Suggestion about the shipyard capacity

[Silence Suzuka]

I think it really need some balance tweak.

Now it is so weird that we pay a lot extra money, and get the ship built much slower when over capacity. And the worst thing is there isn't any warning for a ship order can overload your capacity, nor showing the Capacity vs Order size when we making a ship order. I have to jump to the Finance menu, check how much capacity is left, and the calculate how much I can afford to build.

I see little reason for me to go over that capacity. If I'm in dire need of some capital ship to turn the tide of war, I should not do that because it will result in a later deployment of the ordered ship. If I'm not in hurry for those ships, then why should I pay the extra money for them?

If this capacity is designed to purely punish player who over build, then either make it easier for player to keep track of how much capacity they have left (i.e. Show the capacity vs order size when building new ship), or just make it a hard cap, any ship order goes beyond the capacity will be suspended until your shipyard have some free space.

[ohthot1227]

If you go over the capacity for mistake, just suspend the building of some ships.

[Silence Suzuka]

Originally posted by ohthot1227:

If you go over the capacity for mistake, just suspend the building of some ships.

Yes but that means after I make my ship order, I need to go to the finical menu to check the capacity to see how much is over, then go to the ship menu, find the ship I'm building and calculate how much I need to suspend.

And then after like 10 or more turns I need to go resume those build order.

[bkrrrrr]

yeah, not a friendly interface at all

[Knucklehead]

Shipyard capacity was instituted due to us, the players, pointing out (in early access) that the player could go, in practice, from no navy to a full fleet (200+ ships) in 1-3 years with no penalty in time, build capacity, nor cost as there is in real life. And yes (in my opinion), there does need to be an indicator on both the Ship Design and Fleet pages.

As far as capacity goes, it can be faster to build say 50 ships that put you over the limit all at one time then stay under limit. The cost though, may make this impractical. The difference can be anywhere from a few months to 4+ years, depending how far over the limit and the length of time it takes for each ship to build. This is more the case with BB/BC/CA/CLs.
Ex. (times are approximate): I had a BB that took 28mo to build one (queuing 30 ships), plus a CA that had about 23mo build time (25 ships), a CL with 18mo (55 ships) and a DD with 13mo (110 ships). Total tonnage was well over 1.5m with a shipyard capacity around 600k. that would have taken around 8-12 years to complete but doing them all at once took around 5 years. The cost was enormous and caused some budget issues (especially with a fleet that was already over 200+ ships).

Also, you can que ships then suspend them, without penalty, to get under the limit as suspended ships cost no upkeep (fyi, devs this is not realistic and can be exploited by the way). The months to complete will change on the ships around the one suspended as you get closer to the limit and with give the correct build time when you are under.

[Silence Suzuka]

Originally posted by Knucklehead:

Shipyard capacity was instituted due to us, the players, pointing out (in early access) that the player could go, in practice, from no navy to a full fleet (200+ ships) in 1-3 years with no penalty in time, build capacity, nor cost as there is in real life. And yes (in my opinion), there does need to be an indicator on both the Ship Design and Fleet pages.

As far as capacity goes, it can be faster to build say 50 ships that put you over the limit all at one time then stay under limit. The cost though, may make this impractical. The difference can be anywhere from a few months to 4+ years, depending how far over the limit and the length of time it takes for each ship to build. This is more the case with BB/BC/CA/CLs.
Ex. (times are approximate): I had a BB that took 28mo to build one (queuing 30 ships), plus a CA that had about 23mo build time (25 ships), a CL with 18mo (55 ships) and a DD with 13mo (110 ships). Total tonnage was well over 1.5m with a shipyard capacity around 600k. that would have taken around 8-12 years to complete but doing them all at once took around 5 years. The cost was enormous and caused some budget issues (especially with a fleet that was already over 200+ ships).

Also, you can que ships then suspend them, without penalty, to get under the limit as suspended ships cost no upkeep (fyi, devs this is not realistic and can be exploited by the way). The months to complete will change on the ships around the one suspended as you get closer to the limit and with give the correct build time when you are under.

Yes, I understand the necessity of build capacity.

What I'm asking is the UI should be more friendly for player to keep up with it. Like I said above, if I want to build some ship, I have to first go to Finance menu, check how much capacity I have and how much is currently occupied, and then mentally calculate and remember how much is available, then go to ship build menu, mentally calculate how much I can build, (i.e. 156000 tons left, and my BC design is about 23000 ton) then make the ship order.

And the worse part is, when you building ship, and the combat send some of your ship to repair, you will go over that capacity without any notice, so after each combat (or at least before you end your turn), you need to go to the Finance menu, check if there enough capacity, and if not, then again do all the maths to figure how much and what should you suspend, then also you need to remember to resume the construction, which might be 10 months later.

