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Author Topic:   Gravship formers

Fiannaidh posted 03-25-99 09:44 AM ET
Can grav ship formers go to a sea square and terraform it up until it becomes land? Can they terreform a land square until it become ocean? I ask because obviously regular sea/land formers cannot, and was wondering if grav ships could. Also, if you make a needlejet former, does it run out of fuel if it's terreforming? What about a 'Copter?
Plato90s posted 03-25-99 09:57 AM ET
You can't make air units [Needlejet, Gravship] into formers. No contact with the surface they are trying to modify.
Rawhide posted 03-25-99 10:58 AM ET
You can make Gravship Formers. They cannot raise land out of water. I haven't tried the other way.
Fiannaidh posted 03-25-99 06:25 PM ET
So, then, are there any suggestions on creating barrier reefs? (a small water area surrounded by land) Who thinks that we should have floating cities? I think that would be way cool. Can only be attacked by flying units, and can move 1 space per turn, they recieve +2 energy from all squares, normal nutrients, and -1 Minerals. No boreholes allowed, or condensers.
JRennison posted 03-26-99 12:19 PM ET
Floating cities! Excellent plan. To stop them from being too good, though, they should receive a penalty on production everytime they move, except from orbital stations. The only land units that could move into or out of them would have to kitted with drop pods or be aboard an air unit transport.
Excellent idea!
Fiannaidh posted 03-26-99 06:27 PM ET
Yeah, who wants to be a fungus anyway? maybe you get a choice, you can build floating cities, or transcend? If you chose the cities, Firaxis would have to make a whole lot of new tech's though, so that's probably not going to happen, but floating cities would definately be the plan for those of us who don't want to give up our super sexy bodies to become fungus.
eNo posted 03-26-99 09:31 PM ET
Would't floating cites be essentially a big boat and hence can be attack by boats?
NotLikeTea posted 03-27-99 02:01 PM ET
I think floating refers to flying.
Of course, any floating city with riots for more than one turn would crash to land/sea, becoming either a land base, losing all facitities and 3/4 of the population, or land in the sea and sink like a stone.
Fiannaidh posted 03-27-99 02:14 PM ET
Nah, the flight controls would be controlled by a sentient computer, riots wouldn't affect that, it would be more likely to riot though because some citizens would be paranoid/afraid. So, -1 minerals, no raise/lower terrain, no condensers, no boreholes, +1-2 energy, normal nuitrients, +1 drones, 1 movement point, can only be attacked from air (drop troops included) +100% defense. Must have pressure dome (high altitude, thin air), if that is compromised by attack (1/10 chance of dome buckling every attack) you loose half population, but no facilities. If base is destroyed it crashes, destroying everything within 2 squares of where it hit.
These are just suggestions, come on, this could be cool.
ApcJK posted 03-27-99 02:30 PM ET
yeah... a floating city might be a good idea... but what about the SPs? It's a bit fun to imagine a flying... Transit system?
Hmm... building the command nexus might be more logical though... A moving supreme command center... would make some sense...
But maybe SPs shouldn't be allowed for a floating city? Uhh... well how would they be built? Built like a new unit? Or making one of the existing bases a floating city? what about the sps in there then?
Lots of questions there...
Fiannaidh posted 03-27-99 07:09 PM ET
You could either A) build a gravship colony pod with the special ability floating city, or B) construct the anti-grav lift base facility.
Asher Kohn 656 4 posted 03-31-99 02:43 PM ET
I think this is a cool idea, FIANNAIDH, or however you spell it, should E-Mail the Firaxis Webmaster to tell them his/her idea, I guess Firaxis could make an expansion pack of sorts with this in it, I guess floating cities are a lot like orbitals, so they should be complete with Pressure Domes. Good Idea!
RandomAction posted 04-01-99 06:58 AM ET
Fiannaidh floating cites = brilliant idea. It would really expand the game in interesting directions. In another forum someone had the idea to have underground transportation. I thought that was a pretty cool idea as well, what do you think?
madfly posted 04-01-99 08:40 AM ET
FIANNAIDH, do it!!!!
