Does anyone know why you can not upgrade to the II and up shipyards?

d'oh, matress inadvertently screwed up the prerequisites. we'll get it fixed soon. In the meantime, you can overwrite your "Resources\Data\TechObjectDatabase.xml" file with the attached one.

Eh? I've spent ages working on the Shipyards. I could've sworn that they were working now. .Iceman didn't notice any problems with the shipyards either, and I know for a fact that the Federation shipyards worked correctly because I tested them. Wierd.

I'll add this to the known issues thread. I updated it last night for the May version in case you didn't notice, Mike.

Yep, except for the detail about minors' shipyards I mentioned to MoE in a PM, they were correct.

@matress: They were "sort of" correct. Problem is, you set it up such that a FED_SHIPYARD_II has prerequisites of FED_SHIPYARD_I, KLI_SHIPYARD_I, ROM_SHIPYARD_I, etc. These were set up as separate prerequisites rather than being together in a prerequisite group. Items in a prerequisite group are "equivalent", meaning only one of them is needed, and it doesn't matter which one.

I also noticed that you made Utopia Planitia a shipyard rather than a structure (as it was in BotF). Is this what we want to do? I noticed that it has a lower shipbuilding bonus than the other shipyards, which seems odd to me considering that it's Utopia Planitia. And why did you make it an upgrade from the Federation Mark II Shipyard? If you want to make it available as an upgrade to the Mark II, that's fine, but you also need to add upgrade paths from the Mark III and Mark IV. Otherwise, if the player upgrades to a Mark III, he'd have to tear it down, build a Mark I, and then upgrade it. Speaking of which, do we really want to require the player to build a Mark I Shipyard and then upgrade to Mark II and then Mark III if they have requisite tech levels to just build a Mark III straight up? If so, we should just remove the prerequisites.

I also noticed that you're giving "+ Percent Shipbuilding" bonuses to the shipyards. Shipyards really aren't supposed to have bonuses. You could just as easily use the Build Efficiency property instead. Build Efficiency is the multiplier that gets applied to a colony's Industry output to determine how many build points are available for shipbuilding each turn. Thus, if you had 1000 Industry and a multiplier of 0.75, you would have 750 build points available for shipbuilding (and still have 1000 for planetary building). Instead of having a Build Efficiency of 1.0 and a +15% Shipbuilding bonus, you could just have a Build Efficiency of 1.15.

While we're on the subject of shipyards, this conversation has got me thinking that maybe shipyards shouldn't be a specialized structure, but a completely different type of object. If we stopped treating them as structures, then it wouldn't make sense for them to consume energy from the planetary grid (another problem I have with the current design). What would you guys say if I took away power requirements for shipyards? I don't think it would have much of an impact on strategy, because we already have tons of other structures to ensure that energy is sufficiently scarce .

It didn't work in that way in my experience though, Mike - I purposely set them up as separate groups so that they would work. And that way, if an Empire conquered another Empire's system, they would be able to upgrade any existing shipyards along their own path. Unless I misunderstood the system, each separate grouping means a separate set of requirements, rather than an extra set of requirements, correct?

Utopia Planitia in BOTF allowed for the construction of special ships. Seeing as no such option is available in the editor, (Either as a shipyard bonus, or as a ship requirement) I redeveloped it into a second Fleetyard for the Federation. Since the structure is tech 6 but the Fleetyards are tech 11 structures, I purposely gave Utopia a low bonus - but this is still a considerable bonus because the Feds get it 4 tech levels early. I then kept the Federation Fleetyard, but I increased the build costs slightly and reduced the bonus it provides to compensate. The tech 6 requirement also means that it cannot be an upgrade of the large shipyard - because that is a tech 9 structure. The only way to change that back would be to, as you say, make it a structure instead of a shipyard; make it a higher tech level building - which would defy canon since we know Utopia was around since at least TNG times; or to make it an upgrade for the medium shipyard instead of the large shipyard, which is what I did.

See? There was method in my madness.

As for giving the shipyards bonuses, one of the bonuses that I discussed with Dafedz for the Dominion was that they would be able to churn out ships faster than the other Empires, so we gave them a 25% construction bonus. We discussed this before I knew what the efficiency rate referred to, which is why it was set up that way. I didn't know that you could set the efficency rate above 100% either. If you haven't already done this yourself, i'll change the % bonus into efficiency bonuses once the editor works again.

I actually would prefer it if the shipyards were considered as a different type of structure - in fact, if you make it this way, I would ask if the Orbital Batteries would also be added to this new category. If we take away the energy cost of the shipyards, what if we instead had them use Deuterium and/or Dilithium? The ships need these afterall, and the shipyards do build and refuel the ships.

If we remove the energy cost of the shipyards, what about the Orbital Batteries? Will they also be self-powered? Or could there be an alternative energy structure just for space-based structures? The Cardassians did that in DS9 afterall, even if it eventually proved to be the undoing of their defences.

