FreeOrion

Hello ... one thing I would like to see is a production cost reduction for every consecutive ship built of a specific design at a specific shipyard. I'd like to see a small bonus to every copy made, so once you've built 100 (for example) of a given ship design, at a given shipyard, it's taking 50% as long to build it. This would make the shipyards even more strategic, and make re-tooling and/or upgrading a more difficult choice. So long as the shipyard kept cranking out that one design, the bonus would grow (until it reached a maximum value, say 50% of the original time). This has the additional effect of making an enemy's countermeasures to any given design more important. If you have a successful ship being churned out at a given shipyard, not only does that shipyard become more valuable than a generalist shipyard that you build a whole bunch of different ships at, but it also makes an enemy tactic that trumps that design more effective, because it forces you to retool and hurts your production. Not to mention that a specialized shipyard might be a tempting target for enemy attacks. It also allows a so-so shipyard to concentrate on simple, utilitarian ships and rewards good ship design. It also forces the strategic choice when an attack is imminent - should you re-tool your shipyard to build one kick-awesome ship, thus forever losing your production bonus, or do you take your chances with your old design that you can produce in better numbers. It would be easy to display, simply add "90-ship run of [design name]: -45% production" to the shipyard description somewhere. Each shipyard would only need a couple of simple variables - the ship design and the # produced. Thoughts?

There is a recent article(under construction) on the wiki, that applies perfectly to your post. Check it out.

Shipyards will be able to be specialized via a number of add-ons which will allow the shipyard to create ships with particular parts and hulls. The advantage to an older, well-established shipyard is that it can probably produce a significantly greater variety of ships due to the number of add-ons which have been built for it.

Keeping track of which shipyard has produced more of which ship design would be impractical, as in FO, the player can create an effectively unlimited number of ship designs.

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Point well taken.

It's fine to speculate and kick around ideas, but i don't think we'll have a reason to seriously consider anything more complicated than "a shipyard is a place to build ships" until we've done some real playtesting.

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