[beng]

The weapon idea sounds best. In my Laser-Demo-Nuke mod the Demo general's radar van actually does something similar, in that it has a demotrap launching weapon, so it looks like it goes around chucking out demo traps, which are structures, when it actually fires a projectile that on detonation, OCLs a demotrap.

And because you can fire a weapon using OCL (see the Chinese nuke silo and how it fires the neutronmissile weapon using special power and OCL) you are not limited by the max 3 weepons limitation of a WeaponSet. The Conyard could thus fire many different weapons to create different buildings. These weapons could all a projectile that looks like dozer, or a pile of construction materials. These new weapons in weapon.ini could use the same projectile but have different ProjectileDetonationOCLs so that they each OCL a particular building type on projectile detonation.

To solve the problem of orientation, the buildings could be made movable (add physics behavior, AIupdate, Locomotor) and their TREADS locomotor should have zero speed but a non-zero turn rate, so you can turn them in any direction. If you want them to be required to be locked in a position, then you could have a locomotor set upgrade to upgrade them to locomotor NONE. To make it mandatory, this upgrade could also upgrade the building's command set to allow it to do whatever the building does (build units or whatever).

The problem still is that weapons have a limited range, so your base would be limited to a fixed radius around the Conyard. You could make it such that you can undeploy the conyard into an MCV which can move to a new place and redeploy into a Conyard to build buildings again, but then what would stop someone driving their conyard up to the enemy base and then throwing buildings into his base? And by making a movable conyard you are basically re-creating a dozer vehicle.

Then there is the problem of cost, pre-requisites, etc, that don't work with firing weapons.

Also it does not replicated early RTS games because in those games it is not distance from the conyard, but distance from any building, that determines where you can build. For example, if you captured a building in the enemy base you could then start building new buildings next to it though your conyard was far away.

It is such a complicated problem that i see no really good solution, and it is probably best to just go with the way the game is designed and use dozers or workers to build buildings for the most part.