|
Post by kyle on Nov 4, 2018 14:22:24 GMT -6
And don't forget the Soviet union - the Baltic fleet and Black sea fleets. I would not expect other countries than the US and USSR to have widely distributed shipyards for major ships, but if they wanted to invest the money... it isn't just a matter of investing money. The site for the shipyard must be on the edge of a body of water of sufficient depth and large enough to permit safe launching of ships after being built. The location has to have an adequate delivery system for large and heavy materials needed for building the ships and it should be close to suitable housing facilities for the workmen. There has to be a deep and wide channel leading to the sea so the completed ships can pass out to sea. Most times, along a waterway, the ground has to be strengthened to support the building. If the ground is on very good rock like granite, limestone, or something similar, you don't need pilings. However, if it is on clay material, sandstone, siltstone, it will require extensive piling along with reinforced concrete. If your pilings are made out of wood, then you need a good source of strong wood nearby to build them, trees like fir and pine. Weather can play a large part since all shipbuilding except for steel and iron production and fabrication shops, is outside. Generally, you have three types of shipyards; private, naval and overseas. It depends on the nation which one it uses the most. Another issue is whether this location has already been used for shipyards and whether there is enough room to build a new slip and dock to build your ships. Warships tend to get longer and wider, so the slips have to be either improved or new wider slips built. Is there enough room to perform this necessary modifications. The British had a similar problem on the Thames with the Royal Shipyards. The maximum beam could only be 90 feet due to the crowded nature of the area. Anyway, it gets complex and you can't just snap your fingers and a fully equipped shipyard appears. Read the Battleships Builders for some good information on British shipbuilding. One advantage the German's had in the late 19th century when they began building warships, was that they did not have any shipyards and therefore they could build all new ones, with the latest technology and could use as much room as necessary. It greatly enhanced the design and building of their warships. Of course there is far more to it than money, but for game purposes I expect the management of finding, building, dredging and all those other things to be simplified greatly. I want to build a shipyard not micromanage finding trees and all the other things you mention which are of course also required. If a location doesn't have the materials then you're not going to be building a major shipyard there - regardless of how much money you throw at it! Maybe the locations can be pre-scouted in the game so that an option of building facilities appears only on those locations? Also ship size restrictions - maybe you can build destroyers but nothing larger or anti-submarine sloops (wooden) but nothing steel.
|
|
|
Post by oldpop2000 on Nov 4, 2018 14:55:29 GMT -6
it isn't just a matter of investing money. The site for the shipyard must be on the edge of a body of water of sufficient depth and large enough to permit safe launching of ships after being built. The location has to have an adequate delivery system for large and heavy materials needed for building the ships and it should be close to suitable housing facilities for the workmen. There has to be a deep and wide channel leading to the sea so the completed ships can pass out to sea. Most times, along a waterway, the ground has to be strengthened to support the building. If the ground is on very good rock like granite, limestone, or something similar, you don't need pilings. However, if it is on clay material, sandstone, siltstone, it will require extensive piling along with reinforced concrete. If your pilings are made out of wood, then you need a good source of strong wood nearby to build them, trees like fir and pine. Weather can play a large part since all shipbuilding except for steel and iron production and fabrication shops, is outside. Generally, you have three types of shipyards; private, naval and overseas. It depends on the nation which one it uses the most. Another issue is whether this location has already been used for shipyards and whether there is enough room to build a new slip and dock to build your ships. Warships tend to get longer and wider, so the slips have to be either improved or new wider slips built. Is there enough room to perform this necessary modifications. The British had a similar problem on the Thames with the Royal Shipyards. The maximum beam could only be 90 feet due to the crowded nature of the area. Anyway, it gets complex and you can't just snap your fingers and a fully equipped shipyard appears. Read the Battleships Builders for some good information on British shipbuilding. One advantage the German's had in the late 19th century when they began building warships, was that they did not have any shipyards and therefore they could build all new ones, with the latest technology and could use as much room as necessary. It greatly enhanced the design and building of their warships. Of course there is far more to it than money, but for game purposes I expect the management of finding, building, dredging and all those other things to be simplified greatly. I want to build a shipyard not micromanage finding trees and all the other things you mention which are of course also required. If a location doesn't have the materials then you're not going to be building a major shipyard there - regardless of how much money you throw at it! Maybe the locations can be pre-scouted in the game so that an option of building facilities appears only on those locations? Also ship size restrictions - maybe you can build destroyers but nothing larger or anti-submarine sloops (wooden) but nothing steel. I like to find trees and especially geologic formations, its fun. Shipyards are easy.
