FreeOrion

Two basic shipyards, or a basic shipyard and something else? A few hulls require Orbital Drydocks, but the Small, Medium, and Standard hulls shouldn't need anything more than one shipyard.

I have been meaning to ask for a while what the Orbital Drydock actually does. Why do we start with it at the beginning of the game? If it is only needed later it should instead turn up on the tech-tree.

It would be good if ships could be repaired, could this happen at the Orbital Drydock? It seems strange that a Shipyard and upgrade are available at the start of the game.

With the ship speed, detection and distance measures in the game; couldn't detection and speed be listed as uu and uu/turn? This would then make it clear what uu means for players. The uu and uu/turn only needs to be listed in the tech and ship part description if listing in other places causes problems with space.

The construction queue should be similar to research queue. Queuing something with prerequisites should also queue the prerequisities. If it isn't possible to build for some reason, the reason should be given to the player. (The game obviously knows the reason.)

There seems to be a problem with low stealth - a lack of range. Stars, planets and monsters all having 0.1 - 1 stealth. I don't think I have seen any stealth 0 objects in the game as far as I have played. Is it really required? Just using negative numbers would be better. Stars having -20 and planets 0, with basic ships and monsters around 5 would seem to be good. If there is something we want to be be detected by everyone, just make it -100 or -1000 and any detector will see it at any distances used in the game. Planets are always detected in a system a ship is present in with the current system, even though they don't have 0 stealth.

It does.
This is not so simple. A requirement to produce something can be arbitrary, and is not generally "need X building at same location" as you seem to assume.
The reason is always "an arbitrarily complicated condition is not met by the build location". Telling the user this in a useful way is not simple.
A reasonable suggestion.

A basic shipyard and something else.

I think the basic shipyard and drydock should be combined. By the time your are building another shipyard, the features of the basic shipyard alone aren't very compelling. And IMHO repair should be a feature of all shipyards.

And many of the other 19 shipyards should be combined. We've got 21 shipyards and 34 build-able hulls. So most individual hulls require their own dedicated shipyard. That's too much speed-bumping from the time you start researching a new ship tech too the time you can actually use the new ship. Shipyard upgrades should be significant and special.



Granted that this is not simple with the effects system. Currently, The "Available" and "Unavailable" tabs only (apparently) sort by what has been researched.

On the other hand if there's no workaround to let the player know where he can build particular items -- at least under normally expected effects usage-- then the ability to add "arbitrarily complicated conditions" is causing more harm than benefit. At the very least unbuildable items should be grayed out or put under the "Unavailable" tab. Having an interface were certain buttons have no effect in certain contexts, but provide no clues when they won't work, is very broken.

I frequently find myself reclicking on a build queue item, wondering if it was lag, or a misclick that prevented the item from showing up in the queue.

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Why? In contrast to the 19 need-it-to-build-a-new-hull shipyard addons, fast repair is a fairly significant strategic feature that seems like it might warrant having a separate building. Being able to get fast ship production facilities built far from your original system, but sacrificing repair ability might be strategically interesting...
Sounds good.
Most of those hulls probably aren't presently interesting or distinctive either...
To make them more significant and special, they don't need to be located at the same place as the shipyard. Instead, one such building could unlock stuff for every shipyard, or every shipyard within X distance / jumps.
Something to that effect can be done. It's a longstanding missing feature, not intended functionality as is.

Alternatively or additionally, valid production locations can be highlighted when a producible item is selected, along with a display of range or what would be targets for a building's effects if it were produced at a selected location.

The difficult thing is the "explain in easily-understandable text what condition(s) this production location lacks or has that make it not a valid location to produce this item". Something likecould have 4 different reasons, or 15 different combinations of reasons why it makes a location not a valid production location (+1 case when it is valid = 16 = 2^4). A combined bit of handwritten text to explain all the requirements could be done, but marking which parts of that text are preventing production isn't easy.

[disclaimer]I don't know how it is coded now, but...[/disclaimer]
When a complex condition is evaluated, a trace of some sorts could be maintained. When the entire condition fails, the last trace could (reasonably) contain the first necessary elemental condition that failed. This would provide some helpful insight.

Then again a player would be left to counter one condition at a time (a single trace), when otherwise he could be trying to address them all (two buildings missing? build them both, using excess production). For a precise information what is missing and what not the entire condition would have to be checked (without short-circuit evaluation).

Another part would be a module that could generate human-readable concise strings for (failed/successful) conditions, which is a labor task in itself. Even then presenting alternative conditions (requires either of...), or absence conditions (like in the quoted example) would be troublesome.

Then again.. I should probably read me some code before stating further opinions.

