Shipyards

For what's not in 'Top Priority Game Design'. Post your ideas, visions, suggestions for the game, rules, modifications, etc.

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EntropyAvatar
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#31 Post by EntropyAvatar »

I also agree that discord's comment was out of line. While I'm sure Ablaze can take care of himself, I'd rather not have the discussion sink into a flame war.

First, I'd like to reiterate that it's better to drop the concept of shipyards than to retain shipyards, but make them cheap and plentiful. Rather than building and upgrading a shipyard on every industrial world, just assume that every industrial world has one, and move on.

On the question of complexity, I'm all for Occam's razor, but if shipyards are done right, they will greatly enhance gameplay.

The main gameplay benefit of a shipyard is to create a strategic focus. A focus for strategic investment, ship construction and fleet deployment. A big strategic target for enemy fleets and saboteurs and a catalyst for dramatic, game-changing events. The question of how much shipyard capacity to build and where it should go should be an important decision with long-term consequences.

A small quote from War of Honor, for some imagery...
His eyes were on the visual display, not the tactical display or the maneuvering plot. He was staring at the huge naval yard, its individual structures long invisible as they fell away astern, and his eyes were cold and empty as space itself.

And then his mouth tightened and pain flickered in those empty eyes as the first small, intolerably bright sun flashed behind his ships. Then another. Another, and another, and yet another as a tidal wave of flame marched through the huge, sprawling naval base Manticore had spent almost two decades building up from literally nothing.

Those silent pinpricks looked tiny and harmless from this range, but Higgins' mind's eyes saw them perfectly, knew their reality. It watched the forest fire of old-fashioned nukes—his own missiles' warheads, not even the enemy's—consuming fabrication centers, orbital smelters, reclamation yards, stores stations, orbital magazines, the huge hydrogen farm, sensor platforms and relays, and System Control's ultra-modern command station. And the ships. The handful of ships in the repair yards. The ones who'd had the misfortune to choose this particular moment to be immobilized in yard hands because they required some minor repair, or to be undergoing refit. And worse—far worse—the magnificent new ships. Twenty-seven more Medusa-class SD(P)s, nineteen CLACs, and no less than forty-six of the new Invictus-class superdreadnoughts. Ninety-two capital ships—almost six hundred and seventy million tons of new construction. Not just a fleet, but an entire navy's worth of the most modern designs in space, helpless as they lay beside fitting-out stations or half-finished, cocooned in their building slips and dispersed yards.
Colonies in Moo2 have a tragic sameness to them. The solution is NOT to affix to each a long list of insignificant details, an 'each special in it's own trivial way' approach. Specialized planets are an important step away from that. Shipyards should also help, each shipyard world vital due to the colosal investment you have made there, the focus of the industrial production of a dozen worlds.

So, down to brass tacks. I don't see why upgrading shipyards should be such a chore, especially when the upgrades (like the shipyards themselves) are few and significant. If each step doubles the size, it's not going to keep you busy unless you are building up a new one in late game, in which case you can just select the end size you want.

Shipyards also don't have to be complex. We are talking about a capacity that doubles with each Level, and maybe one other rating. As long as they are few, shipyards will be simpler than building ships on a large fraction of industrial planets.

As to the idea of having a shipyard-designated planet devote a constant fraction of it's industry to building and maintaining a shipyard, I think it can work (especially if the fraction is large). There would need to be some mechanism to grow the shipyard over time so that you can't switch the shipyard on-and-off like a light-switch, but there are many good ways we could do that. Probably the simplest is to dedicate the 'shipyard fraction' that's not consumed by maintenance of the shipyard to expanding capacity. I'll have to think about it some more.

One last note on macro-management tools. I think its a good idea to make the game as manageable as possible without macro-management tools. The player should never be forced to use these tools, especially if tool AI is making potentially vital decisions such as what ship to build where.

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skdiw
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#32 Post by skdiw »

skdiw wrote: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.
But for more strategic value,
skdiw wrote: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.
We can make each shipyard upgrade far and wide so there might only be 2 upgrades in the entire game. We can just do a window pop-up when you finish researching that allow you to chose to upgrade all existing shipyards. We can also make initial cost of shipyard huge while upgrades small or none and say that you paid for the upgrade when you dumped in 9999 rps researching the upgrade. This way there is minimal micro while we get added gameplay value.

[/code]
:mrgreen:

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utilae
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#33 Post by utilae »

I don't like the idea of having few shipyards, because I don't think it will work. You can't limit the shipyards by making them expensive, because then building a shipyard in the early game, well will that be an option. A player will always find a way to build heaps of shipyards and then micromanagement will set in as a result. So, I think this needs discussion.

