laser garrison,  Trance Laser garrison ECM 3 Res Garrison....  The list just goes on......

There was also the OBSOLETE curse that happens when you discover a new reactor.  There is an option to disable auto pruning, but it'll be an issue if you don't know about it.

[bvanevery]

I'm totally living with the cramped workshop right now.  My mod puts Fusion engines almost at the end of the tech tree.  This causes a lot of old unit designs to pile up.  On the other hand, I'm not sure that putting it earlier would actually solve much.  Might lessen it a bit, but I don't think that's a tradeoff worth making.