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[...] for Man has earned his right to hold this planet against all comers, by virtue of occasionally producing someone totally batshit insane. - xkcd

This might be a simpler way to start, but it again makes assumptions that don't hold in general. You noted it later, but to emphasize the point, the quoted text assumes that all location conditions are of the form of an And condition containing several other conditions, just one of which can be reported to the player as failing. But if the outermost condition is an Or of several contained conditions, then reporting to the player that a first-level subcondition was not passed doesn't help, as that condition isn't actually necessary for the production location to be valid.
If you want to see what a plausible quality level of autogenerated condition description text looks like, turn on autogenerated effect descriptions in the options UI tab and look at some building or special tooltips. Then, think about the fact that the grammar for that text mostly assumes English grammar rules apply, and other languages would look significantly worse even if their stringtables were completely translated.

If there is such a complicated with an alternative (OR) at the root... well... the best you can do is to provide a link called "Complex condition failed.", that brings the player to several paragraphs in pedia about what is and what isn't required to build the structure in question. There is no way to fit this into small space and preserve readability.

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[...] for Man has earned his right to hold this planet against all comers, by virtue of occasionally producing someone totally batshit insane. - xkcd

Usually there is, but it requires hand-written text. It's not impossible to do something somewhat useful that handles both Or and And conditions; every condition could have an optional description tag that refers to a stringtable entry that describes it (completely, including all subconditions and relevant parameter info). Cases in code could be added for a simple condition, or sets of subconditions in either an Or or an And condition, with the GUI able to highlight appropriately which subconditions are or aren't met in each case, eg:

Location Requirements (FAILED)
All of:
√ Planet owned by Empire
X Planet contains Shipyard owned by Empire

Location Requirements (PASSED)
One of:
- Planet contains Shipyard owned by Empire
√ Planet owned by Empire, if Remote Shipbuilding tech is researched

with green, yellow or neutral colour, or red highlighting; or checkmarks, dashes, and X's to indicate which are met, not met but not required, or failed, respectively.

But this still requires lots of handwritten text to be readable (everything after a - is one effectsgroup's custom description text). It also probably makes some grammar assumptions (like that One of: or Any Of: make sense if used this way), but this GUI layout is not structured quite like natural language anyway, so that's probably not so much of a problem.

Yeah, it may be a more interesting distinction, but it still strikes me as a MoO2 building type choice. You would probably want all your shipyards to repair eventually, even if for no other reason than so you wouldn't have to remember which shipyards have repair facilities, and which don't.
If we want to have strategic decisions about repair, i'd rather start with a basic shipyard that does slow repair, and then have tech(s) that enable faster repair rates for all shipyards.
A turtle empire might want to focus on, the more powerful, but immovable shipyard repair techs, while an aggressive empire would prefer techs that allow some measure of repair on the move.

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You'd probably also want shipyards everywhere, but they and/or drydocks could be prohibitively expensive.

The point is to make the player chose where to put them, rather than being able to put them everywhere. That can be accomplished by making only one or relatively few of a thing is necessary, or by making the thing absolutely (hard restriction on number produced, requirement for a very particular location) or effectively not producible everywhere (due to cost and production time).

But sure, combine them if so inclined.

Also, it will be possible to destroy shipyards in the future.

Colonies can only be taken with groundtroops, so it seems likely that shipyards will be destroyed without the colony being taken.

Space monsters should be able to destroy shipyards too.

If repair ability needs to be built seperately to construction ability a choice must be made when rebuilding a destroyed shipyard.

Well, the example mentioned earlier would be slightly harder:


Trying to extrapolate your notation we have either:

Location Requirements (FAILED)
All of:
√ Planet owned by Empire
√ Planet has Resonant Moon special.
X Not any of:

- Planet has Cloning Center constructed.
! Planet has Bioterror Projector constructed. (either using √ or X marks would look strange here...)

Or:
Location Requirements (FAILED)
All of:
√ Planet owned by Empire
√ Planet has Resonant Moon special.
X Planet does not have constructed: Cloning Center, Bioterror Projector (but we don't say which one is constructed here)

Ideally:
Location Requirements (FAILED)
All of:
√ Planet owned by Empire
√ Planet has Resonant Moon special.
√ Planet does not have Cloning Center constructed
X Planet does not have Bioterror Projector constructed

The last one looks best, but requires usage of De Morgan's law somewhere along the way to collapse negation of disjunction into conjunction of negations.

Still, this is for two levels of nested conjuntions/disjunctions only. The question is if the code should assume that the content will have relatively simple conditional constructs, or try to "catch 'em all"?

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[...] for Man has earned his right to hold this planet against all comers, by virtue of occasionally producing someone totally batshit insane. - xkcd

On that basis, "Basic" shipyards are a bad FO building.. either allow ship building on every colony (perhaps every colony with Infrastructure/Construction of 20 or Supply range of 1) and have a very expensive "Drydock" that allows for ship repair and faster ship construction.
OR
have a very expensive "Shipyard" that is required for ship building.

The first option might be interesting and would allow the return of "Infrastructure". Infratructure could not only be how far a planet's supply links are, but also how fast it allows ship construction.

EDIT: Split from here, since the question is more widely applicable

How can I determine the attack capability of a space monster?
I mean there is something like the heart icon that indicates the structure of the monsters, but I think it would be cool to know your chances more precisely before attacking a monster. Especially for those that protect ancient ruins