Proposal: Change the asteroid building location requirements

[LGM-Doyle]

I'm suggesting two changes to the asteroid processors to improve their narrative consistency and clarity of use.
There is a PR implementing it. Please provide feedback on the changes.

Currently, there are two asteroid buildings, the Asteroid Processor and the Asteroid Reformation Processor.
The Asteroid Processor:

• can be built on any asteroid belt
• is required to be in system with a shipyard to build the "basic" asteroid hulls

The Asteroid Reformation Processor:

• must be built on an asteroid belt containing an Asteroid Processor
• is required to be in system with a shipyard to build the "advanced" asteroid hulls
• is required to be supply connected to any shipyard to use asteroid armor.

I never noticed the any shipyard ability before I looked at this PR.

I'm proposing to add/change the following requirements.
The Asteroid Processor:

• can be built on any asteroid belt in a system containing a empire shipyard
• is required to be in system with a shipyard and supply connected to build the "basic" asteroid hulls

The Asteroid Reformation Processor:

• can be built on any asteroid belt
• is required to be in system with a shipyard and supply connected to build the "advanced" asteroid hulls
• is required to be supply connected to any shipyard to use asteroid armor.

The following things are improved:

• Requiring the processors to be supply connected to an in system shipyard, makes narrative sense in that you manufacture hulls and then transport them to the shipyard to be assembled into ships. If the route from processor to shipyard is blockaded, then you can't use asteroid hulls.
• Requiring the Asteroid Processor to be built in a system with an existing shipyard, highlights the fact that it is an extension of the shipyard, like the similar facilities in the other ship type lines.
• Allowing the Asteroid Reformation Processor to be built on its own highlights the fact that it also provides armor components that do not require a pre-existing shipyard to be useful.

[dbenage-cx]

The Asteroid Processor:

• can be built on any asteroid belt in a system containing a empire shipyard
• is required to be in system with a shipyard and supply connected to build the "basic" asteroid hulls

Assuming this means asteroid hulls require a supply connection to an in-system Asteroid Processor.
Provided that condition is met, the building is inherently connected to an in-system shipyard by requirement to build a hull.

The Asteroid Reformation Processor:

• can be built on any asteroid belt
• is required to be in system with a shipyard and supply connected to build the "advanced" asteroid hulls
• is required to be supply connected to any shipyard to use asteroid armor.

Reworded: the Part requires supply connection to an Asteroid Reformation Processor
Dropping the Asteroid Processor requirement reduces the overall build cost in some cases, don't know if that needs to be addressed.

[Dilvish]

The Asteroid Processor: ... can be built on any asteroid belt in a system containing a empire shipyard

I presume the reasoning for this is to prevent the item from cluttering the build list (or actually being carelessly built) where it could not be useful. I'd propose that we also allow it to be built in a system where an empire shipyard is at least enqueued (not necessarily fully built), so that the parallel-build approach Matt mentions is still possible (and there is plenty of precedent for that kind of requirement also, with other shipyard type facilities).

[MatGB]

It would be the only one that triggers off an enqueud basic shipyard, but I'd be happy with that, they're a different line to the others and are meant to be more restricted in location.

Overall, I'm happy with the suggestions overall. I'm not 100% sold on the idea that the reformation processor can be built absolutely anywhere, and it also takes away from an idea we played around with but never wrote up awhileback: Slimaline Crystals could be a strategic resource in a way, if the Ref Proc can be built anywhere with a basic Ast Proc, or on a belt with Crystals, that would make sense for flvaour and at least make those annoying snetry guarded single belts with crystals marginally useful after clearing them out.

[Telos]

I'm not sure I understood the original proposal, because it wasn't clear in the proposal where all the asteroid ships could be built.

Can asteroid ships be built only in the same system where the asteroids are present? (If so, then why not just go with a simpler proposal that makes Asteroid buildings be shipyard add-ons with the added requirement that asteroids be present in the system, much like black hole generators require black holes?)