So what I'm suggesting is
1. The ship capacity should be more visible at where player could deal with it, for example when player is building new ships. And in the fleet menu where player can pause and resume the construction.

2. Either make there are some reason to go over it (saving time at huge extra cost), or make it a hard cap, so any ship beyond available capacity will be suspended automatically, and continue when there is enough capacity. In other words is it work like a build/repair queue. It is just stupid to make it a soft cap but with no reason to going over.

[Knucklehead]

Originally posted by Silence Suzuka:

Yes, I understand the necessity of build capacity.

What I'm asking is the UI should be more friendly for player to keep up with it. Like I said above, if I want to build some ship, I have to first go to Finance menu, check how much capacity I have and how much is currently occupied, and then mentally calculate and remember how much is available, then go to ship build menu, mentally calculate how much I can build, (i.e. 156000 tons left, and my BC design is about 23000 ton) then make the ship order.

And the worse part is, when you building ship, and the combat send some of your ship to repair, you will go over that capacity without any notice, so after each combat (or at least before you end your turn), you need to go to the Finance menu, check if there enough capacity, and if not, then again do all the maths to figure how much and what should you suspend, then also you need to remember to resume the construction, which might be 10 months later.

So what I'm suggesting is
1. The ship capacity should be more visible at where player could deal with it, for example when player is building new ships. And in the fleet menu where player can pause and resume the construction.

2. Either make there are some reason to go over it (saving time at huge extra cost), or make it a hard cap, so any ship beyond available capacity will be suspended automatically, and continue when there is enough capacity. In other words is it work like a build/repair queue. It is just stupid to make it a soft cap but with no reason to going over.

Depending on how realistic that the devs want to go with this, is how much code they will have to write/rewrite. Just copy the capacity info to the main map, Ship Design, and Fleet pages would be the quickest way and probably answer most (though not all) of your complaint on this. Writing in a calculator or writing a pointer to run the calculation on the balance left adds to the resources the game already needs as the processor would need to run another, though minor, calculation. Doing either will just take time from the update, and bug fixes, that the devs are currently working on or even delay the upcoming update if they decide to incorporate it into it.

To make it closer to real life, then that’s even more code and system resource intensive. From what I’ve read/seen, ships are half build on a slipway before being moved to a drydock (or maybe mooring) to be completed (Drachinifel has a few videos that cover this). Because of this, the build process would need to include a slipway not just a drydock. The drydock would still be used for construction, refit, and repair and the slipway would only be for new construction. Doing it this way you could, depending on the amount of control they give us, stop ships from transferring to a drydock during construction when a different ship needs repair during war. Coding this into a game could cause unknown game performance issues before they work the bugs out of or optimize it. Also, your second suggestion is what happens, in real life, as new ship construction is always limited to, the number of dockworkers, dockside equipment, and how many slipways/drydocks there are and their size (large drydocks can work multiple ships at one time).

As far as cost over runs for going over the limit, that is already there. They have tweaked it a few times, but it still needs some fine tuning in my opinion.

When ships go into drydock for repair is controlled by what the setting is for repair on a given port not a task force. This is set to "High" by default and if I'm not mistaken changing it to the lowest setting will stop or at least limit the overcapacity problem. Also, the repair setting on a task force is to send a ship to harbor for repairs not to send them to a drydock.


My thoughts on new construction are:

0%-1% would be planning and procurement (suspending here shouldn’t cost much after this the cost should go up substantially).
2%-50/60% would be the slipway.
50/60%-100% of the build process, the ship would be in the drydock (or mooring).

Also, allow us to “build” new drydocks/slipways and upgrade existing ones, plus give us an exact number of them. Upgrading should take the individual drydock/slipway out of use.

[michaelbcurtis]

Originally posted by Silence Suzuka:

I think it really need some balance tweak.

Now it is so weird that we pay a lot extra money, and get the ship built much slower when over capacity. And the worst thing is there isn't any warning for a ship order can overload your capacity, nor showing the Capacity vs Order size when we making a ship order. I have to jump to the Finance menu, check how much capacity is left, and the calculate how much I can afford to build.

I see little reason for me to go over that capacity. If I'm in dire need of some capital ship to turn the tide of war, I should not do that because it will result in a later deployment of the ordered ship. If I'm not in hurry for those ships, then why should I pay the extra money for them?

If this capacity is designed to purely punish player who over build, then either make it easier for player to keep track of how much capacity they have left (i.e. Show the capacity vs order size when building new ship), or just make it a hard cap, any ship order goes beyond the capacity will be suspended until your shipyard have some free space.

If that isn't bad enough, the refit times show up in the refit design, the shipbuilding tab for selecting the ship and the fleet tab, and all three are different, between one month and 9 months. when you select a refit, and it says one month, it will take shipbuilding to refit, then you got into fleet and it says it will take 9 months to refit, it is just not reasonable