Revisiting the topic about making the shipbuilding capacity of a system be independent from that system's industrial output.
If these two are de-coupled, small systems can still be good shipyard systems; they'll take longer to build the shipyards themselves though, so they are more useful but not as much as larger systems.
The current system, because of the base industry provided by pop introduced in Sup, makes removing pop units from industry not have much of an impact on the system's ship construction capacity.
So IMO it'd be better if it'd be changed to each shipyard having its own shipbuilding capacity, independent from the system's industry. The current Build Efficiency bonuses are scrapped, and instead build rate is determined by shipyard output and ship cost only. Much simpler, and easy to balance. There already is a PercentShipBuilding attribute, adding a ShipBuilding one is not much work. Plus, no real need to change the UI, only a bit of code.
I'd start with something like this, and then tweak it (or ship costs):



* only the Federation and the Cardassians have this SY
** Kazon, Axanar, Coridan, Tellarite

I wouldn't really consider having different stats for each empire, since ship costs already reflect the empires' capacity to build ships; it'd be kind of redundant or conflicting (as the current system is).
I'm also not convinced of the gameplay value of Slots, except for repairs, so I've kept them the same.


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I have some issues with the current database (regarding shipyards), which are also valid for these changes since some stats didn't change:

- Fleetyards I
They have 6 slots and MaxLevel 12, just like Fleetyards II. That's kind of odd, since they're level 5.

- Shipyards II
They have MaxLevel 12, shouldn't they be 11, and let only the Fleetyards build the top of the line ship for each empire?

- Minor special shipyards (fleetyards)
Same as above, maybe they should be MaxLevel 11. See below.

- Fleetyards
Both empires that have 2 FYs (Federation and Cardassians) and 3 of the 4 minors that have special SYs are in the Alpha Quadrant, which might pose some balance questions.

I've also tweaked the build costs of Outposts BTW. I'm testing all these changes in the game, and they look good so far.
Energy structures, they need a complete overhaul though.


Outpost I - 1000 (no change)
Outpost II - 3000
Starbase I - 5000
Starbase II - 15000

Science Station - 4000 (no change)

What if we powered the individual construction bays (slots) independently? For example. if you had a Shipyard III but only wanted to build 2 ships, you could power up two of the slots and leave the other two unpowered, requiring 50 energy instead of 100 energy.

That would be a good idea IMO, though it would kind of increase MM (energy). But colony management is all about MM.

Plus, when I said slots wouldn't be all too useful, it was in the respect that either we make ships take very long to build, or you can just build one per system and not get behind - I'm assuming we're going with a trekish approach of not having large ship counts in empires.

The downside effect of slots might be that you only build a few shipyards/fleetyards in your empire, and pump out ships from those few yards. That is, you don't need to build too many of them. Might not be a downside at all, depends on what you want with the game. Maybe restricting shipyard construction to systems with Raw Materials (and/or Dilithium might be pushing it) would help in this case. Sure, losing such systems would be crippling, but then again, one more reason to protect those systems with all you've got.

Well you might build more shipyards only because of location. Strategic. So that your output is close to a new front line. Plus in the old game there was something about a shipyard increasing the reach of your exploration. Bashir

Yeah, but notice the size of maps, range of shipyards, ships' fuel+range stats, pacts with other empires/minors, etc. And you can scrap your inner core shipyards as soon as you build new ones, to save on maintenance (will shipyards have credits maintenance?), since you'll be building on the frontier systems anyway.
Notice I'm not saying you'll only have 2 or 3 SYs.
Also notice that, like I said before, the role of stations might get shafted by all the factors mentioned above.

I've been making some comments about the changes to the game, and the extended database. They are not gratuitous. The old game was very streamlined (mechanics-wise that is), giving each part of the game its specific role. There was a purpose for everything, and that purpose was evident. With all the new stuff that was added, there's duplication of effects, redundancy, and innefficiency in various places. The massive amount of food structures, the proliferation of energy structures, the things I mentioned in the previous paragraph, etc. It feels like a mod.
This is all just my opinion of course.

Oh, and when I asked Mike to add an _option_ to have move to systems only in the game, it was basically to make Scouts more valuable, make exploration harder and more challenging/interesting, prevent exploits and as a side effect reduce Turn Processing Time. In BotF you could move anywhere sure, but notice how ranges worked in that game.

I like the idea of having independently powered build slots. The question is how this will be presented to player to make it obvious.

...

In reference to the proliferation in Food structures, refer to Dafedz's database only when it comes to Food structures. Structures like the Domestic Replicator Network were never intended to be in the game. They were an experimentation on my part that accidentally made their way into the May 2009 update.