Or can they be built in any system that is supply-connected to the asteroid processor or asteroid reformation processor? (If so, then why the requirement for a shipyard in the same system as the asteroids? If the idea is that the shipyard could mount engines on a 'roid and send it off to some distant system for weapons and stuff to be added, shouldn't construction of a ship in that roundabout way take more time? And doesn't this detract from the game's making you make strategic choices regarding where your production centers will be, and not just letting you always build the best ships at whichever frontline planet needs them?)

Regardless, I'm not at all convinced that these "improvements" actually improve anything. I like the current system. It seems fine to me that the reformation processor is a Tier-2 tech that requires a Tier-1 basic asteroid processor to already be in place, so I don't like having removed that pre-requisite. If the Tier-1 basic processor is going to be a pre-requisite, then I don't think it should require a shipyard in the same system because sometimes, especially in early-mid game, your only asteroids are in systems without colonizable planets, and I like how the game currently allows you to build an asteroid-reformation processor on remote asteroids to supply your empire with rock armor. The only "problem" you're solving is just that some people didn't read the text on the reformation processor, and it seems like the main fix for that would just be to clarify that text.

Here are two suggestions that I think I'd be a bit more happy with:

(1) It might be interesting to make *all* armors work in the same way as rock armor currently works, requiring a specialized production building (e.g., a diamond armor processor) to be present somewhere supply-connected to the shipyard that builds the ship. If all armors work this way, this would address the worry that people might overlook how the reformation processor makes rock armor widely available. Note: like the asteroid armors, neutronium armor already sort of follows this model too, requiring a specialized building at a source of neutronium, though it also requires a specialized shipyard add-on too, a requirement that I'd be happy to drop for parity with other armors, or could leave as an extra hoop for the top-notch armor.

(2) I'd be open to making there also be a second Tier-2 asteroid building to build after the basic asteroid processor, called something like an "advanced asteroid hull processor". This could be a pre-req in-system for building heavy asteroid hulls (which currently are surprisingly buildable just off the basic processor), for the scattered flagship, and perhaps for the other advanced asteroid hulls that typically aren't really worth building anyway. With the in-system requirement placed on this building, it would then be easier to get people to think of the "reformation processor" mostly just as an empire-wide armor building, and perhaps it could even be renamed something like "asteroid armor processor" to help make this role clear. (I'd still be fine having it as an in-system prereq for crystal hulls and the flagship though, as this is intuitive enough.)

[dbenage-cx]

Can asteroid ships be built only in the same system where the asteroids are present?
Or can they be built in any system that is supply-connected to the asteroid processor or asteroid reformation processor?

All of the hulls in asteroid line require an Asteroid Processor in-system.
Crystallized, Mini, and Scattered hulls require an Asteroid Refinery in-system.
The in-system supply connection is broken when there are enemy ships present.

The bigger change here is that armor parts require a supply connection (PR includes neutronium), instead of just ownership of a refinery building.
Currently cutting a supply line has no effect on access to these armor parts.

I'd be open to making there also be a second Tier-2 asteroid building to build after the basic asteroid processor, called something like an "advanced asteroid hull processor".

I like the general idea of moving the Asteroid Refinery requirement to a new shipyard type building for hulls (probably not in this PR).

[Telos]

I have mixed feelings about requiring a supply line between the source of specialized armor (like rock or neutronium) and the shipyard that mounts it onto ships.

On the one hand, I agree that this would add interesting strategic depth, which would generally be interesting, and might be especially useful for opening up stealth strategies.

