Game Bottleneck

[Phoenix-D]

You can boost ship yard built rates, yes. Components.txt for that. The other things affecting production are in settings.txt, I think.

"I haven't noticed differences due to population. . . spaceborne shipyards produce just as quickly as planetary ones. . . so what else can effect this?"

Actually, population does have an effect, as does happyness (both apply only to planets, obviously) All told, ship yards are MUCH slower than planetary yards.

For example: in one of my games, a Jublient planet with 3766 billion population produces at 4200 a turn. A small jublient planet produced at 3000 per turn. All my ship-based yards, on the other hand, produced at just 2000 per turn.

Phoenix-D

[Baron Munchausen]

quote:

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Originally posted by Argh:
Can I boost the rate by which the Space Yard can produce, much like boosting resource production? That way, I can construct planets that are based around building spacecraft, and further-specialize elsewhere. . . just a thought.

IRL, the warships in SE:IV are more like cars than anything else- you're building standardized designs in large numbers. I guess that, to me at least, it makes no intuitive sense to assume that these are all ultra-complicated one-offs like today's modern warships- on the contrary, since they all use the same parts. . . dunno

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Yeah, it's a simple edit of the facility.txt file to make space yards more powerful. But that won't change the single item per turn limit. That's in the program code.

There is a cheat, too, but you'll find it tedious. Make a 'dummy' facility with no spaceyard abilities and call it something like "Industrial Infrastructure". Build them on the planets you want & then save game, edit to give those extra facilities space yard abilities, then reload game. Problem is, once you do that you cannot build anymore. Unless you edit facility.txt again to remove the abilities, meaning you cannot use the extra abilities while building new ones.

[MegaTrain]

Actually, the population of a planet can be a pretty substantial bonus to construction rate. Here are the numbers (population figures are minimums for that bonus level):

Pop - Bonus %
100 - 5%
500 - 10%
1000 - 20%
2000 - 30%
3000 - 40%
4000 - 50%
5000 - 60%
6000 - 70%
7000 - 80%
8000 - 90%
(8000 is the max pop on a huge native-atmosphere planet)

It's awfully hard to get several thousand on EVERY planet (unless you've got incredible reproduction rate), but in my Last game I had several "super construction" planets, which were constructing at over 4500/turn (in NON-emergency mode!). And that was with just 6000 pop and a Spaceyard II. Not too shabby.

Here's a full chart I just whipped up in Excel:
[ 29 December 2001: Message edited by: MegaTrain ]

[Q]

Yes the space yard capacity is a bottleneck for production in SE IV, but IMHO this is a good change MM made in comparision to SE III where you could build a star destroyer in one or two turns if you had enough resources. In SE IV you are forced to make more long term plans for your construction. And if I want multiple space yards I build several space stations with space yards on this location.

[Argh]

Yeah, I can see where MM was going with this. . . but at the same time, I just feel a bit miffed when I hit the "wall" in production about midgame. Seriously speaking here, from a game design perspective, it makes sense to be able to build spaceyards that can still eat all of the available resources, as time goes on. Perhaps what I need to do is modify the tech tree, so that everybody can research further editions of Spaceyard.
I have planets that, if tweaked, are producing upwards of 30,000+ minerals per turn(given all of the optimizations you can get for production) and yet I can't build Dreadnoughts simply because of the insane lead time required. It's very hard to fight a war against opponants who have much cruddier technology overall, but who sacrificed their build queue for Dreadnoughts early on Now, this may be fair, from some perspectives. . . but it's terribly unrealistic, imho. I mean, I have FAR more resources than I can *ever* possibly use. . . in the amount of time I'd normally use them!

I'll try modifying the research tree, and see how things feel after that. Now, there are some issues that would remain- I'd have to modify the AI files, or they won't research this, don't I?

[Baron Munchausen]

Argh,

It sounds to me like you might be emphasizing ships too much. How much do you spend on units? The best way around the bottleneck is to use every single planet to build units. For that matter, even spaceyard components can build units at a reasonable rate. Admittedly, they are not so effective for offense as ships. Even with carriers you can't attack in the same way using fighters as you can with ships. But I still think units are a vital part of the game.

[Phoenix-D]

"and yet I can't build Dreadnoughts simply because of the insane lead time required."

Yes you can.. you just have to be more patient about it. 7 turns, 5 with emergancy build, for a 4billion pop SYIII planet. Twice that at a ship-based space yard.

If you want lots of ships (in an unmodded game), build lots of contruction bases. If you send part of the newly built bases to build MORE bases, you can get a lot of bases quickly, then start building entire fleets at one location.

"Seriously speaking here, from a game design perspective, it makes sense to be able to build spaceyards that can still eat all of the available resources, as time goes on."

It doesn't, really. One of the few advantages of smaller ships is they take less time to build. Take that away and they're useless, instead of almost useless. It also removed the need to pre-plan what you're going to do, and to hold ships back to defend. That makes offense much nastier.. until you hit a planet. Then a smart player will have built a cargo facility or three, and used his large shipyards to build as many fighters as will fit. A huge planet with a few cargo facilities could throw so many fighters at you- all built in one or two turns!- that SEIV would choke. To say nothing of satilites or mines. Or the impact of being able to build an entire invasion force on one planet in one turn.

You'd also hit your construction limit in just two or three turns- because of maintance. Then all your shipyards would sit idle. IMO *that* doesn't make any sense.

Phoenix-D

[ 29 December 2001: Message edited by: Phoenix-D ]