neonstrom

You know what would probably be awesome? Mobile energy sources! When the going gets tough, all your energy activates wheels/legs/rollers and scoots away with your army!

Fast mobile solar trucks for light vehicles!

Jumpy jumping Windmill bots!

Floating Amphib tidal bots!

Tanky and explosive Mobile Fusions!

Giving players the option to build a less efficient but more mobile economy could lead to all sorts of shenanigans, it was pretty awesome in Imperial Winter, as the four or so people who played that game might testify!

no

Conch has a special power - it's amphib. Mason doesn't.

Fine, Mason. Whichever. There are still a bunch of cons with no special powers and a 1E energymake would be fun.

Adding gridding to that would be hard. Just letting it generate E like a comm is easy. Do the easy thing. 1E for a con. Personally I like the Conch just because it works nice with the ability to hide amphibs in random little pools and so it would be epic for surviving elimination in FFAs, Mason is good too.

I could see the Mason model open up to be a light solar collector when idle. Unfortunately the problem with putting significant energy generation on cons is that you are then concentrating two resources - energy and BP - onto a single unit.. risks being spammed

Having dedicated mobile E sources would make more sense. You could plan around a base trade and then take all your energy with you. You could fight a guerrilla war in a large game. You can mitigate starting on a weak front you expect to collapse midgame by moving all your e-sources somewhere safe. You could save money on porc by relying on energy with wheels to escape raiders.

OH I know!
Terraform could be restricted to Mason only, giving it a special power.
What do you think?

Not only is it a bad idea to restrict terraform to Masons, it's also impossible without a terra rewrite. Assist and Terraform are impossible to decouple under the current system, so any unit capable of assist can terra. The terraformer doesn't actually build the terra object, the gadget creates it and then the terraformer goes and works on it.

Pxtl a hacky way to implement it is thusly:
(psuedocode logic)

-[executed when any unit is selected by the player]
-IF selectedUnits(Mason)==false THEN
---drawGraphics(terraformButtons)=false
-END

-[executed when any terraform order is given by the player]
-IF unitOrder==terraformOrder THEN
----FOR i=1, #selectedUnits DO
-------IF unitName(selectedUnits[i])=~(Mason) THEN
----------blockUnitOrder
-------END
----END
-END

TheEloIsALie i must have misread the original idea. Hacky solution for that is as follows:
(pseudocode logic)

-[executed when any builder is given an order by any source]
-IF unitOrderQueue(newestOrder(targetType))==(terraformUnit) AND unitName=~("Mason") THEN
----blockOrder(newestOrder)
----deleteQueueOrder(newestOrder)
-END

(alternative)

alter all builder unit unitDefs to make badTarget[terraformUnit]==true