Neutral bases which trade goods

[glutamate]

The idea would be to have rare, small neutral bases set up with map generation.

They would produce one or more items in exchange for you providing something else. They could have unique building art to give them a bit of character.

So maybe you find a small military-themed outpost who'll provide you with 1 productivity module for every 20 machine guns they receive.

- Exploration is fun. Currently there is very little reason to explore long distances. Hunting for an interesting station in your car would be fun.
- Building a railway/other supply line to somewhere distant is fun.
- Having each game be a little different because you found a different base adds replayability.

The work it would require would be the programming to add this to the map generator, some nice building art assets and some balancing for the formula of what to generate as exchange options.

For balancing:

Tech level of goods provided by a generated base could be limited based on some combination of:
- How distant the base is to your starting location (longer railway = better goods)
- Time played
- Your tech level
- Your pollution level
- Your total output

Just so you can't "cheat" the tech tree, but that it's still worth setting up the link.

What are your thoughts?

[ssilk]

Yes. Another example: To whatever reason, you cannot assemble green circuits. You find an outpost, where assembling machines stands, which can, but you need all your copper and iron to there.

This becomes then a game like OpenTTD, where you need to bring oil to the refinery, bringing that to a factory, which makes goods, which needs to be brought to a city. And all by automated transport of course.