Floating Fiannidh!!! Also, if or when it's included in the expansion pack, FIANNAIDH should be including in names for the cities!!! Credit where credit is due!
Brill Idea!!!
Neil
Fiannaidh posted 04-01-99 09:04 AM ET
Hmm, now, what about the land around the base, does the base use whatever land it happens to be over, or does it take a big chunk of ground up with it, leaving a crater behind? I think that it would balance the bases best if it used whatever land was below it, although it is a less realistic option than taking the ground with it. If you were forced to leave enhancements behind as you moved, there would be less temptation to move your bases all over the map, except to get a better landmark. The problem with that is, that if you simply terraform the ground below you, any resource bonuses/penalties would only make sense if they were applied only to the base square. Gimme more suggestions, we gotta make this sound good to Firaxis!
Grug posted 04-01-99 08:34 PM ET
Just a question, by floating do you mean that it is the atmosphere hovering above the ground or in space?
Also, if it was in space, rather than having orbital improvements, how about building sky farms, orbital power plants connected to a base. The asteroids for Nessus mines could be random in the sky, like rocky terrain and mines could be built on them. However, all of the improvements would have to be connected to the base to work.
Fiannaidh posted 04-01-99 11:29 PM ET
Now there's a man with an idea! Orbiting colonies, hmmm... That is an excellent idea, but how would they be attacked? Could they be attacked by orbital defense pods? Could the pressure dome be compromised (which ought to be a risk with sea colonies)? Orbital bases would not move for conventional reasons, but to maintain a stable orbit, so the base would, by necessity have to carry all of its resources with it. Lots of new ideas, keep 'em comming
I would especially like to see flying bases, say a few thousand feet off the ground, huge, massive chunks of land clinging to it, a flying fortress.

Can Gravships Transports have Carrier decks? A flying fortress like that would be awesome. Also, about sea colonies, would undersea colonies be something we should consider here? What about mobile sea colonies? I mean, they are floating.
Quikness posted 04-02-99 12:05 PM ET
If you ask me, i think they should improve the space model all together. It seems a bit weak that people would launch satellites but not launch stations, hey, we are already launching a space station =p. I can't believe though that Sid Meier made the entire space model fit into a little panel...tisk tisk. Civ II was going in the right direction but SMAC seemed to take a left turn down the wrong road.
eNo posted 04-03-99 10:51 PM ET
I think sea colonies are underwater not floating on the surface. If they were floating they wouldn't need the pressure dome. The pressure dome icon also has water over the dome.
bobjob posted 04-04-99 06:45 AM ET
you might as well have orbital cities i'm sure they would be cheaper to keep in the air but you would REALLY need a pressure dome but then ou might as well be able to colonise other planets or moons.
firesky posted 04-04-99 11:25 PM ET
Oh Yeah, Great thread Topic..But I don't want to dismiss the Idea of Sub-Terrainian complexes entirely. The thought of vast empires completely under ground really starts the wheels turning. To see the look on Yang's face as a giant hole opens up in the center of his empire and 100 of my best tanks that I have been building for several turns pours on to his landscape would be a fair trade off to his floating city Technology....

Firesky
Proverb9 posted 04-05-99 10:41 PM ET
About the orbital colonies, what if they were attacked and destroyed? Would they crash into Planet? By the way, these are all GREAT ideas! I wonder why Firaxis didn't add these? To complex already?
eNo posted 04-05-99 10:46 PM ET
Back to the original topic. I find that a mix of Gravship and Hovertanks formers are the best because Hovertanks can use magtubes and their a lot cheaper. If you've got magtubes connecting all the cities, a tank former will take care of a bloom anywhere in the city within the turn. I use grav formers in outposts where magtubes aren't built yet and over water.
Fiannaidh posted 04-06-99 09:17 AM ET
I am hereby changing the official topic to floating/orbiting cities.
hehe
Orbital cities, how would you make them, would you launch a city into orbit, or create the city with an orbital colony pod?
