So this Is my idea.



Why not have the ability to divert excess Food and Industry to other systems. For example by diverting industry to systems that border onto another faction you could create "stronghold" systems, designed to output fleets quickly in response to hostile factions. This would not only be useful, but tactically interesting. If the enemy is able to take over your stronghold, they inherit the ability to pump out fleets directly into your empire. This could result in players needing to think out a rather complex system in which they can get fleets to the front line quickly, without putting too many eggs in one basket. Some players may prefer to build their strongholds further into the system since they would be too valuable to be lost.



Other ideas would be that you can divert food to developing systems, depriving the donor system of food, but encouraging super-quick growth at the receivers end. You would then have the opportunity to quickly raise difficult systems with barren/gas giant planets etc. without immediate terraforming. It would require players to be extremely careful about how they divert food, if they divert too much to frontier planets, then the inner planets will have halted growth, on the other hand it means that players can expand much faster and create much more tension at the beginning of the match.



The 2 methods would be interlinked. If you have a well set up empire, with industry diverted to the front line to produce ships, you can put constant pressure on the enemy systems. Now divert food to those front line systems and you can convert the excess food to industry, further boosting the production rate of ships. If you do manage to take an enemy system you would then be able to divert all food to it to get it up to max population, improve it and then have it replace the previous stronghold- which would then become a donor system.



Realistically this would probably have to be multiplayer only as the AI is not that great and I don't think would be able to cope with building up war fronts, but who knows! I believe that this would add more of a tug-of-war feel to going to war, and would make games pretty tense between players. It also would get players to start thinking about the best set up for their empire, do they really need to build food improvements on front line systems if they can divert food from other systems? Is it better to have stronghold systems at the front lines, or distributed throughout the empire as a backup?



On the practicalities of this, you would have 3 system categories;



"Stronghold"- Industry and Food is diverted to these systems.

"Agrarian"- Food only is diverted to these systems.

"Industrial"- Only industry is diverted to these systems.



Say you have 3 Agrarian systems, excess food is diverted to these systems in equal amounts (1/3,1/3,1/3). The same would apply to Industrial systems.

If you have 1 Agrarian systems, 2 Industrial and 3 Stronghold systems then; 0.25 Food to Agrarian, 0.75 Food to Stronghold, 0.4 Industry to Industrial and 0.6 Industry to Stronghold systems.



I would love your input as to whether you think this is a good idea, and any ideas on how directing the flow of Food/Industry could be managed, as well as other ideas.

Sorry, but I don't think this is a good idea.

It would simply break the game mechanics.

With this system everyone simply would divert industry to the outpost and build all the defense improvements and make them to full colonies (in terms of pop and improvements) in only a few turns.

It would also result in a position warfare as everyone would simply build a lot of ships in their frontern systems.

Diverting some food at the cost of some industry and dust could be a good idea.

Although diverting industry seems overpowered, and the fact of having strongholds could end up being strategic points that you can't afford losing.

Actually that sounds like a much better idea to have it cost you to divert Food and maybe industry. That way the strategic advantage of having strongholds would come at a hefty dust price. Also maybe limiting the number of stronghold planets depending on the game size (eg. 2 for medium, 3 for Large, 4 for massive) to prevent players from dominating? I just feel that Food is pretty useless later on in the game unless you have Adaptive Industrial Systems, and this might be a better use for it.

i agree with Lord_S



only way that i can imagine this is with only Food and with a low Percentage divert. And only unlockable via high end technology.

That's what I'm asking, I want to know HOW it could work! So forget the industry part, but diverting food at dust cost would be pretty neat right?