whilst i’m in the mood for throwing out ideas, hirelings, a new fleet troop type. Similar to droids/TO in that you don’t get them on all races but you can build them to give a non-scaling flat bonus to your buildings.
1 only affects a single building and so it’s not super overpowered as you need to make sure that their cost is worth it but each of them adds 1 to the output of the building. This is more effective for buildings that produce less but this can be offset with training costs, they are originally built using the building type and their is an additional cost to change their trade (for example you build 1000 for Mining Facilities but it will cost a lot more than building 1000 for Hydroponic Farms, the cost to retrain also changes depending on their new trade)
Since their output cannot be scaled, it is not only easier to implement, you don’t have to worry about balancing as much since planet or science bonuses don’t do squat. It just finds how many are active (say 1000 active on CF (having more than or equal to 1000 CF)) and adds that number of the produce (say 1000 more gold). Any number of hirelings more than the number of target builds are inactive and do not produce anything but still have upkeep cost, meaning they cannot be mass manufactured hoping for them to come in handy 2 weeks away but they can be useful to stack up before your MFs or whatever finish building.
I give to you the following complete example:
You are at the start of round, your banker is building his home planet’s CFs, eships and whatever else. Your banker has a leftover stack of withering away resources at his disposal and is not happy to put anything into science funds. Well, now he may be tempted as he can build 250 hirelings that will give him another 250 gold per tick, by his 9th planet, he could have an extra 1800+ space to build CFs, he does just that along with put a cheeky 250 on his HP. Now he has well over 2000 CFs as well as spare resources, if he builds 2000 hirelings for his CF, he can have that extra 2k gold per tick. He also scored some early science funding due to his hirelings paying him some extra cash back, now he’s balling and rolling in a slight advantage over custom bankers that didn’t take the hirelings. Later in the round, he has 100k CFs and 50k TO as well as some lasers, RC and 100k hirelings. Now this glorious pudding has 100k gold advantage per tick over his fellow custom bankers that didn’t take the hirelings.
Similarly for resources, that could be an extra 60k iron per tick and 10k endo per tick in a mid-round scenario, suck on that non-hireling taking custom resourcers, ya loonies.
Anyway, idea over, they are more expensive for lower yielding trades (MF/RS) and cheaper for higher yielders (HF/CF) because it balances. They can be retrained for a cost (again more or less expensive depending on which trade they go to (which sounds horrible for swapping from RS to MF but that’s because it is, it should 100% be expensive twice, they are a powerful tool).
Just another one for the void I imagine.