Incidentally, energy might be scarce, but i've actually already increased the output of all of the energy facilities by 25%. It would've been worse if I hadn't.

Hehe, I think I did mention the construction bonus (and the lack of any sense) somewhere... And the docks.

As for no pre-reqs on shipyards, then why are there pre-reqs for structures? Why can'y I build a Farm 6 from the ground up? Also mentioned earlier. The upgrade system in the game is really bad.

Another issue also mentioned earlier. While restructuring the whole thing, maybe it's time to decouple the shipyard production from the structure production..?

considering that that most shipyards are space platforms they should operate well on solar-panel, nuke, or fusion generators. which in ideal setting should provide energy bonuses to their system; however there has to be some kind of set back to offset this. maybe pricing increase to manufacutring them.

Well I could easily increase the cost of the Basic Shipyard for all of the races. I always thought the Basic Shipyard was too cheap - it was always one of the first structures I built - which doesn't make sense when a new colony *should* be investing in food production, energy production, etc etc. Building a space platform should only be possible once a colony has grown to a sufficient size to be able to support it. I believe the industrial cost is the same as it was in BOTF though, so BOTF was also flawed in that particular respect.

IIRc, nope, in BotF cost was something like 500 or so (or was it 1000?).
At the risk of sounding repetitive (and annoying), consider decoupling ship construction from structure construction. That way one has to assign pop either to factories OR shipyards. Since apparently Intel structures are going to be scrapped, use those slots for the shipyard, so that UI changes are minimal.

I agree that shipyards ought to be more costly. Do we have a consensus that shipyards without energy requirements are acceptable if they are more costly (read: time consuming) to construct? .Iceman, Valcoren, Matress, et al?

.Iceman's idea of shipbuilding being a separate infrastructure category is interesting. It would be a pretty radical change to how shipyards are represented in the code, though. It would also replace the notion of multiple construction docks in a single shipyard with instead having multiple shipyards with one construction dock each.

They'll always be on, but that's not a bad thing. You don't run the risk of seeing your fuel range decrease suddenly - partly good, as it makes people not wonder what happened when they see their ships get stranded for a lack of energy ; though it was also an interesting thing (denying your enemy the range).
There should probably be some kind of upkeep. Maybe require the shipyard to be manned to provide the range bonus; remove the pop (see below), and lose bonus.

Docks can be represented by the number of "slots" available. For balance, those slots can be capped not by pop/10 like usual, but by pop level like trade routes or something. Or have the pop upkeep cost be higher (then 10 as usual) for shipyard slots. Tech level would add additional slots.
Even simpler, and keeping with the current trend, each 2 or 3 levels in a "shipyard" tech (or Construction area level) unlocks an additional dock.

Yeah, i'm happy with this idea. Separate them and give them population blocks. Larger shipyards then allow you to allocate more people as the number of docks increases. One thing that would make it a good idea to separate them in the code may be that we plan to have shipyards and orbital batteries in the tactical combat though - would the game know to show these structures in combat if they weren't separated? Kenneth and Trashman have already created the models for these structures.

I haven't got a problem with scrapping the energy costs if we're bumping up the construction costs as well. However, there needs to be a concession with this - home systems should always have a shipyard prebuilt, or on early tech games you won't be able to do much exploring or defending even with the starting ship(s) that you have (Which also begs the question of where those ships came from if you don't already have a yard), especially if the starting ships are destroyed by a random event or combat.

The minors special shipyards would probably have to be converted to structures giving construction bonuses (which means the Tellarite facilities would be merged). Minors' shipyards have to be scrapped too, but that's not really a bad thing They're still better than the empires' in some instances, which is weird. The confusion with minors shipyards would go away, that's another benefit.

Yep. Actually, I had already asked a couple of times why the heck didn't the empires start with a shipyard already built...

There could be a raw materials bonus cost for shipyards BTW, or a credits maintenance cost, so that you don't build one in each and every system you colonize - when there's nothing else to build, build a shipyard, to increase range.

A credits maintenance cost might be a good idea. But then again why use credits when I previously suggested Dueterium and/or Dilithium. Credits might be applicable to the Orbital Batteries as well, if we're still looking for some sort of limitation on them.

I wasn't complaining lol. Even if the shipyard isn't in use, the lights and everything are still turned on. Chances are it's powered by Fusion reactors, which consume Deuterium as a fuel source. Therefore they should use Deuterium. [/end pedanticism]

I am in complete agreement to the shipyard change, and the labor fee is a great idea. so the votes are all in (haha) …. oh M.O.E. I feel some more random events coming of this idea!

I think yall need to look at that patch you have created because it does not work. I have tried multiple levels and different races and have been unable to create any new star ships beyond level 3. beyond that everything else about this game is great and i can not wait for the finished product.

Well, shipyards are in space, they can use solar panels for their basic power needs... No Deuterium needed. Doesn't mean they cannot *cost* some when built.
BTW, above I meant raw materials cost (only), not raw materials bonus cost (duh!).