FreeOrion

This is something iv been meaning to bring up for a while....

When we first start out in the game, say we colonize a planet...and build a shipyard (and usually a drydock). Then a monster or enemy scout decides to rain on our parade by blockading our supply lines. (Speaking of which, could we get a site report if a planet is being blockaded?). We gota send a Mark I over and blow the annoying floater up. We don't get "Planetary Defenses" type techs till later in the game (for me around turn 200).

I was thinking a solution would be to have our Shipyards have a light type of a weaponry...Maybe adding 2-5 points of offense to our planet where the shipyard was built.

It could come built onto the Shipyard and increase our planet defense for the planet that has the shipyard.

Or maybe the weapon for the shipyard could be added as a "Module" to the shipyard. "Shipyard Defense System" and have 4 or 5 refinements....

Anyone like this idea?

Another solution would be to leave a ship at the shipyard to protect it.

Also: viewtopic.php?p=49547#p49547

Ya, that works to, just sometimes ships can be running a lil short, esp if they are being destroyed faster then built and a smidge of extra firepower never hurts.

MoO2 had what I believe was called an Orbital Defense Station.

Being able to build something like that, I think, would be more senseable then something as basic as a shipyard having any significant defenses mounted on it.

That's basically the concept behind the defense meter, except you don't build them explicitly, but research techs that allow an ever-increasing defense meter growth.

The imperial palace already gives a +5 to defense, so adding a few more points to the shipyard, which should generally only be at your homeworld in the early game, isn't going to change much.

If planets are too lightly defended in the early game (which i'm not sure of) a better solution would be to make Planetary Defense Network easier/cheaper to get to in the tech tree.

We very much want to avoid buildings that you would tend to build in most/all systems or planets. Buildings should make their location special and specialized.

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another suggestion around the same topic. When ever I "do" build a shipyard, I always find myself building a drydock for it next, mainly for its repair ability. Its kinda annyoing making the sipyard, waiting few turns for it to finish then go back and make a drydock (the site rep announcement for the shipyard throws you outof the production screen....).

Would it be feasable to combine the capabilitys of the drydock into the shipyard? That would eliminate a module and streamline the ship constuction system a bit as well as reduce micro management and complxity....or add the drydock capabilitys as a tech?

Maybe u could even increase the cost of the shipyard....

The core of difficulty you're describing, IMO, is that you can't just queue them both up at the same time because one depends on the other. This is true for all shipyard upgrades, and is kind of a pain. It might be nice if there was a way to make it so that simply having the prerequisite building in the build queue would allow you to queue the building, but PP wouldn't be allocated to it until the conditions were met.

All buildings could be put in the queue even if location conditions weren't met until recently, but it was a bit confusing sometimes when you could queue up an item and no PP would be allocated to it without any indication of why. In the case of shipyards though, I'm not sure that what we have now is necessarily better...

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Ya, that would work too....Maybe a PP tooltip?

Also eleazar was talking about drastically cutting back and/or consolidating the ridiculous amount of shipyard modules....Maybe the Drydock could be one of them that gets absorbed into the capabilities of the shipyard.