Underground tunneling/cities is an intresting idea. Yang supposedly already has all his cities underground. A think a mineral bonus for underground cities would be appropriate, as well as a penalty for nuitrients.
JRennison posted 04-06-99 11:21 AM ET
This discussion is moving to features that, at best, might appear in Alpha Centauri II but I don't see it happening in a patch. For fear of spoiling the party, a quick reality check...
Floating cities: possible if not probable, as it means adding to a city object the ability to alter its position. Not so hard, maybe, but a lot to ask as it means re-writing the tech tree, designing graphics, sorting new sounds, speeches and altering several interfaces. Think about the impact on territory boundaries and the AI improvements. People are already upset enough with the AI as it is...
Orbital Cities: this is even less likely as the orbit interface is sparse to say the least and the code to write a new sub-game allowing orbital combat on a proper scale, questions of unit and terrain representation etc. are alarming to say the least. Maybe in an expansion of the game?
Underground Cities: No way, not happening except maybe in the sequel. You've got to add a whole set of new attributes, a new underworld playing area which, even if it was assumed only allowed factions to dig to a fixed depth beneath the surface, doubles the size of the map. Then there is all the units, etc. that apply to the other two ideas. Uh-uh. No way.
Cracking ideas, but don't get too upset when Firaxis replies to you with a (no doubt very) polite but forceful no way...
Mantis posted 04-06-99 01:12 PM ET
I know it was brought up a while back, but to spin back to it:
Land Locked Sea Cities, as in an ocean city surrounded by land.
It's a pain to get, but I have one! I had a wonderfully performing city on an island... Until the Hive Planet Bombed it.
The bomb left a reef with ocean four sqaures wide in it.
I set up a small city on the reef to act as a "canal" and sent though a sea colony pod and a sea former. I then set up sensors on the reef.
It works WONDERFULLY.
TheBard posted 04-09-99 12:29 AM ET
Floating Cities
an Essay on the possibilites and hindrences
Consider the applications of resource gathering... Water colonies have a problem with land, no? How much harder then for an airborne city to mine? How do they farm? There are three answers I can see...
In order to produce ANYTHING, a floating colony must LAND - that is, it must give up any flying defense benefits it once had in order to set down to work. The probelm with this system is the lack of food during flight periods. Or as a varient, perhaps installing the 'mag lev system' in the city turned it permenantly flying and destroyed most of its prduction capacity, but this is hardly practical.
The second option is that the flyer somehow supports workers with the increased energy needed to lev down to the planet surface; a permenant magnetic elevator apparatus that takes x amount of energy every turn where x is a function of the number of workers in the city. Or perhaps stacking a levitating transport would be enough... Alternatively, the floating city could have a 'dedicated city,' that is, a permenant home base that supplied it with all the resources necessery to operate -- an alternative way to deal with population in excess of worker capacity. Floating cities of this nature would really be more attack facilities .. in fact, if we couple the supported cities with the option to LAND, we now have a solution of sorts for the food problem ... provided the host city is in a sufficiently nutritious area.
The final option is that the floating city harvests resources from the sky by means of improvements such as hydroponics farms and solar collectors. The problem is that such improvements would look messy on the map and, given their nature to change position, would be hard to implement on the map. An the alternative to this, having the improvements only visible on the city screen, creates the problem of where the improvements come from and how they are built -- surely terraformers would be a problem.
THoughts to ponder
Condu posted 04-10-99 10:48 AM ET
I an but a newbie but everyone seems to be forgetting about supply crawlers. It seems to me that they solve this problem easily.
trippin daily posted 04-10-99 12:08 PM ET
lol hes right.. u may need drop pods r whatever.. but Condu is right... I don't know why this is even a topic, cause the chances of there being flying bases in smac is well slim to none...
Fiannaidh posted 04-12-99 08:52 AM ET
It doesn't matter whether its likely to happen, it's the fact that we're getting out new ideas, ideas that might lead to something that might happen . A floating city could carry its land with it, or recieve double bonuses from orbital facilities. Planet busters should have fallout, no?
Taika1 posted 04-13-99 08:25 PM ET
They should also make nicer looking craters- like garland crater.