I'm struggling trying to come up with a better shipyard interface. Below is what I have so far, but it's not obvious how you power/unpower the bays, nor now much energy each bay consumes.

Wow thats a awesome screenshot Mike. Lovin it!

It does seam familiar though. It looks like the original game where you clicked to light up turn on or turn off darken an item. You would do that and watch the quanta of energy get consumed out of your reserves.


You could change it to say Powered and Unpowered in place of Ready and Offline. It might be clearer that way.

Forget that earlier ****, I like this much better:

Ok so that's just friggen awesome! I love the idea of ships actually in Bays - it's worthy of your exciting improvement in graphic realism. If we had all the models we could come up with a shot of an empty shipyard, and ones with the same yard, the same size with the chosen ship in it in a docked orientation. Hmmm. Do we have a 3D model of a shipyard owned by someone in our community? Captain

BTW: what do the tools in the top right signify? It's on and ready?

I'm assuming it means powered and available but no ships have been ordered for construction. So essentially the shipyard at that point in time is simply wasting energy.

Mike also told me on MSN last night that he was thinking about adding the energy requirement numbers near the lightning bolt so players know how much it costs to power the individual bays.

By the way, what about repairing ships, Mike? Are they still going to show up in the repair bays as planned, or are you just going to give ships a passive, per-turn repair as it was in BOTF?

Looks good Mike. That background image, ugh, have you thought about changing it already? I've changed mine to a pure black with very dim white small stars. It's less aggressive



Well, that was a very long lasting accident. It's a string of 6 upgrading structures, and they're still there.
Anyways, I've sent the latest update to the database to Mike yesterday, with them still in it.



Related to this, if the system is attacked when ships are repairing in the docks, will they fight, or remain docked - and be sitting ducks? With cloaking and all, could be interesting to have them docked.

We have all the models of ships and shipyards. The problem would be coding an engine to load the correct models and then ships into the correct bays. After that you need to take a render and display that. It is not impossible but a combat engine will come first.

I've pretty much written off the idea of manually repairing ships. There's just too much other stuff that needs to be done.

And yes, the tool icon is what you would click to select a ship for construction. I'm going to do away with the queues for ship construction.

I used one of the docking bays from our Federation Shipyard III model to make those graphics.

The other way to do this Kenneth is to have the following pictures (by way of example) and just switch between them.

Empty dock
Dock rendered from the same distance and angle and lighting with a Star Ship #1 in it
Dock rendered from the same distance and angle and lighting with a Star Ship #2 in it
Dock rendered from the same distance and angle and lighting with a Star Ship #3 in it
etc.

i.e. just program Supremacy to show the empty dock when there is no construction going or the "dock AND ship in question" when there is construction going on. It just means we need a "dock with ship" render for each of the ships. Our goal would be to have the images aligned exactly so that it looks like the ship appears in the dock and the dock stayed there. Computers are fast enough that you would not see the switch if the dock doesn't lurch or jiggle in the transition.

It occurs to me that it would make it necessary to pay attention to what tech level of dock and what kind of ship since a dock for larger ships wouldn't work well for Archer Enterprise level ships (the mechanical arms aren't close enough to the ship to manipulate anything). This problem was addressed in that episode where the repair station formed itself around Enterprise.

Bashir

Added the energy numbers. Better?

Great!

Yes, terrific! CB

It's the little things that count.

It's interesting to see how this compares with Dafedz's Yard Ops mockup from many moons ago. He had the ship images front-on as you suggest, Bashir.

From mockup to (semi-)functioning prototype:


I'll work on the progress bars later. But it works with live game data now.

Cool!

One thing I just noticed though, could you darken the colour of, or even remove, the square around the ship image? It would make the ship look more like it is in the shipyard instead of floating in front of it as a separate image then.

It's not going to look like it's "in" the shipyard either way. The perspective is all wrong. I'll probably keep it.

We can still give Mike images that are front on. Everything else is ready to go. CB

It would probably just be easier to eventually render the actual models themselves rather than manually making additional images of every ship.

By "Render the Models" I assume you are implying using software code such as would be in the combat engine to draw a 3D ship front on. The downside is the the ship would be low poly when it doesn't have to be or do I have the wrong idea? Captain B Here is a front on transport render I did in 3 minutes (in the middle of writing this post).

It's a great job MIKE, the next interfaces & mockups will be updated as this view?

The ships wouldn't be rendered very large, so it wouldn't really matter if they're low poly. I was thinking of rendering them in the ship build list anyway:

You're gonna make a lot of people very happy with this update, Mike.

...Including me.

If possible, i'd suggest making the background behind the ships black though. Or even better, display the Supremacy background. It would look better and make the ship look like it was in space. Hope it can be done without too much work.