Parallel Ship Building

[EntropyAvatar]

In most space 4x games, you shipyard works on one ship at a time, and a shipyard with more construction builds ships faster. So you build the your new dreadnought design at a backwater and it will take 100 turns. Build it at Construction Prime and it takes 5 turns.

Of course, in the real world, having more industrial resources available doesn't necessarily mean that you can complete a complex project faster. Just as nine women can't make a baby in one month, it makes sense that building a giant space ship just takes a certain amount of time, no matter how many hands you have available. Instead of building ships faster in serial fashion, larger shipyards tend to build more ships in parallel.

This has interesting strategic implications. If it takes, say, 5 years of game time to build a capital ship, you really have to plan ahead. If you are caught flat-footed in a war, and you have nothing in the construction pipeline, you will be fighting with the fleet you have for a long time before you can respond, regardless of your construction capabilities. If you launch a crash construction program, and your main shipyard is destroyed partway through, you've lost not just the value of the shipyard, but all of the hulls under construction there.

I think I would prefer this approach myself, as I like a game that requires planning and where the "ship of state" can't be turned on a dime. On the other hand, it is reasonable to worry that in a free-form game like Stellaris, it could cripple the AI to adopt mechanics that require a lot of planning and imagining of possible futures.

 

[SIEGE-109]

You generally only have to build shipyards to enable ship construction, or to enable larger hulls. You should have to build larger/additional shipyards to be able to allocate more Industry and build more ships.

 

[DeveronMagi]

really nice analysis by entropyavater. i never though about it like this but this is much like the HOI system of building your armed forces and i like it, this will also help with making the ships more valuable (if you cant just replace your lost ships that fast you might opt to retreat a fleet instead of a desperate attack which you know you cannot win).

This will also help with a more 'realistic' introduction of new technologies. you cant have a dreadnought with the new 'super duper special laser array weapon X' 5 minutes after researching it. a dreadnought just takes 10 min.

lastly this makes it also very important to think about fleet upgrades and building of ships during peace time. you cant just ramp up production as soon as a war breaks out because it still takes a while for the ships to be ready. if you didnt upgrade your fleet you might have a large numerical advantage but will still lose due a technological disadvantage.

I like it! IF this could be implemented correctly i would be all for it. i am for ANYTHING that makes one ship valuable an not just cannonfodder.

 

[Lys91]

Indeed, something ala HoI would be great! Very nice suggestion OP.

 

[stilgarpl]

Sins of Solar Empire has it exactly like you describe. Building time is constant and more shipyards can simply build more ships at the same time.

It's a fun mechanic, especially when you are building your Titan - not only the ship is expensive (it costs as much as a fleet of capitals), it's unique shipyard is expensive too (you can have another capital ship for that price). Also, it takes a long time to build, so you have to defend it during construction, or all that money and resources will be lost.



Another thing about parallel building - this is especially annoying in turn based games. If you have enough research to invent two or three techs in one turn, or build more than one building/ship... no, the game will usually just give you the first one from queue, and if it's nice, the rest will be converted into money. If it isn't, they it's simply lost (and you have to micromanage sliders, so you will put into the project exactly the amount it needs)

 

[henzington]

Thankfully that won't be an issue as the game is real time.

 

[stilgarpl]

Thankfully that won't be an issue as the game is real time.

Not quite There is still a tick, like a day in CK2/EU4 or an hour in HOI. It is unlikely, but possible to produce more X in a day than it is required to complete something.
And, as some things are only calculated monthly in those games, there were tactics ("exploits") taking advantage of that. If you timed sending diplomats or colonists just right, you could get more than you normally would.

 

[Kaiser Timo]

I would suggest building small space ships at spaceports on planets, whilst when you acclaimed the technology to build Apocalypse-class Battleship then you need a huge platform to build it. Like a terraformed asteroid or huge floating spaceport that orbits an industrial world.

 

[echo2361]

I really like this idea. It would make your capital ships much more valuable if they took longer to replace. It would also make forge worlds with massive orbital shipyards key targets in any war for raiding while the enemy's battleships are sitting in rows, half complete and unable to defend themselves

 

[Bismark776]

I think this really depends on what the time scale is going to be and what kind of abstraction they're using between that time scale, industrial production, and technological advancement. This kind of system would make a lot of sense if each tick is a day, a week, or even a month. However, if ticks get longer than that then this kind of thing stops making a lot of sense. You get into yearlong ticks and suddenly the amount of produceable material and the advancement of technology per tick eliminates the real value of gearing as you'd likely want to re-gear every few ticks.

Of course, if every tick is less than a year then the game would be very very different from your standard 4x. Imagine the slow rate of population growth in colonies if ticks are only days.

 

[EntropyAvatar]

Well, HoI2-style gearing is a characteristic of a serial build. Stellaris could have gearing and parallel builds, or either one independently.

It's definitely true, however, that the various game time scales influence how important such a feature might be. If, for instance, travel takes a long time relative to construction, it probably doesn't matter if ships are produced serially or in parallel. If ships are very few and very expensive, you might only be able to afford to produce one per shipyard anyway.

I think building ships in batches could have a nice see-saw effect to a war (provided that you don't lose the shipyards). I could see a player holding back, trying to buy time, knowing that a good number of modern reinforcements would soon become available.

 

[Dutch Empire]

I really like the idea! It would also be nice to use natural resources in production.
Say you want to construct a huge fleet, or say Space Bismarck class ships, you need to have the resources to do this. Either you buy them, mine them or capture them by force.
Rare resources (like uranium, aluminum and oil in Civ4) should be rare and not easy to be found. It has to be really rewarding when you find that source of rare metals so you can finally construct another ship or hurry production.

 

[stilgarpl]

Rare resources (like uranium, aluminum and oil in Civ4) should be rare and not easy to be found. It has to be really rewarding when you find that source of rare metals so you can finally construct another ship or hurry production.

If resources are too rare, AI may have problems with playing the game.

Once I played a game of Armada 2, I tuned the resources to the minimum. Basically, the game was in empty space and the best source of resources was to capture and recycle enemy ships. AI had no idea how do play that scenario