FreeOrion

We have 34 build-able hulls and 21 different types of shipyards.
So usually when you unlock a new hull, you also have to build a new shipyard, -- an annoyingly frequent speed bump.

I propose to get rid of about half of the shipyards, with no more than 3 shipyards to any single line of ship hulls.

The remaining shipyards would be greatly increased (generally doubled) in price, to help make building a shipyard a more significant accomplishment (measured by difficulty and usefulness).

"Orbital Drydock" would only be deleted after a switch to a more tech and wonder based ship repair progression which i'm still working on.



If there's any particular reason to keep any particular group names for the new shorter roster of shipyards, etc. speak up now.

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I would keep the name "Xenocoordination Facility" over "Competitive Maturation Chamber". There's already a "Chamber" in that line of shipyards, and "Competitive Maturation Chamber" really only makes sense for the Ravenous Hull.

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OK.

Is there a good reason the bio-organic line of shipyards is so very extremely cheaper than other lines of ships?

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It has to do with the currently non-functional trade-off between an empire that focuses on Production/Construction, and one that focuses on Biology, so as of now, no.

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revision 4828
I did some of it

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Woah, I thought you were getting rid of Asteroid Reformation Processor and keeping Crystallization Module. I like the Crystallization Module, though I suppose it doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense for the larger Asteroid Hulls to require something called Crystallization Module.

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That and when i looked closer, the Crystallization Module only was needed for one hull, so it seemed odd to have the first shipyard produce all the asteroid hulls but one.

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Since the "Engineering Bay" only enables one hull, and the "Geointegration Facility" enables three, and has a more distinctive concept, i'm going to drop the former and keep the latter.

revision 4830:
"Reduced number of shipyards from 21 to 12. I think all hulls have reasonable requirements, and stringtables are updated, but i might have missed something."

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In a related vein, it has long annoyed me that you need to build a shipyard to get your newly acquired species to colonize new planets.

Here's my new solution:

* Planets without shipyards will be eligible to build a basic colony ship. It will take longer (2 to 5 times) than it would at a shipyard, but is otherwise similar.

* Thus shipyards are more able to be the rare, expensive, important structures envisioned.

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This could be implemented as a PP spending limit at shipyards. No shipyard would have a very low PP spending limit, making even a basic colony ship take a long time to build even at a high industry-producing planet with no shipyard. This would avoid the need to have an extra slow-building colony ship variant.

We already have a PP spending limit built into production. I don't like the idea of layering an addition limit on top of it--- especially if PP cannot be stockpiled.

An extra slow variant is somewhat kludgy, i admit, but is easy to implement.

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Maybe we should revisit that - I've never found it particularly enriching that all instances of a particular type of object have a fixed amount of PP that can be allocated to them per turn. Instead, the amount of PP that can be spent at a particular location could be determined by other factors.

Consider the following:

Perhaps each producible item has a "Production Group" associated with it. Each planet would have a PP limit for each production group, which would be the maximum PP that can be spent on items belonging to that production group at that location. Thus, Constructed Shipyards would contribute to the "Constructed Ship" production group PP limit, or whatever, whereas an Organic Shipyard would contribute to the "Organic Ship" production group PP limit. Rather than having hard location conditions for particular hull types, it could just be vastly impractical to build a particularly expensive hull without an advanced shipyard of the appropriate type.

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In theory, i'm not opposed to a location based PP limit instead of a per part PP limit. Though on the other hand, the advantages don't leap out at me.

But if it were location based, "Production Groups" seem an overly complicated way of doing it. I'd much rather see a single limit value per location, based on techs, buildings, specials, species, population and/or infrastructure, etc.

Also in general, for the sort of game we're making, i don't think making something "vastly impractical" instead of impossible is likely to improve the game. The danger we have is burying the player too many build/research option. Adding a bunch of almost-always-bad choices to his build options, just gives him more things to ignore.

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I have a simpler idea to accomplish this:

Instead, Homeworlds would always have the option to build basic colony ships. So if you added a native species to your empire, you could build colony ships from their homeworld without building an otherwise useless shipyard. Thus one less reason to spam shipyards.

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oops.. reiterated idea

supporting PP limit based on location of production instead of thing being produced (at least for ships).

However, It should be PP limit PER ship

so a level 1 Shipyard allows you to spend 10 pp per turn on Each ship you are building at that location, with no limit on the number of ships you can have queued.
level 2 allows you to spend 50 pp per turn on Each ship, etc.
(Techs could also improve that.)


Also agree Colony ships should be buildable without a shipyard.. (whether that is at All worlds of that species or only on homeworlds)... 'homeworld' would then specify the amount it allowed putting into colony ships. Also that makes sense
[of course 'homeworld' would only allow colony ships of the species of that homeworld if it hadn't been bombed out+repopulated]