Data sheets would be cool!
Data sheets are definitely in the pipeline!
What if there were no difference between “units” and “buildings” at all? and the difference is just the components. This could allow for stationary “units” (like defenses) or movable factories. Or crazy stuff like swarm-spawning motherships.
I think this makes a lot of sense and it really goes in the direction of the game. At the end of the day Units are just a mash of different devices + a CPU + some code. You could have a Factory device, that provides the interface to assemble units and you could embed that in anything as you say. The idea of movable factories generating swarm units is very interesting. (Depending on how we model resource gather it may mean a constant stream of resources going to movable factories! I’m still thinking about how I want to model resources and if they should be factory-local, similar to how factorio works)
This enables strategies like expensive smart units controlling expendable dumb ones.
Exactly! The strategies are endless when you have control over every part of a unit at runtime (except changing devices, although units with a factory device may be able to rewire a unit to have different devices altogether)
What if there were some kind of mechanism to read/write the code on the enemy units? (like the engineer in command & conquer).
This could be very cool but I wonder how to make it work, maybe by salvaging killed units? You send a unit with some particular device that can extract fragments of code from enemy units.
exposes a custom UI so the player can see the data
I literally just wrote another post about customizable interfaces that touches on this and I added your example to the advanced UI device. Check it out!