So, do we have an idea of how many shipyards on average we want their to be in the early, mid and late game?

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#34 Post by EntropyAvatar »

I'm sure appropriate mechanisms and incentives can be found to concentrate shipyard capacity into a handful of large shipyards.

Maintenance is a flexible constraint on total capacity. You can afford to build/maintain more total shipyard capacity as your economy grows. However, ships become increasingly expensive at higher tech levels, so the need for capacity grows as well. It will never be cheap to have all the capacity you need, especially in an emergency.

However, that still leaves the problem of encouraging or enforcing concentration of shipyard capacity. You are right that the 'increadibly shrinking price-tag' effect measn you can't just declare a 'high' price for shipyards. The definition of expensive changes over time.

One factor operating in favour of concentration is the need to build large ships without a big time-lag. Ten small shipyards could build ten Leviathans in say 40 turns, but it would take a big shipyard to build a Leviathan in 4 turns. You still have 10 ships in 40 turns, but with a big shipyard you get those ships 18 turns faster, on average.

Another factor would be the need to protect shipyards. Spread production is a kind of defence, but small shipyards would be more vulnerable to light raiding fleets, simply because you can't defend everywhere at once. Hard to say how this one would work out.

Another possibility is increasing efficiency for larger shipyards and/or an efficiency penalty for higher numbers of shipyards.

Target-wise, maybe something like this:

Start, 1 major planet, 1 small shipyard
Early, 3 major and 6 minor planets, 1 medium shipyard
Mid, 8 major and 20 minor planets, 1 large, 2 small shipyards
Late, 20 major and 60 minor planets, 2 large, 3 medium shipyards
End, 40 major and 120 minor planets, 1 huge, 3 large and 4 medium shipyards

Keep in mind in the above that what I might call a 'medium' shipyard in the end-game might be many times the capacity (and cost) of a 'large' shipyard early-on. It is medium only in the sense of how many industrial worlds it takes to 'feed' it (supply it with ship components at maximum construction rate).

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Krikkitone
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#35 Post by Krikkitone »

Hate to jump back in, but there is an easy way to avoid the technology diminishing cost effect.

1. Ship 'parts' cost more as tech goes up (so if productivity/ pop or /planet goes up 50*, then so does the cost of a Cruiser at various tech level)

2. A shipyard is capable of building a certain Cost of ship per turn rather than a certain Size of ship per turn... so a 'medium shipyard' will cost more throught the game, because the Cruiser it can build in 5 turns will costs more, and that will balance out the fact that the woirld is producing more.

As for how to concentrate them...well
1. let ship production be distributed throughout the empire with a minimum of loss (or none at all)

2. after that, anyone who makes large ships will want to concentrate their shipyards on their most populated world (almost all worlds will probably be industrial except for some rich mining worlds, a few food worlds, and a number of research worlds that depends on how strongly you are going to tech..'Industrial' would be an average world.. so 'Shipyards' will just be the biggest ones)... because it can overspend on Shipyards and Defense the most easily.



This does mean that a Small ship strategy would meand multiple small shipyards (ie say one per system)... but that seems reasonable.


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skdiw
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#36 Post by skdiw »

I think a shipyard should be able to produce many ships a turn. A shipyard only affects the conversion rate between pp to ship building. You can use those pp to build one large ships or several small ones.

You start with a free shipyard and each additional yard costs some amount. All upgrades are free and done automatically. We can make the first upgrade early and leave the higher upgrades more spread apart.

We can also make shipyards cheap and make each additional yard more expensive depending on how many yards you own already.
:mrgreen:

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#37 Post by discord »

ablaze: dont take it personal, i was just pointing out my opinion that if you find this to complicated to follow, you should stick with what you understand(as in pointing out that, imho. this aint all that complicated, pretty simple actualy, and since you now changed the focus to gameplay, i'll just say it again, it aint all that complicated.)