|
|
|
Post by kyle on Nov 4, 2018 15:28:10 GMT -6
Of course there is far more to it than money, but for game purposes I expect the management of finding, building, dredging and all those other things to be simplified greatly. I want to build a shipyard not micromanage finding trees and all the other things you mention which are of course also required. If a location doesn't have the materials then you're not going to be building a major shipyard there - regardless of how much money you throw at it! Maybe the locations can be pre-scouted in the game so that an option of building facilities appears only on those locations? Also ship size restrictions - maybe you can build destroyers but nothing larger or anti-submarine sloops (wooden) but nothing steel. I like to find trees and especially geologic formations, its fun. Shipyards are easy. Me too - when I'm not digging into military history I'm often digging period. Out here in Oregon I have volcanoes all over to poke and plenty of trees. Maybe we need a civilization sort of RTW where we can scout trees, build shipyards, dredge canals and prospect for coal then oil and steel - the works!
|
|
|
Post by oldpop2000 on Nov 4, 2018 15:34:58 GMT -6
I like to find trees and especially geologic formations, its fun. Shipyards are easy. Me too - when I'm not digging into military history I'm often digging period. Out here in Oregon I have volcanoes all over to poke and plenty of trees. Maybe we need a civilization sort of RTW where we can scout trees, build shipyards, dredge canals and prospect for coal then oil and steel - the works! Sounds Great. I enjoyed our Columbia River Cruise and our three Alaskan Cruises. Rocks, Trees and Indian relics; all great items. I love your volcanoes. Hawaiian cruise was great, even got to go to Kilauea. I think there should a scenario in the game where we can be engineers scouting for the military to find good locations. It would tops. I love Civilization type games, I have three of them.
|
|
|
Post by srndacful on Nov 4, 2018 22:46:35 GMT -6
First off: excellent suggestion which runs along with my ideas as well - but is much better expanded upon. Still, I feel obliged to point out that: (in the hopes of improving the sales pitch even a little bit) 1. You seem to have forgotten the months currently required to build a ship in your "base capacity gives x100 tonnage constructed per month" (if I read correctly - if not, sorry but: that's my take) part. A BB/BC takes 28 months (or thereabouts) to build - so, a 42000 tonne beast is being built at a rate of 1500 tonnes a month. So, if we take your "Base Capacity x100" formula, this means that any colony with a Base Capacity of 15 or more can build this ship. A colony with a base capacity of 60 could build 4 of them. A 8000 tonne CL takes 21 month to build at a rate of about 400 tonnes a month - so even a Base capacity 4 colony can build one. 1500 tonne DD takes 12 months - so a Base Capacity 5 colony can build 4 at a time. In other words, a single base capacity 24 colony could build all 6 of the above ships with ease. So, my addition to this proposal would be to reduce that base capacity to giving x10 tonnes of construction per month - driving the base capacity requirement for building a single 1500 tonne destroyer up to at least 13 - which, IMHO, is far more realistic. Naturally, any Repair/Refit could take place instead of this construction - as long as construction is Halted. Oh, and - also, there is already a "Builder" column under the "Under Construction" tab - perhaps it might be useful to expand on it a bit? 2. Has anyone else noticed that Home areas also have a Base capacity already included in RtW1? Unless I'm mistaken, it seems to be an uniform value of 1400 - which (along with x10 multiplier above & just to point out as a happy coincidence) gives 14000 tonnes of shipbuilding per month - just enough for 5 BB's, 5 CL's and 5 DD's to be built simultaneously - which is just about standard (for me, anyway). That's my 0.02$ in any case. I hope it wasn't too intrusive - I just wanted to expand on your (already excellent) point a bit. Cheers!
