I was reading through the thread where people had mistaken the placeholder graphics for the new ships, and a few thoughts occured to me:
I believe I heard someone once mention the gifting of ships being allowed in Diplomacy, so why not also allow limited trade of space ship specifications between allies of different species? It shouldn't, ostensibly, cause any imbalancing issues as each side would have the same opportunity and they'd still take up the same fleet space. I would limit the number of vessels you can reproduce in a similar manner as Star Control 2 did - you need special captains to man the ships. As allies are not always permanent in Sins, a special cross-training tech could be listed in the Diplomacy branch and once it has been acheived AND you have an ally that agrees to the infotradecan have a slow buildup of cross-trained captains (I would suggest some type of hard cap on the number, in order to maintain the high level of distinctiveness between the sides). If an alliance is broken, your ability employ captains for that side's ships is lost unless you have another ally of the same species who is also providing that trade to you.
One could set different research requirements to obtain each level of ship. Here's my quick mockup:
Diplomacy techs:
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starship plans, frigates - level 4
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starship plans, cruisers (non carrier) - level 5
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starship plans, carrier cruiser & strike craft - level 5 (another branch)
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starship plans, capital ships - level 7 (also requires strike craft tech)
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advanced/faster cross-training - level 5
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highly advanaced/superfast cross-training - level 6
pilots/cross trained points needed according to ship type:
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strike craft: 0, only available via carrier cruiser or capital ships
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frigates: 1
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cruisers: 3
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capital ships: 10 (also fills a cap ship crew slot)
Hardcap on cross-trained pilots/points: tie into overall fleet size increases and scale it up as you go. I would have something less than 100 (maybe 75?) as the absolute max, and start with something pretty small like 5. I would do this for a few reasons: if you're doing a full fleet of cap ships, you won't be able to just make it all "foreign," and the low amount to start with likely won't inhibit anyone as by the time you have the research to share then you'll have more significant fleet sizes. That would just limit weird AI's/players who just want to tech themselves out.
While you have a cap on your points, you will likely want them replenished as ships are destroyed. Alternatively, you could also have one-time buyouts of points, but I like the continual stream approach to better reflect the time investment. I'd go with something like this:
accumulation rate of pilots/points (only occurs after you have the trading tech and while you have an alliance with someone willing to share plans/training):
Well, thanks for following along if you've gotten this far. I hope it seems worthwhile to everyone else!
