First off let me just place you in a scenario. After long and grueling combat with many sacrifices the fate of your empire is finally clear. Your largest fleet has been decimated and nothing stands between the aliens and your final system, they will arrive in lets say 10 turns. Now in normal ES you may just quit out and move on to your next game knowing nothing can be done or you may have your valiant last stand. What if the player was given a final ditch effort option?



The Idea

What I'm thinking of really is a sort of emergency build option only usable in war times and for a limited perion, for ease of maths lets say 10turns maximum. So in the above scenario you have no ships, you have no defence of your final system but by activating this emergency build your entire systems resources and populace is poured into the industry doubling your output. Lets say your ships take 2 turns to build, you would have 5 by the time the enemy arrives whereas with the emergency build you could build 10 which may just be enough to beat the enemy off and keep you in the game.



Possible balancing

As mentioned above this would be a system you could only activate in war time and would have to have penalties that would make you consider twice before activating it. So lets say the option only has a maximum activation time of 10 turns during which industry is doubled for the system. However activating this option means the entire populace man, woman and child is forced to work day and night in order to meet these demands having an obvious severe effect on system approval. This could lead to riots and revolts very quickly. As another form of balance there would be side effects to the system after the emergency build either expires or is deactivated by the player. Due to the incredible work load placed on the populace and infrastructure the industry would be in shambles so once the emergency build stops industry is halved for however long you had the build activated (eg. the E-build was active for the full 10 turns so your industry is halved in that system for 10 turns. Now those ships that normally take 2 turns to build take 4 instead for the next 10 turns.)



Those are the main ways I thought that this option could be balanced but one I was playing around with was this. Due to everyone working day in day out for a long period of time and with health and safety out the window accidental deaths would become a common occurence in the system and due to everyone working rather than copulating the emergency build could have a severe impact on colony growth rate or even start to reduce the population if the system has a low amount of food available.



So that is my proposed idea. I just like the thought that during your final hour the populace can be forced to work together in one last ditch attempt to hold of the invaders rather than "oh well I've lost this round time to start a new map". Let me know what you think guys and be gentle this is my first post on the forum also sorry to the mods if this is in the wrong place.

moved to the correct session./

Ah sorry about that I'm not really great with forum navigation.

I dunno, on normal difficulty, I've only lost the first game of 3 and I honestly can't see myself losing a game on normal difficulty. It just reads like you want a built-in cheat to get around the fact that you can't manage dust? Besides, if you only have one system left, what would it matter? Maybe you have too much of an emotional attachment to your planet, race or empire?

I think it would be interesting to have the option to overwork systems for a short period of time at the cost of incredible unhappiness afterwords.

maybe on multi-player games because on single player if i see i am losing system after system i just quit and start over or load a previous saved game

DracuSRL wrote:
maybe on multi-player games because on single player if i see i am losing system after system i just quit and start over or load a previous saved game

Where is the spirit in that. Losing systems should just make you want to try harder!