Weapon manufacturing

Alright, who's ready for another long suggestion that adds complexity in ways no one really asked for?

To start off let's talk about what needs to change. Weapons would have a limited amount available for vehicle creation. You could extend this to everything in a way, chassis/engines/armor whatever but I suggest keeping it to weapons for now. You would get new weapons to add on to tanks over time. The commander gets to decide how to allocate what gets priority in the manufacturing process.

The idea here is that there would be a new menu for commanders, called manufacturing. In it the commander would change what weapons get built faster. I would think it could be simple slider bars to say which weapon type gets priority out of a 100%.

Or it could be made so every individual item is in there. You get x amount of points that could be divvy up between every thing. I would imagine every point is a time multiplier, decreasing build time for a new weapon. You can either have everything at least set to 1, or the default would be 0, meaning it's not getting built at all.

About that x amount of points and how to speed up production. Personally I'm partial to the idea of a new building, but I think it would be simpler to tie to how many vehicle factories you have. It might be best to have it at least set to 1 so things are always being built, considering how long it might take a vf to get up and how much harder it would be for the losing team to get back on their feet. I wouldn't know if the first vf doesn't count, or it does increase production if you did it like that though, I'd be fine with either way.

I would think that every weapon would have some build time variable, so different weapons take longer to make, like nukes taking a few minutes or std cannon taking 30 seconds. It would certainly make sense if chassis were added to it for heavier tanks to take longer to manufacture then light tanks which could be popped out like every 30-45 seconds. I wouldn't know if there should be a cap of how many you can stockpile though, I kinda like how towards the end of the game there's quite a few light tanks stock piled but not many heavy tanks so you supplement them with a bunch of lights assuming chassis were added. For weapons it's the same deal really, std mls would have a ton of them by the end but something like uml would be rarer, so tanks would go to repair pads to constantly outfit as newer weapons come available.

I should mention that weapons and anything else you added to it would still cost resources to actually build from he vf menu. While it might be neat to have it take from the res pool as it constantly built new weapons, it would conflict with the wage system. Sure you could make it so tanks built with wages bypass everything, but then they need full amount which can be tricky to get and if it did dip into the res pool there wouldn't be much point to this suggestion at all. So I would keep it simple and just keep res cost and manufacturing separate entities.

So pros include:

• More control for commanders
• More value to space and building extra buildings
• Weapons can have stats increased/decreased because it takes time, you don't have to worry about what if someone spams 20 of them in an instant
• More value to lighter chassis due to plentiful supply of weapons for them but not for the better weapons/chassis

Cons include:

• Might make it harder for a losing team to make a comeback
• Strategies of spamming certain vehicle setups will go out the window, though nothing says they can't stockpile then do a massive build for a rush
• Might make it more painful when that new player takes one of the fancy weapons and loses the tank a minute later

Could be considered good or bad depending on who you talk to:

• Slows games down
• It reduces spam which empire seems to run off of