[Patroklos]

Mentioned before, several times, by me, in this thread, but a topic that is dear to my heart and that I must have in SEV.

Space Yards should be restricted in what they can build by level. You should require a certain level shipyard to build certain level componets/size ships. This way you would have to have large sprawling shipyards to produce the largest most advanced ships. Orbital shipyards should be prohibitively expensive, capital investments that take a long time to build. Planetary shipyards should be resticted to building Frigate size vessels and smaller.

I also like the SEII style of building ships where the ship shows up in the sqare with all its componets destroyed and then has to be "built" a component at a time. This might be how it worked in SEIII, I did a generational skip however. This allows for two things.

1.) You can attack a shipyard and destroy a building vessel.

2.) In emergencies you can launch a vessel prematurely before it is done. Maybe require 50% complete before launch or something like that.

And though I know this is moddable, ships cruiser and up should take a significant amount of time to build increasing proportionally to their size. This would

1.) make the production of smaller ship classes always nessecary and add more depth to ship design/fleet strategy.

2.) make your larger warships scarce, prestegious, and important. In SEIV ship size becomes meaningless since everyone can build the latest size within say 10 turns of each other. Once everone is on par fighting with Dreadnaughts they might as well be Frigates.

What I am really trying to do with this is make ships more important "living" things. If you can only produce three large capital ships every 5 years (because you only have three large shipyards capable of building that scale vessel) those ships become important, trackable units. They will be behemouths among the many smaller vessel you have to maintain, renowned and well know within your empire and your neighbors.