I have tried to change some main buildings for other purposes - now I like to report my experience.
How it came:
The idea is an old one, I tried this when I run out of buildings which could be moddified. So I tried to use the 5 primitive farms for new buildings - and it didn't work (surprise, surprise).
The I tried to let one empire use the main buildings from another one to free up the then useless main buildings - and it didn't work (surprise, surprise).
Then I took a look at the wonderfull BoP-mod, where a lot of upgrades for main buildings aren't used any more and that was a little inspiring.
The idea:
I wanted to creaty an elite university with 2 upgrade levels, so I took the last three upgrades of the (romulan) university and changed them with UE, so they were no normal univerity upgrades, but upgrades of their one.
Then I renamed them to new "elite university", made them "ones per system" and increased the output to 120, 180, 240 for the three levels.
Then I took the BotF_Editor.exe (the BotF Building Editor v 2.53) to modifiy them to non-manned buildings (had the last time big trouble doing this with UE, but that could be caused by other things). But I think I will use the elite university as a manned main building.
How BotF behave on this:
First, the elite university don't work as a single building. It addes itself to the normal universities and that means, if one has 15 universities and one elite university, it makes 16 science buildings.
Even if the elite is changed to an unmanned building it adds itself! But than the last science building will get unmanned between turns!
The output of the single elite university is calculated by botf as added portion to any science building, which is like the not working "% science building bonus".
>>> edit 2009-05-11 <<<Guess>>> edit 2009-05-11 <<<
I started a game one level lower than needed for elite university. When I reached level, I didn't see the building in the building list.
I will edit first elite to tech 1 and then see what happened.
>>> end of editing <<<
- I don't know if the AI is using this changes in the correct way?
Possible use of this modification:
It this would work as intended, this could substitute some special buildings - if one likes the idea of having the phoenix, the subatomic simulator, the theory simulator and other energy driven buildings replaced by manned buildings.
With such modds there can be buildings freed for other use as creating a second special minor building.
Be inspired to discuss that...
