More Basic Buildings

[Lynx Shaman]

What if each material had a basic building that it could build multiples of? Aluminum's got Warehouses (Storage Bonus), and Steel's got Cannons (Attack Bonus), but Glass, EUR, and Diamond lack that initial boost. If each material had something like that, perhaps it would give each material its own strength during the rebuilding process. Here's a couple ideas on what could be done, although I'm sure that better ideas could be thought of:

Glass could be given a Greenhouse advantage (a Supply Bonus), by making it so that multiple Greenhouses could be built (max 5, or something like that, with a chance of growing food in EACH of them each cycle).

For EUR, you might have Power Collectors (giving a Power Bonus), which could have a random chance of generating 1 free power for each Collector that had been built. If it was desired to sweeten these further, it might also be capable of using this power to fuel construction.

Perhaps Diamonds could be used to build Shields. These wouldn't have much effect beyond providing expendable buildings to be destroyed, while preserving buildings that have more use (which would be a nice Defense Bonus).

Just a few thoughts. I'm sure some of you could come up with better ideas.

[psiweapon]

Hey, those sound good! But the glass one sounds soo good that it sounds exploitable. Anyway, I'd like to see those ideas put into action.

[Lynx Shaman]

It could also result in quick overflow, though, as you could potentially be gaining more materials than you can store.

[jc]

Then turn off Greenhouse use?

Or use the Food to change between two governments over and over. Seriously, extra Food can never do any harm. If you have any amount of Food beyond 1, you can get rid of all of it without any downside, simply by switching Governments... So, in fact, it's almost always better to earn TWO Food, instead of one, unless you're going to use one for something else (ie inciting revolt, etc.)...

[psiweapon]

I think that 3 greenhouses max would be better, 5 sounds overkill. But I think that would kill the idea of the desert being arid and so on... perhaps we should look at the other uses of glass: spying, outposts... and just shields for coal miners sounds a little bit lame. But I could be wrong :S

[Lynx Shaman]

Well, those were just a couple ideas. If anyone else has some, toss them up. Let the discussion continue!

[Rasteroid]

I may allow more greenhouses; I've actually been meaning to work over the way Food is produced so it's not just stuffy percentages, more like it should have its own PM scale.

However, Steel and ALU are the basic building materials, the others are for more interesting effects. It's pretty nicely balanced, I'm not about to throw that off by giving uro/sand/dmnd a lot of other things to be spent on.