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Author	Topic: Gravship formers
Fiannaidh	posted 03-25-99 09:44 AM ET Can grav ship formers go to a sea square and terraform it up until it becomes land? Can they terreform a land square until it become ocean? I ask because obviously regular sea/land formers cannot, and was wondering if grav ships could. Also, if you make a needlejet former, does it run out of fuel if it's terreforming? What about a 'Copter?
Plato90s	posted 03-25-99 09:57 AM ET You can't make air units [Needlejet, Gravship] into formers. No contact with the surface they are trying to modify.
Rawhide	posted 03-25-99 10:58 AM ET You can make Gravship Formers. They cannot raise land out of water. I haven't tried the other way.
Fiannaidh	posted 03-25-99 06:25 PM ET So, then, are there any suggestions on creating barrier reefs? (a small water area surrounded by land) Who thinks that we should have floating cities? I think that would be way cool. Can only be attacked by flying units, and can move 1 space per turn, they recieve +2 energy from all squares, normal nutrients, and -1 Minerals. No boreholes allowed, or condensers.
JRennison	posted 03-26-99 12:19 PM ET Floating cities! Excellent plan. To stop them from being too good, though, they should receive a penalty on production everytime they move, except from orbital stations. The only land units that could move into or out of them would have to kitted with drop pods or be aboard an air unit transport. Excellent idea!
Fiannaidh	posted 03-26-99 06:27 PM ET Yeah, who wants to be a fungus anyway? maybe you get a choice, you can build floating cities, or transcend? If you chose the cities, Firaxis would have to make a whole lot of new tech's though, so that's probably not going to happen, but floating cities would definately be the plan for those of us who don't want to give up our super sexy bodies to become fungus.
eNo	posted 03-26-99 09:31 PM ET Would't floating cites be essentially a big boat and hence can be attack by boats?
NotLikeTea	posted 03-27-99 02:01 PM ET I think floating refers to flying. Of course, any floating city with riots for more than one turn would crash to land/sea, becoming either a land base, losing all facitities and 3/4 of the population, or land in the sea and sink like a stone.
Fiannaidh	posted 03-27-99 02:14 PM ET Nah, the flight controls would be controlled by a sentient computer, riots wouldn't affect that, it would be more likely to riot though because some citizens would be paranoid/afraid. So, -1 minerals, no raise/lower terrain, no condensers, no boreholes, +1-2 energy, normal nuitrients, +1 drones, 1 movement point, can only be attacked from air (drop troops included) +100% defense. Must have pressure dome (high altitude, thin air), if that is compromised by attack (1/10 chance of dome buckling every attack) you loose half population, but no facilities. If base is destroyed it crashes, destroying everything within 2 squares of where it hit. These are just suggestions, come on, this could be cool.
ApcJK	posted 03-27-99 02:30 PM ET yeah... a floating city might be a good idea... but what about the SPs? It's a bit fun to imagine a flying... Transit system? Hmm... building the command nexus might be more logical though... A moving supreme command center... would make some sense... But maybe SPs shouldn't be allowed for a floating city? Uhh... well how would they be built? Built like a new unit? Or making one of the existing bases a floating city? what about the sps in there then? Lots of questions there...
Fiannaidh	posted 03-27-99 07:09 PM ET You could either A) build a gravship colony pod with the special ability floating city, or B) construct the anti-grav lift base facility.
Asher Kohn 656 4	posted 03-31-99 02:43 PM ET I think this is a cool idea, FIANNAIDH, or however you spell it, should E-Mail the Firaxis Webmaster to tell them his/her idea, I guess Firaxis could make an expansion pack of sorts with this in it, I guess floating cities are a lot like orbitals, so they should be complete with Pressure Domes. Good Idea!
