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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Ranos
Dyson Forest
Posts: 234
Joined: Tue Mar 23, 2004 6:24 am
Location: Northern Wisconsin

#91 Post by Ranos »

First off, I only read through page two but I wanted to post my idea before I forgot it. I will go back and read the rest.

If you read Sci-Fi books, which I do (especially Star Wars), you will see that most have a focus system, if I am understanding the way it is being referred to. You have planets that are primarily mining worlds. They have no other contribution to the rest of the empire. They may have a location or two capable of growing crops, but the crops stay on planet while the materials are transported elsewhere. There are agricultural, industrial and multiple other types. Look at Coruscant in SW, it is nothing but a governmental world. It produces nothing for the rest of the galaxy, no crops, no mining, no industry, etc.

If I understand waht is being said about worlds haveing a focus, then this is an idea that is already being tossed around. In the latest addition to the SW universe, The New Jedi Order, throughout the series, which is around 20 books, there are only two or three worlds mentioned that have shipyards. That is the way a real system would work.

I would like to see shipyards, but not the way it has been done in all other games. In MOO3, first off, you can build the smaller three or four ship designs with no shipyard at all. I don't like that. You colonise a planet and are immediately capable of building a ship. How? If there are 10 sizes of ships, when a planet has built its base industry (I'm assuming that all planets will have some form of industrial complex on them, just some will be huge and others will be small), it can build the smallest or maybe the two smallest ship designs. The rest would require an orbital shipyard to construct.

If you have 20 planets in your empire, only one or two would have shipyards, but those shipyards would be capable of building multiple ships at once. The rest of the planets would send pp to this planet so the ships could be built. Call me longwinded, but follow me on the building of this ship producing planet:

--The planet is colonized.
--Its industrial base is built.
--You decide to use it as a ship producing world.
--You build the first shipyard which is automatically capable of building the largest ship design you have, but only one.
--The game continues and you are getting more and more planets and more and more pp.
--You add a second bay to the shipyard. Now you can build two ships at once.
--You just finished researching the next design size. You can already build it in your shipyard. Why? You tell your military researchers to design a larger ship type. They start working on the design. As they are working on it, the size specifications are finalized and sent to the ship produsing planet. They immediately begin upgrading the shipyard to accomidate the larger design. When the design is finished, so are the upgrades. You may now commence construction of the newest and greatest ship in your fleet.
--As the game goes on and you continue to increase, you continue to build additional bays on the shipyard.

This makes for more strategic points in wars. Instead of having to take every world before you can stop worrying about facing the big ships, you try to take the ship produsing worlds, or if the enemy has too many ships there, you take all the worlds with starlanes to it, effectively cutting off its supply of pp and forcing it to abandon all but one or two ships being built.

There would have to be a maximum on the number of bays that could be constructed per planet and empire wide. Something like ten or fifteen per planet and a fromula for the empire maximum. Maybe one per planet in the empire or 1.5 per planet.

NOw for the multiple ships being built at one shipyard, it wouldn't be the annoying MOO3 way. Ship A takes 5 truns to buld so buildding 5 would take 25 truns and 25 turns later you get 5 of that one ship. This would be a screen in which you would either micro and tell Shipyard 1, Bay 1 (S1B1) to build ship A and S1B2 to build ship B and so on or you have a supervisor and tell him how many of each kind of ship you want built and he will order the Docks and Bays to build the specific ships.

Now lest say you have four different ship designs, A, B, C and D. A takes 2 turns to build; B, 4; C, 6; D, 8. You have four bays on a shipyard. You tell B1 to build A, 2 to build B, 3 to build C and 4 to buld D. After two turns, you have a working A that is on its way to the rally point or is ready for orders B1 begins building another A and the rest of the bays have completed two turns of work on their ships. Two turns later, you have another A and a B. Now you have two As and a B to use. I can go on, but I think you get the idea.

This would be a more realistic and, for me, a more enjoyable way of doing ship building. Now I am not a prgrammer so I don't know how complex that would be to put into the game nor do I particularly care. I'm just throwing out my idea for discussion/consideration.

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