|
|
|
Post by ccip on Nov 4, 2018 23:39:40 GMT -6
That might work just as well! To be honest I was just trying to eyeball what sounded like a reasonable figure - it's something that someone (Frederik, presumably ) would have to do the actual math on. Regardless, I think the basic idea would be to have some limit - and base capacity seems like a good number to go off! The main reason I suggested 100x rather than 10x base capacity is how it currently works in game - both in terms of what you get for ship support capacity, but also how long it takes to build up bases. Expanding bases is expensive, and from what I recall you can only do it once per year per possession, for a total of 10 additional capacity each time you expand it. So if a possession's capacity starts out at 0 or 10, even if you invest into it every single year, you'll only be able to build 5000t ships there by the end of the game if it's counted as 10x base capacity, which if not unrealistic then is at least largely worthless from a gameplay perspective. Conversely, 100x gives reasonable chance that if you're committed to it, you can build up an area as a major construction hub from nothing - by expanding your base there every single year for 50 years, by the end of which you can build a whole 50,000t ship there (and even then, still only one - or more smaller ones). So I think that's not a bad yardstick - though of course the way base building works could be changed or rescaled just as well. Just that I think it's important to give the player some motivation to actually try it and see some benefit from it. I think home area is worth giving some thought as well, but I'd be cautious not to overdo it - since there's already a max dock capacity mechanic (which presumably reflects the core home shipyards), and the real limits on construction tend to be funding and technology rather than available building capacity, it might just be not worth imposing additional rules on what's already a complex enough system. There's a lot of factors that could in theory be modeled - for example, the actual role of private industry and being able to order ships from different manufacturers each with their own strengths and weaknesses. But the key thing is to ask whether this would really add much to the playability to the game - and I think RTW's use of the "KISS" principle in its design probably points to no. But building outside home areas is definitely something worth giving thought to - and since it seems that things like effects of strategic bombing and the ability to decide on invasions of possessions, giving base capacity more potential value seems like killing two birds with one stone
|
|
|
Post by bcoopactual on Nov 8, 2018 3:33:26 GMT -6
In RTW1 when you start construction on a new ship, it's location (the ocean area associated with the nation's build area) is recorded into the gamesave#.bcs file immediately. So players in RTW1 who wanted to roleplay US West Coast construction for example could go in and manually change the location to North American West Coast. For France you could go in and enter The Mediterranean for ships you want built in Toulon and so on. Technically you could do the same thing for overseas territories if you were a UK player and wanted to build a ship in Australia or Canada.
I was playing with this in a test game and one thing I noticed is it takes longer for ships constructed overseas to go from Poor to Fair. Meaning at the end of the three turn workup the ship's crew quality was still poor. I forget the exact time but it was between 6 months to a year to reach Fair quality. That's not a criticism in any way because I realize that the game isn't meant to do that but it's something to understand if anyone wants to roleplay their construction more historically.
I bring all of that up because it would seem (emphasis on seem since I'm not the one doing the work) to be a pretty easy concept to work in for the player. Might be as simple as adding a field to fill in in the design screen if you don't want to get into the weeds with base capacities, difficulties moving raw materials to overseas shipyards, etc.
The trick I think would be to get the AI to use the system correctly. Particularly if you start adding in requirements like tonnage limits or number of simultaneous ships building at a time proportional to base capacity. I think the simpler we keep it the better.
|
|
|
Post by jeb94 on Nov 8, 2018 13:21:48 GMT -6
I think the best place to select which shipbuilding area to build a specific ship in should be in the build menu. Ideally it would take in to account the available capacity in that region for that size of hull. Carriers, large cruisers, and battleships all using basically the same slips. If your selected region is already at capacity the new construction would be delayed but if capacity was available in another region the player would be advised that if you built it in that region you could get it sooner. I’m no programmer so have no idea how difficult it would be to do but if feasible this is how I think it should work for the player.
|
|
|
Post by ccip on Nov 10, 2018 15:03:54 GMT -6
I was playing with this in a test game and one thing I noticed is it takes longer for ships constructed overseas to go from Poor to Fair. Meaning at the end of the three turn workup the ship's crew quality was still poor. I forget the exact time but it was between 6 months to a year to reach Fair quality. That's not a criticism in any way because I realize that the game isn't meant to do that but it's something to understand if anyone wants to roleplay their construction more historically. That is really neat, thanks for sharing! I'll have to try it. That too is part of the current base capacity function - it limits the quality/readiness of ships and their improvement/recovery. I would still be cautious with "unrestricted" construction (6 months readiness difference isn't exactly a big penalty) - but maybe an even simpler way to go is just to have a simple base capacity threshold for construction - e.g. you have to have 50 base construction in a region to build destroyers there, 100 for CLs, 150 for CAs, 200 for battleships etc. It would still serve as a relatively "soft" limit, and it would still mean that things like losing base capacity would affect construction. So I'm down with that sort of simpler approach, actually, especially since it's simple from a coding perspective and messes least with current game rules
|
|
|
Post by rob06waves2018 on Nov 30, 2018 16:24:44 GMT -6
I'm not so concerned with building overseas but refitting would be useful. When I'm playing as the UK, it's really annoying having to send another ship out before I can refit, especially if it's only a 3 month refit with a better fire control. (Too long anyway but picking my battles)
|
|