RandomAction	posted 04-01-99 06:58 AM ET Fiannaidh floating cites = brilliant idea. It would really expand the game in interesting directions. In another forum someone had the idea to have underground transportation. I thought that was a pretty cool idea as well, what do you think?
madfly	posted 04-01-99 08:40 AM ET FIANNAIDH, do it!!!! Floating Fiannidh!!! Also, if or when it's included in the expansion pack, FIANNAIDH should be including in names for the cities!!! Credit where credit is due! Brill Idea!!! Neil
Fiannaidh	posted 04-01-99 09:04 AM ET Hmm, now, what about the land around the base, does the base use whatever land it happens to be over, or does it take a big chunk of ground up with it, leaving a crater behind? I think that it would balance the bases best if it used whatever land was below it, although it is a less realistic option than taking the ground with it. If you were forced to leave enhancements behind as you moved, there would be less temptation to move your bases all over the map, except to get a better landmark. The problem with that is, that if you simply terraform the ground below you, any resource bonuses/penalties would only make sense if they were applied only to the base square. Gimme more suggestions, we gotta make this sound good to Firaxis!
Grug	posted 04-01-99 08:34 PM ET Just a question, by floating do you mean that it is the atmosphere hovering above the ground or in space? Also, if it was in space, rather than having orbital improvements, how about building sky farms, orbital power plants connected to a base. The asteroids for Nessus mines could be random in the sky, like rocky terrain and mines could be built on them. However, all of the improvements would have to be connected to the base to work.
Fiannaidh	posted 04-01-99 11:29 PM ET Now there's a man with an idea! Orbiting colonies, hmmm... That is an excellent idea, but how would they be attacked? Could they be attacked by orbital defense pods? Could the pressure dome be compromised (which ought to be a risk with sea colonies)? Orbital bases would not move for conventional reasons, but to maintain a stable orbit, so the base would, by necessity have to carry all of its resources with it. Lots of new ideas, keep 'em comming I would especially like to see flying bases, say a few thousand feet off the ground, huge, massive chunks of land clinging to it, a flying fortress. Can Gravships Transports have Carrier decks? A flying fortress like that would be awesome. Also, about sea colonies, would undersea colonies be something we should consider here? What about mobile sea colonies? I mean, they are floating.
Quikness	posted 04-02-99 12:05 PM ET If you ask me, i think they should improve the space model all together. It seems a bit weak that people would launch satellites but not launch stations, hey, we are already launching a space station =p. I can't believe though that Sid Meier made the entire space model fit into a little panel...tisk tisk. Civ II was going in the right direction but SMAC seemed to take a left turn down the wrong road.
eNo	posted 04-03-99 10:51 PM ET I think sea colonies are underwater not floating on the surface. If they were floating they wouldn't need the pressure dome. The pressure dome icon also has water over the dome.
bobjob	posted 04-04-99 06:45 AM ET you might as well have orbital cities i'm sure they would be cheaper to keep in the air but you would REALLY need a pressure dome but then ou might as well be able to colonise other planets or moons.
firesky	posted 04-04-99 11:25 PM ET Oh Yeah, Great thread Topic..But I don't want to dismiss the Idea of Sub-Terrainian complexes entirely. The thought of vast empires completely under ground really starts the wheels turning. To see the look on Yang's face as a giant hole opens up in the center of his empire and 100 of my best tanks that I have been building for several turns pours on to his landscape would be a fair trade off to his floating city Technology.... Firesky
Proverb9	posted 04-05-99 10:41 PM ET About the orbital colonies, what if they were attacked and destroyed? Would they crash into Planet? By the way, these are all GREAT ideas! I wonder why Firaxis didn't add these? To complex already?
eNo	posted 04-05-99 10:46 PM ET Back to the original topic. I find that a mix of Gravship and Hovertanks formers are the best because Hovertanks can use magtubes and their a lot cheaper. If you've got magtubes connecting all the cities, a tank former will take care of a bloom anywhere in the city within the turn. I use grav formers in outposts where magtubes aren't built yet and over water.
Fiannaidh	posted 04-06-99 09:17 AM ET I am hereby changing the official topic to floating/orbiting cities. hehe Orbital cities, how would you make them, would you launch a city into orbit, or create the city with an orbital colony pod? Underground tunneling/cities is an intresting idea. Yang supposedly already has all his cities underground. A think a mineral bonus for underground cities would be appropriate, as well as a penalty for nuitrients.