EA: appropriate mechanisms and incentives? pretty simple.

base module to build 1(read one)scout class ship costs alot more in upkeep then the second(basic supply lines, support personel for this specific type of work, etc. it's practicly a whole new industry to be built/maintained, and in continuance, it's cheaper to upgrade a existing yard, then to build a new.)

add in basic ship yard upkeep, to keep a large basicly non profit thing working, is a drain on the treasury....(or why have 200 shipyards, when you only have resources to actualy keep 1 or 2 working left after upkeep.)

total ship production capacity vs total empire prefab capacity.(if total empire prefab capacity is 500 PP's, why have a 5000 PP's shipyard?)

yard tech should be mainly about how many 'modules' you can fit on it. (and yes, i dislike automation, it often removes variation in gaming styles.)

and to sum it up.

base shipyard capacity(amount of modules you can add.), gives a increase in upkeep, up to balancing to figure out the best ratios.(and it would if you want it, keep the amount of actualy yards down.) something like 10->20->35->50 modules, in other words, a lvl 1 would be able to to have all ship size modules, and some crew to do the work, would not be very efficient way of doing it though...

ship construction modules, (one for each ship size, duh.) here i have some thoughts, either go with 'improved docks to increase possible speed', or a yard wide shared pp, and a cap for each dock(how much effort you can put on each ship size before it no longer gets faster. deminishing returns and all that.)...actualy both are possible, now that i think about it.

crew module.(to get more total work power, in the case of yard total system.)

defensive modules, so the thing aint just a sitting duck.

a few more could prolly be added, and just make 'stations' out of the whole deal, like C&C, armor, screens/fields, fighter bays, etc.

krikkione: read above for my thoughts on the same subject.

skdiw: PP efficiency would also be a nice module to add.

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utilae
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#38 Post by utilae »

skdiw wrote:I think a shipyard should be able to produce many ships a turn. A shipyard only affects the conversion rate between pp to ship building. You can use those pp to build one large ships or several small ones.
I think it should be possible for shipyards to build many ships at once, but only the biggest shipsyards can do this.

Maybe we could do it like this:
Each shipyard has a level, representing size of ship that can be built, ie max capacity. So a level 6 shipyard should be able to build 1 size 6 ship, 3 size 2 ships, 2 size 3 ships or 6 size 1 ships. This would mean that each shipyard would need X queues (where X is the shipyards capacity/size). So a level 6 shipyard would need a max of 6 queues.

I don't know what system we will use to allow the user to manage ship building, but I imagine it would be something like homeworld (when buildign ships) where you could build 10 ships and they all build at once, you see 10 progress bars, etc. In that way 1 empire wide queue would work (hint, my idea, hint). In any case the ship building system must be able to handle heaps of shipyards, because you have large shipyards and small shipyards. We expect few will be built throughout the game, but what about those players who only build small shipyards, heaps of small shipyards.

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#39 Post by skdiw »

Shipyard level affecting pp conversion is easier than having level 6 yard being able to build up to X ships total up to hull 6. First off, you won't have the annoying problem of researching a hull 7 ship and not being able to build it since you only have shipyard 6; you will be able to build hull 7 but it may not be very efficient. Secondly, you can just use a single queue and any extra pp left over from building previous ship gets tranfered to the next queue item at no cost; you just list what you want and the AI does the rest. For example, your shipyard 6 gives you 1000 pp; you can use those pp to build a hull 7 (cost 10,000 which takes 10 turns) or hull 6 (cost 4,000 which takes 4 turns)or 2 hull 1 (cost 500). This way is easier and less cluttering.

Empire build is an excellent idea. I think a simple window using one master queue list will do. You just specify what ships you want and how many and the AI will pick your biggest producing planet to take your heaviest order. I think every player will want to produce ships this way so we can take microing planetary ship build out entirely because I don't think there is exceptions where you would want a weak planet making your executor secret (you lose all pp when you cancel an order so none of that civ wonder trick). You also do refit in the master queue.

I personally don't like ships immediately dumped into reserves after they finish and then they magically teleports to the front line whenever you want. No reserves and setting waypoints will be more complicated but it would add more strategic value.

@Discord
All these stuff are very simple. But what Ablaze and most of us mean is that these stuff are too complicated to manage for a game considering that there are other much important macro issues you have to deal with in the game. You don't want to be bogged down by minor details that doesn't really do anything. (IMO, Ablaze is smarter than you and has better comprehension as to joke around. Then again, I like jokes and flames on these dry forums sometimes.)
:mrgreen:

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#40 Post by utilae »

skdiw wrote: Shipyard level affecting pp conversion is easier than having level 6 yard being able to build up to X ships total up to hull 6. First off, you won't have the annoying problem of researching a hull 7 ship and not being able to build it since you only have shipyard 6; you will be able to build hull 7 but it may not be very efficient. Secondly, you can just use a single queue and any extra pp left over from building previous ship gets tranfered to the next queue item at no cost; you just list what you want and the AI does the rest. For example, your shipyard 6 gives you 1000 pp; you can use those pp to build a hull 7 (cost 10,000 which takes 10 turns) or hull 6 (cost 4,000 which takes 4 turns)or 2 hull 1 (cost 500). This way is easier and less cluttering.
I thought you could do it that way too, though that way might be more practical.
skdiw wrote: Empire build is an excellent idea. I think a simple window using one master queue list will do. You just specify what ships you want and how many and the AI will pick your biggest producing planet to take your heaviest order. I think every player will want to produce ships this way so we can take microing planetary ship build out entirely because I don't think there is exceptions where you would want a weak planet making your executor secret (you lose all pp when you cancel an order so none of that civ wonder trick). You also do refit in the master queue.
Yeah, it would be great.
skdiw wrote: I personally don't like ships immediately dumped into reserves after they finish and then they magically teleports to the front line whenever you want. No reserves and setting waypoints will be more complicated but it would add more strategic value.
I think you set a waypoint, maybe 3, on 3 worlds on the outer edge of your empire. Your ships would travel to the nearest waypoint once built. Ships would not magicallt appear there, but travel, take X turns, etc.

The end result is that you have gathering points for your armies. So with three waypoints, you would soon have three armies at the edge of your empire, each of the three armies at one of the three planets (where the waypoint was put).

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#41 Post by EntropyAvatar »

I'm definitely thinking of capacity as the amount of production that can be converted into ships in one turn. Modelling individual construction slips would be more realistic but it's more than the player will want to deal with. I'd like to keep the number and types of shipyard upgrades very low for the same reason.

Every shipyard should be able to build every ship size (if your empire has the technology) and every shipyard should be able to build multiple ships per turn (if it has the production). We don't want to bring back one of the worst features of Moo2. A high-level shipyard should be a veritable firehose of light ships (if that's what the player ordered).

I don't think we should have upgrades that increase shipyard defences. If you want to defend your shipyards, build some fixed defences or keep a defensive fleet there.

To K1: By the incredibly shrinking price tag, I only mean that we can't dictate that an individual shipyard be expensive throughout the game, unless we somehow increase the minimum price of a shipyard as the game progresses.

So, in favour of concentration, we have:

- big shipyards needed to build large ships quickly
- easier to defend a few large shipyards from raids

on the the other hand:

- spread production is less vulnerable to a single attack or calamity (what do you mean Arcturus went nova?)


One other suggestion I'd like to throw into the mix is a changing maintenance/construction cost tradeoff as the shipyard upgrades capacity.

So if each upgrade multiplies capacity by 2.0, then perhaps it multiplies maintenance by 1.8. On the other hand, the cost for each new point of capacity might go up by 10 or 12% per level. So dispersed ship-building capacity is cheaper to build but more expensive to maintain, while concentrated capacity is more expensive to build but cheaper over time. Also, as the game goes on, the cost of shipyard capacity shifts from maintenance to construction.

skdiw: I think the player has to be able to override all computer decisions unless it's very nearly a mathematical certainty that the computer will make the optimal decision. A routine that's 97% correct isn't good enough if the other 3% causes you to lose a planet. Don't tell me you've never run into software that thinks it knows what's best for you.

BTW, does your name have anything to do with Bombardier?

discord
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#42 Post by discord »

EA: on defensive systems on yards, why make 'planetary defense' and shipyard, two different things? just have them be the same, just add on modules for the station for what it's supposed to do...on the other hand i can see the use for 'easy approach' aswell....bah, why am i even talking about it, noone ever agrees anyway, and yes i'm in a slump.

//discord

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#43 Post by EntropyAvatar »

Cheer up discord, you've come up with some good ideas, and I agree with you often enough... but not today :wink:

I'd like to keep defence and shipyards separate because there are lots of reasons why people would want to build defences without shipyards. Of course, both might end up right beside each other on a local military tab or screen. I'd still prefer them as separate facilities, rather than a single facility with many parts.

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#44 Post by utilae »

Well, I have always imagined that they would be seperate. After all, all ground-to-ground-defense need to do is affect ground combat, so the more ground-to-ground-defenses you have the more difficult ground combat will be for the enemy. And ground-to-space-defenses will affect space combat in the same way, so the more you have the better.

Whether they are apart of a shipyard or not does not even matter.

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#45 Post by discord »

EA: never said they would bé the same thing, just why make a arbitrary designation, a shipyard is a orbital facility, a defense station is a orbital facility, what i said was, why make two different build screens/options/etc. just have a single 'orbital facility' in wich you can toss whatever you want, be it space yard docks, armor plating, PD systems, fighter bays, whatever.

most economicly sound would be spaceyard thataway, and defense stations that...unless it's a battle, then some pd systems and armor/shields would prolly be wanted on the yard....

//discord

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