But, on the other hand, it is worth noting a serious player frustration that this is likely to engender. On any turn where the armor supply line gets cut off, the game will automatically pause production of ships that require the specialized armor and shift to projects lower down the production queue if there are any, or waste the production if there aren't. This means that players will sometimes be completely surprised and disappointed about where a turn's production points went or failed to go. Optimal play to avoid such frustration often involves stacking alternative projects (like ships at suboptimal shipyards) lower down in the queue that you don't really want to build, but that you keep at the bottom of your queue just in case you end up needing some alternative place for your production hammers to go to. Keeping track of these alternative queues of production isn't very fun, especially as the UI starts to get sluggish with long production queues, and especially as enqueing new items often requires dragging them, one at a time, past all the items you have enqueued as backups in case a space monster decides to linger somewhere that blocks a supply line. (Similar problems arise for other long-distance supply-line requirements, like the ones for building colonies or for transferring PP from production planets to distant building sites.)

It would be ideal if there were some way to delay all these backlogs, such that a broken supply line wouldn't block production that was planned the turn the supply line broke, but would block any further production. I don't think that can be solved with the current scripting capabilities. Scripters currently can't say something like "buildable only if rock armor was supply-connected to this shipyard *last* turn", and regardless that wouldn't solve the frustration that arises from having a flood of hammers get cut off from the system where you'd been planning to use them this turn. Probably the best resolution is just to shift around some of the turn-order stuff, moving production so it happens before the computation of new supply lines. If players could be assured that what will get built this turn actually will be what is highlighted in their queue this turn, then I'd be much more open to adding long-distance supply conditions upon what's buildable. But the way the game currently is, I think adding more of these long-distance supply conditions is just a recipe for player frustration. (I have no idea how well the AI handles such things, but it's probably a recipe for making the AI even worse too.)

[LGM-Doyle]

Why was the shipyard enqueuing of dependent items done in parallel, while the research of dependent items done in series?

[Dilvish]

Why was the shipyard enqueuing of dependent items done in parallel, while the research of dependent items done in series?

In both cases the primary item must have been completed before it can be used, but the relationship to the dependent item differs. The primary tech : dependent tech relationship (at least this aspect of it) is more akin to the shipyard : ship relationship than it is to the shipyard : upgrade relationship. In the case of technology, we consider the primary tech to be used as part of researching the dependent tech. In the case of shipyards, we consider them used to build ships, not generally used to build related facilities; the primary item (say, an Orbital Drydock) is used as part of building ships with the dependent item (in this example, a Geo-Integration Facility); the Geo-Integration Facility is described as a kind of upgrade to the Oribital Drydock, and construction can proceed on the 'upgrade' in parallel with building the primary item, but neither of them can be used to build ships until the shipyard required for that ship is actually built.

My recollection is that these production items *used* to also have to be built in a serial process, and unlike techs you could not even enqueue them until the primary item was completed, but this was deemed overly restrictive (not really helping the user manage UI choice complexity, and not really needed by theory).

[MatGB]

I did the former very recently for player-frustration-limitation reasons: if setting up a new colony with, for example, Mu Ursh that's intended to be a shipyard takes 20+ turns (hello Organic line) then half the time the game would be over.

Research has always been in series and it's a different thing: if it were changed then we'd need to rework the entire costings and time setups, but we need to do that sooner rather than later anyway.

[LGM-Doyle]

Thanks for the answers.

I appreciated the change. I would occasionally start building up a shipyard and then forget to add the next building to the queue, when the first had completed.

When you made the change I had expected them to be in series like the research queue. Would it be more consistent between the two types of queues to adjust the build times of the various shipyard extensions and then allow players to queue all the dependent shipyards that they have researched, but then only build them in series. Is there a reason not to adjust the ship yards build times so that building them in series results in the correct final time?

[MatGB]

Two:

1) What is the "correct" final time
2) sometimes you're building a shipyard on an established world having unlocked the tech, othertimes on a new colony, if top end Organic line yards take 16 turns after research then it'd make that line a real pain to manage, even though they are unlocked early.

I like the current balance although the costs of all the various yards need a thorough review at some point (one thing long planned is to substantially increase many but it'll require more AI work and isn't a priority)