JRennison	posted 04-06-99 11:21 AM ET This discussion is moving to features that, at best, might appear in Alpha Centauri II but I don't see it happening in a patch. For fear of spoiling the party, a quick reality check... Floating cities: possible if not probable, as it means adding to a city object the ability to alter its position. Not so hard, maybe, but a lot to ask as it means re-writing the tech tree, designing graphics, sorting new sounds, speeches and altering several interfaces. Think about the impact on territory boundaries and the AI improvements. People are already upset enough with the AI as it is... Orbital Cities: this is even less likely as the orbit interface is sparse to say the least and the code to write a new sub-game allowing orbital combat on a proper scale, questions of unit and terrain representation etc. are alarming to say the least. Maybe in an expansion of the game? Underground Cities: No way, not happening except maybe in the sequel. You've got to add a whole set of new attributes, a new underworld playing area which, even if it was assumed only allowed factions to dig to a fixed depth beneath the surface, doubles the size of the map. Then there is all the units, etc. that apply to the other two ideas. Uh-uh. No way. Cracking ideas, but don't get too upset when Firaxis replies to you with a (no doubt very) polite but forceful no way...
Mantis	posted 04-06-99 01:12 PM ET I know it was brought up a while back, but to spin back to it: Land Locked Sea Cities, as in an ocean city surrounded by land. It's a pain to get, but I have one! I had a wonderfully performing city on an island... Until the Hive Planet Bombed it. The bomb left a reef with ocean four sqaures wide in it. I set up a small city on the reef to act as a "canal" and sent though a sea colony pod and a sea former. I then set up sensors on the reef. It works WONDERFULLY.
TheBard	posted 04-09-99 12:29 AM ET Floating Cities an Essay on the possibilites and hindrences Consider the applications of resource gathering... Water colonies have a problem with land, no? How much harder then for an airborne city to mine? How do they farm? There are three answers I can see... In order to produce ANYTHING, a floating colony must LAND - that is, it must give up any flying defense benefits it once had in order to set down to work. The probelm with this system is the lack of food during flight periods. Or as a varient, perhaps installing the 'mag lev system' in the city turned it permenantly flying and destroyed most of its prduction capacity, but this is hardly practical. The second option is that the flyer somehow supports workers with the increased energy needed to lev down to the planet surface; a permenant magnetic elevator apparatus that takes x amount of energy every turn where x is a function of the number of workers in the city. Or perhaps stacking a levitating transport would be enough... Alternatively, the floating city could have a 'dedicated city,' that is, a permenant home base that supplied it with all the resources necessery to operate -- an alternative way to deal with population in excess of worker capacity. Floating cities of this nature would really be more attack facilities .. in fact, if we couple the supported cities with the option to LAND, we now have a solution of sorts for the food problem ... provided the host city is in a sufficiently nutritious area. The final option is that the floating city harvests resources from the sky by means of improvements such as hydroponics farms and solar collectors. The problem is that such improvements would look messy on the map and, given their nature to change position, would be hard to implement on the map. An the alternative to this, having the improvements only visible on the city screen, creates the problem of where the improvements come from and how they are built -- surely terraformers would be a problem. THoughts to ponder
Condu	posted 04-10-99 10:48 AM ET I an but a newbie but everyone seems to be forgetting about supply crawlers. It seems to me that they solve this problem easily.
trippin daily	posted 04-10-99 12:08 PM ET lol hes right.. u may need drop pods r whatever.. but Condu is right... I don't know why this is even a topic, cause the chances of there being flying bases in smac is well slim to none...
Fiannaidh	posted 04-12-99 08:52 AM ET It doesn't matter whether its likely to happen, it's the fact that we're getting out new ideas, ideas that might lead to something that might happen . A floating city could carry its land with it, or recieve double bonuses from orbital facilities. Planet busters should have fallout, no?
Taika1	posted 04-13-99 08:25 PM ET They should also make nicer looking craters- like garland crater.