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Buildings are intended to provide some incentives for and rewards for building up strongly defended homeworlds. However, in some cases, players have asked for or expressed expectations about buildings which are not realistic.
1. Buildings are lost (destroyed into rubble) if a planet is lost by a player for any reason. Production buildings are not attackable other than by ground forces, and are only lost if the planet is lost (or given away or left). These buildings only have one simple function -- they affect production points in some way. Some building produce resources, some convert resources, and some produce shield points. These three types of structures are illustrated in the first three building types proposed:
Shield generator - converts energy into shield points, effectively adding +1 to shield and -1 point to energy. Points are not created, but shifted from one type of production point to another with this building. Energy production can therefore be negative, with energy consumed to feed the shields strength.
Power plant - converts hydrogen into energy, effectively adding +1 production point to energy and -1 production point to hydrogen. Similar in function to shield generator as a production point converter, which does not create anything but transforms one resource into another.
Iron ore mine - this building creates iron from the ground. This is a very simple, and yet, very useful building to make, and since iron will be used in making other buildings as well as in making ships, demand for iron is likely to increase if buildings become popular, so an iron mine will be needed.
For each of these production buildings, we should keep number of levels of buildings and contruction costs simple. I have stated that I do not want to have more than three levels of each of these buildings, at least at first, and I would like to have the cost of each level increase by either the multiple of the level or by doubling of the prior level.
2. Defensive buildings, turrets, have a different nature than production buildings. These buildings must be attackable by fighters, and are an easier way of having active defense of planets than by creating fighters with autoattack. These are essentially fighter ships on a planet, although they will not be written that way in the code. Unlike fighters, however, I would like to have these structures have a probability of being killed by any ship which is a function of ship attack strength. The buildings do not suffer damage, or damage is automatically repaired, unless they are killed. Any ship with any attack would have a chance of killing a turret, but a fighter with 21k attack would be three times as likely to kill a turret as a fighter with 7k of attack. This makes it much easier to implement attack and defense modules and to add turrets into the game. Any other form of implementation would take significantly longer, and essentially would mean it would not be possible to have turrets done by December round.
At the same time, it is quite possible to have turrets be designed either as large structures that are very hard to kill which will require a lot of fighter attacks, but only a few of them can be built (three levels), or to have turrets be small and weak, but permit many of them to be built on a planet, with a fighter shoting at each turret and being shot at by each turret until it gets past them all or is killed. A player might be able to have 100 of these weak and small turrets, which would mean that an untrained fighter would be able to kill a few of them (and a trained fighter significantly more due to both higher attack and higher defense to be able to shoot longer at them), but eventually, with 100 turrets, the planet would win. But, the next fighter might only see 85 turrets, then 65, then 35, then none, as the few turrets left, the higher the probability would be of the fighter surviving to kill them all.
Either big strong turrets or little weak turrets (e.g., 2k attack strength per turret) can be implemented, but not both. We do not have time to do both, and I do not want to have two types of turrets in the game. One is enough.
Choices we have to make now are:
1. Cost of production / conversion buildings to build level 1 structures
2. Which type of turrets, big or small, are better
3. Cost of turrets for whatever type of turret we implement
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thats not simple its gonna take me 20mins to read it 