Interesting ideas i come up with thread

[N35t0r]

Answering in the help forum about cities that can or can't build ships or sea-related improvements, i came upon an idea...

A space scenario, using 9-tile planets with 'cities' being founded on the center tile, could still be enabled to build 'sea units' (large spaceships, usually), and then 'launched' (paradropped) to one of the 'coastal' tiles in the planet, thus enabling it to head away from the planet.

This, however, would make a quite interesting game enabling planet bombardment (which is disabled if the sub tag is used) to clear space for 'planetheads', but still requiring the planet to be captured using ground forces.

the only inconvenient is that the AI is unable to cope with this.

any ideas?

[techumseh]

You could use Merc's Civfort utility to add an airbase to each ocean (space) square to allow any ship with warp/hyper drive to 'jump' from anywhere.

[Mercator]

Very interesting...

You could also have just a limited amount of airbases and call them Wormholes, or something.

Well, since all ships should be able to paradrop (to get off a planet), it wouldn't really be possible to have warp speed for only some ships. Unless you'd give most ships a paradrop distance of 2, and warp-capable ships a much larger paradrop distance.

With spaceships being ships, you could also let them have their own fighter fleets, if you make them carriers. Fighters only have limited range and are usually capable of landing on a planet, so that'd be perfect.

When you paradrop a carrier/transport, do sleeping units get carried along with it?

It wouldn't really be possible to "colonize" new planets, though, except with the use of a house rule. Well, maybe in ToT it could work, if you make the "coastal" tiles impassable terrain, which only settlers can't pass. They'd need to be able to paradrop to get off a planet, of course (or get carried along on a transport, if the answer to my earlier question is "yes"). That way you can only settle on the central squares.

[techumseh]

Paradrop range is set in the @COSMIC field. It's the same for all units. Paradroping ships always carry their cargo with them, whether it's ground units, air units or missiles; yes, you can make para aircraft carriers and subs. Such units may jump from a sea square if there's an airfield in it; however they must drop on a land square even if they're a ship unit.

In Test of Time it's possible to use a second map as hyper-space and give unlimited GROUND movement by setting the terrain MP to zero. Unfortunately air and naval units always spend 1 mp per square. Units can either move between maps at teleporter sites, or can be given intrinsic ability to move between maps. Or they can be limited to only one map.

[N35t0r]

Hmm... i didn't know about airbases in ocean tiles, but Techumseh is right, you can only paradrop to a land tile.

But it can still be done to allow for capital ships to return to cities (can they? i'll set up a test...), though they will still be able to bombard from there...


[Edit:]
Yes, you can paradrop into a land tile and then enter a city.

[N35t0r]

Hmm, but it would be possible to fashion in-out warp gates occupying two tiles, with the airbase icon as the entrance tile and a land tile with an according graphic as an out tile...