Shipyards

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EntropyAvatar
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Shipyards

#1 Post by EntropyAvatar »

First thing we might want to decide is what to call them. Are they shipyards, naval bases, military-industrial complexes or what?

I'm in favour of wrapping a fair number of capabilities into these, such as shipbuilding, ship repair and reserve storage/deployment. I'll just call them shipyards for now, but maybe bases would be more appropriate.

Let's say shipyards are rated at a certain capacity. This is the amount of money/production that can be pumped into the facility in a given turn for ship construction (or repair?). In addition you might have tech that allows for larger ships, or more efficient construction, but that applies to all your bases.

If you want to build faster than the shipyard capacity allows, you can, but there is some kind of smooth diminishing returns that kicks in.

The shipyard has a construction cost and maintenance proportional to its capacity. The planet's economy does not directly limit the amount you can spend building ships (only capacity affects that). Construction and maintenance of the shipyard is limited by the local economy however, so it could be very expensive to build/maintain a large shipyard on a world with a small economy.

I think it might be helpful to organize shipyards into Levels, with each level twice the capacity of the previous level, rather than have capacity selected on a slider or something.

Finally, a shipyard should appear as an orbiting structure on the tactical map. It has hitpoints proportional to its capacity but is otherwise defenseless (Maybe it should have shields?). Destroying or damaging the shipyard has reasonable consequences (destroying/damaging ships in reserve/under construction).

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utilae
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Re: Shipyards

#2 Post by utilae »

EntropyAvatar wrote: First thing we might want to decide is what to call them. Are they shipyards, naval bases, military-industrial complexes or what?
Shipyards, considering we all call them that. Plus the others I don't like.
EntropyAvatar wrote: I think it might be helpful to organize shipyards into Levels, with each level twice the capacity of the previous level, rather than have capacity selected on a slider or something.
This is what I was thinking. A shipyard could have a level representing its capacity or size. The shipyard could 'grow' (increase level) automatically depending on techs gained, when upgrades could be applied and how much money is being put torward shipyards.
EntropyAvatar wrote: Finally, a shipyard should appear as an orbiting structure on the tactical map. It has hitpoints proportional to its capacity but is otherwise defenseless (Maybe it should have shields?). Destroying or damaging the shipyard has reasonable consequences (destroying/damaging ships in reserve/under construction).
Well, are shipyards necesarily in space. They could be on the surface of the planet. Ships built there could be transported to the owner, and maybe launched into space (assuming they can't just fly into space).

discord
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#3 Post by discord »

utilae: on planet bound yards, they are very impractical for several reasons(although sure you could build smaller ships planetside.),
#1 try building a several kilometers long massive construction planetside, you will find that gravity can be a bitch.
#2 gravity again, getting things from ground, into orbit...there is a reason why many ships in scifi settings cant take off/land on planets.
#3 since with 90% probability, asteroid mining(or mining colonies) would be the major contributing part of resources used, why drop it down, potential world scale destruction.
#4 and heavy industry produces waste, wich you dont want close to your populated areas.

could prolly think of a few more, but dont feel like it, i hope you get the idea.

and on capacity levels? would prolly be better with levels for different things on the same construction, defense/number of bays(in different sizes, how many ships of each size cn be built at the same time) and amount of total construction point available....a few more should be viable.

//discord

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Zanzibar
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#4 Post by Zanzibar »

Well, from the way I see it... if we call it a base then it's not defenseless, is it? I don't know of any military base in the world that is defenseless...

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#5 Post by Ablaze »

Some shipyards (or at least some aspects of a shipyard) should not be targetable. For instance, advanced shipyards would probably collect energy from the local sun using a large dispersed cloud of nanobots. Another cloud of nanobots might even be used to assemble ship parts from raw elements. (Or solar wind.) I don't see how a structure like that could be destroyed unless a weapon had an insane Area Of Effect.
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#6 Post by PowerCrazy »

This will have to be decided when we get the paradigm for shipbuilding balanced out. However, I'd like to see only the smallest ships be able to be built on the surface, with the bigger ones forced to be built in orbit.

Including colony ships.....

Thus i propose 2 shipyards. One can build "medium" ships, like colony ships, defensive ships stuff like that, this would be a fairly cheap structure that you oculd build on most of your planets without feeling an economic pinch.

The next would be a shipyard DX. You would be able to build anyship size above "medium" including "large", "Huge", "Leviathan", and my personal favorite, "Executor" :) Obviously these would be hella expensive. With very few in existence in your empire. this would allow the medium and smaller ships to remain viable, because you could build them anywhere you wanted, and lots.

Also i'd like to see ships take a while to build. Like a fully teched out and developed empire would take 2 turns or so to build a medium sized ship. This would have the effect of reducing fleet size dramatically, allowing a more focus approach to fleet combat.
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skdiw
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#7 Post by skdiw »

I rather keep it simple and just have one kind of shipyard. Having pp - > shipyard - > ships instead of just pp - > ships is complicated enough already. Different shipyard level is fine. My problem with shipyard controlling amount of pp conversion is what happens to planets excess pp that didn't go into ships? Are they just dumped into imperial treasury as taxes? Or can the planet build as much capacity as it wants and the level of shipyard controls how big the ship you can build?

