Kooky ideas, based on WWII tech (and a tiny bit of SE3).
- drop tank, one-shot range extension.
- They give +range (maybe +6 in GC3), but -agility while equipped.
- You drain them as dry as you can, then drop them before combat. This effectively gives you +range for "zero" cost ...
- ... except that constantly discarding a squadron's-worth of tanks every sortie gradually costs you in lost tanks and wasted fuel. That transforms the conflict into not just a tech duel, but a resource-stockpile duel, so the richer side can convert resource-advantage directly into combat-advantage (which is historically accurate).
- Corollary: If you never dogfight, you bring them home empty and lose nothing.
As a tech, it'd be moderately early and very cheap. As a resource drain, it'd be mild -- certainly less than the cost of losing one unit, and a small fraction of the ordnance they're going to deliver. But it's not zero. This concept may/not generalize to spacefaring ship warfare. (It seems to persist into the 21st century: we still equip fighters with conformal drop tanks, e.g. to enable F-15s to cross the Atlantic non-stop with no tanker buddy. The one with the tanks is the tanker for his flight.)
SE3/SE4 had some ship components that explored this niche (but really poorly thought out):
- [SE3,4] emergency speed, one-shot component (SE* models this as: right-click to access component's command menu; usage destroys component, like normal ship damage). Adds +2 squares movement to the ship for 1 turn (where normal movement is 8-15 hexes). Use at most 1 per turn.
That's completely worthless; it's not worth the opportunity cost of eating up 1 uber-precious component slot. So we players voted with our "feet", and unanimously relegated this category of component to the dunsel bin. I cannot imagine, to this day, a (legitimate) scenario where such a component pays off. Even the AIs agreed: zero of their own designs included it. SE5 quietly omitted (or extincted) these components. I'll have whatever the SE3 designers had when they thought this up.
- (abuse) self-repair infinite ship. In SE4, numerous techs gave components that were "one-shot" at medium-low tech, and "infinite for free" at extremely high techs. In early mid-game, you could design a ship large enough to carry a typical combat stack, a repair bay (which is just a component), and 1 each of several "one-shot" components. Every turn, you use every component once, and then it repairs itself
This broke the game: the ship basically gained permanent +speed, +other stuff, infinite range, and oh-by-the-way it could heal any battle damage. The first one you built simply dominated the entire map. Man those were fun ships -- but they trumped the game so bad they made it just-not-fun, and I ceased SE4.
It may have had a parallel in old piston-engine tech.
- copper wire, one-shot emergency speed.
- Restriction: only to air-cooled radial piston engines (blunt stubby noses, c.f. Corsair, Hellcat, Thunderbolt).
- Does not apply to water-cooled inline piston engines (tapered noses, c.f. Lightning, Mustang, Spitfire).
- Normal in-flight cooling is from airflow over the pistons. In your engine compartment is a reservoir of water. Across the upper limit of your throttle is a copper wire.
- In extreme duress, you ram throttle through the wire, breaking it. This punctures reservoir, dousing water over the pistons. For ~90 seconds, you get +10% hp (horsepower) beyond max military power, which sometimes lets you pull away from equally-fast enemy fighters (and open a gap sufficient to turn 180, as needed).
- This may crack the cylinders, and generally damage or ruin the engine. After it returns you home safely
, maybe you replace the engine, and your discolored shoes.
This is an anachronism of propeller tech. Jets and turboprops don't have anything equivalent. (Jets have their own variant, called afterburners.)
For interstellar ship engines, we obviously have artistic license to make them any way we want. So the decision rests on game-play or storytelling issues:
- Are there interesting trade-offs? (e.g. drop tanks for resource-dueling may suit a game that emphasizes resources)
- Does it add cognitive burden? (more micro is really bad) Can we abstract it away? (e.g. just make it a tax on your resources)
- Does it add nonesuch benefits? (e.g. heroic/legendary escape could leverage RPG or singular-figure game systems)
These ideas might not fit GC* at all. Most of these concerns are intrinsically small-unit level in scope, e.g. they matter very much to 1 pilot at a time, or to a squadron, or maybe to a theater air boss, but probably make no difference at a Joint Chiefs level of planning. GC3 abstracts everything planetside, but ships are still modeled individually, so there's room to explore this mechanism.
The high-level idea is that a tech doesn't just give you a flat bonus, but creates a new sideflow(?) of resource-to-bonus, for some input resource R and transform function f(R). (Exemplar: Enable Tourism +1, which creates a new sideflow of zoc-to-income.) Then you must have R, and actually commit it to buy your bonus. Much later on, you'd get a tech that just trumps any such bonus, at which point you may or may not upgrade everything.
Maybe this idea is best in slow-tech games, where war-duration is much shorter than tech-creep, so that there is a need to wield your strengths outside of your tech. If you're going to reach the high tech before your slow weenies even reach Kona's backfield, then this idea is just a big detour.
GalCiv3 Forums
This broke the game: the ship basically gained permanent +speed, +other stuff, infinite range, and oh-by-the-way it could heal any battle damage. The first one you built simply dominated the entire map. Man those were fun ships -- but they trumped the game so bad they made it just-not-fun, and I ceased SE4.
, maybe you replace the engine, and your discolored shoes.
i guess that's where these things are. What did the targeting computers and zone of control modules do?