GALAXY: A transport by any other name? From: amead@s.psych.uiuc.edu (Alan Mead) Date: Fri, 31 Jul 1992 18:08:10 +0000 A lot of people (including Galaxy's creator) seem to want to complicate the development side of the game by mucking with the "transport" design. [Can you determine my opinion? :) ] How do you hope to operationalize a "transport"? Once you put a gun or a shield on a ship, it is no longer a "transport"? What if you build a [10 1 10 10 10] ship? Could that be a transport? And I don't think this is trivial... If Bampton's victim had built armored transports like [2 0 0 1 1], then Bampton would have been in even more trouble. And I'm not at all sure that the fact that large transports are rarely used represents a game flaw. It simply means that people are not shielding their freighters. And *that* implies, IMHO, that the Galaxy galaxy is just a relatively safe place. Certainly, that could be changed. --- [Tangentially releated to this, some one asked about transporting Materials. I once calculated the "tonnage" each of my planets produced. I think the difference for a fully developed world of size 900 between having a materials value of 10 and a value of .1 was on the order of 20 "tons". So you definitely wouldn't get much of a pay-back from building ships to transport MAT. You might set unused ships to hauling MAT, but I really mean unused (because at the same time, you have to devote a world or two with good materials value to producing MAT instead of ships).] --- I think a much better improvement to the transportation part of the game would be: - ability to haul ships (of any sort) - new resource, AGIcultural product. It would be just like MAT except it would be neccessary or else your population would start to diminish (die, be frozen, etc). Then abolish population levels (and if your pop rises above the level supportable by that world's AGI value+the amount of AGI stockpiled, you'd start freezing them) What does the net think? -alan mead Up