In unmodded Moo3, it was really annoying to find that you research a larger hull but couldn't build it because you lack the shipyard level. One way around this problem is to have prerequisites for techs. So to research "leviathan," you need to research shipyard level 6 first. Alternatively, we can have shipyard level affect the rate of pp conversion so while you can ship build a leviathan using shipyard level 5, it just won't be as effective as shipyard 6. And shipyard 6 would allow you to build more small ships faster than shipyard 5.

The way I see it, an industry world has 2 purposes: first is to build ships, and the second major role is to build up imperial treasury for war, econmoic win, overdriving new colonies... I find it the easiest if the player just build a single shipyard that can build any hull and build at the rate of the planet's economy + overdrive.
:mrgreen:

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#8 Post by EntropyAvatar »

Ablaze: If Player A can build his shipyard out of nanobots, Player B can build nano hunter-killer bots to feed off A's shipyard. I think nanotech of that capability kind of breaks the game model though.

Powercrazy: We can let very small ships be built on-planet (at an efficiency penalty) without a shipyard. That should be the general rule for cheap stuff that you expect to build every; just say it's already built.

skdiw: I don't think you should have research tech to build shipyards with higher capacity, so that's one worry addressed.

Having the 'large ship' tech should be enough to build large ships at all shipyards. It's just that small shipyards will take that much longer to build a big ship. I don't see any benefit to putting in two hurdles here when one will do.

Money for ship construction shouldn't have to come from the planet where the shipyard is located (though the planet's economy needs to be strong to construct and maintain the shipyard). Generally the idea is that wealth from taxes on industrial planets gets spent by the government all over the empire, for all sorts of things. Food and minerals can move around, and so can production (within the limits of overdriving).

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#9 Post by EntropyAvatar »

discord wrote:utilae: on planet bound yards, they are very impractical for several reasons(although sure you could build smaller ships planetside.)
Yeah I think that's a good model. Sure we can imagine tech that would allow construction of large ships on planets, but that wouldn't mean they were safe anyway. Putting the shipyard in space gives players a nice discrete target to aim for, and is instantly understandable.
and on capacity levels? would prolly be better with levels for different things on the same construction, defense/number of bays(in different sizes, how many ships of each size cn be built at the same time) and amount of total construction point available....a few more should be viable.
I'm definitely against breaking things down into discrete bays or anything like that. While it sounds neat at first, I think it would just start to feel like a chore after a couple of games.

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utilae
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#10 Post by utilae »

I think a shipyard should be able to be built in space or one the surface. You would build the shipyard on the surface so that it can't be targeted from space but only through ground combat. It would cost more, especially for larger shipyards.

Also if a shipyard has a level representing max ship size it can build, are shipyards going to improve in levels automatically?

This would likely be based on how much money is being invested into the space ship building industry.

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#11 Post by discord »

utilae: cant be targeted from space? errr, that would be a 'sorry incorrect assumption' the atmosphere might shield some types of weaponry, but 'cant be targeted' is kinda loonie...especialy with our current tech evel we got things in orbit that can target single persons, laser mounts that are exact enough to actualy hit the person, the only part lacking is efficient lasers that are powerful enough, and that is today.

'cant be targeted' bah...

//discord

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#12 Post by skdiw »

@EA
resources including pp shouldn't move totally freely over the empire. taxation comes with an overhead/gov. efficiency cost. There is an important difference between pp/empire and pp/planet. ship building should be pp/planet if we want to keep industrial and shipyard planets a strategic military target.
:mrgreen:

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#13 Post by EntropyAvatar »

Wealthy industrial planets are important targets because each one represents a chunk of your all-important wealth. Shipyards are important targets because you need them to build ships and they aren't easily replaced.

As a bonus, big shipyards are almost always located on wealthy industrial planets, and taking a shipyard means he loses that portion of his reserve.

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utilae
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#14 Post by utilae »

discord wrote:utilae: cant be targeted from space? errr, that would be a 'sorry incorrect assumption' the atmosphere might shield some types of weaponry, but 'cant be targeted' is kinda loonie...especialy with our current tech evel we got things in orbit that can target single persons, laser mounts that are exact enough to actualy hit the person, the only part lacking is efficient lasers that are powerful enough, and that is today.

'cant be targeted' bah...

//discord
Well, sure they could be targeted from space, but then we would have enemy ships blowing up all of your farms, labs, factories, leaders, etc. For reasons of 'fun' it would be good to make it so that ground combat can take out ground buildings.

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#15 Post by EntropyAvatar »

utilae wrote:Well, sure they could be targeted from space, but then we would have enemy ships blowing up all of your farms, labs, factories, leaders, etc. For reasons of 'fun' it would be good to make it so that ground combat can take out ground buildings.
Space ships that can destroy stuff groundside is pretty much a constant in stellar conquest games and space-opera in general. Requiring an army to capture a planet, sure. Requiring one to do damage? Not good.

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