speeding up construction through modding

[Fyron]

Suicide Junkie: About building more SY around the homeworld: i suppose these orbital SY also benefit from the population modifier for speeding up construction?

No. Only the planetary SY is affected by pop or happiness. BSY and SYS are never affected by these, no matter where they are.

[General Woundwort]

Originally posted by PvK:
Construction seems pretty fast to me. If you increase it much more, then destroying ships won't have much Lasting effect at all (since they get rebuilt almost immediately), and it'll be even more a battle of resource limits.

I agree. That was one of the things I wanted to see in my Highliner Mod - an appreciation of how valuable interstellar ships are, and making them expensive and lengthy to build. Of course, as it turned out, you get the worst of both in my mod - slow builds and a battle for resources to pay the enormous maintenance costs...

[Suicide Junkie]

Rather than increase the costs, why not slow down the build rates?

Make a spaceyard build at a rate of only 500 instead of 2000, for example.

[General Woundwort]

Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
Rather than increase the costs, why not slow down the build rates?

PvK, isn't this what you did in Proportions?

[PvK]

Sort of. What I did in Proportions was to make population weigh a more realistic 1000 kT per million, slow down reproduction rate to a more realistic 1/10 the default rate, reduce cargo capacities, and then change the population effects curve so that having only a few million on a planet means the planet constructs and produces quite slowly compared to the default game, while homeworlds have good rates for their population, and are full of Cultural Center facilities which are practically unbuildable during play, and are very productive and have various effects.

The result is that the homeworld builds quickly, fledgling colonies build quite slowly until you get about 10M colonists on them, and then they still build at about the rate of a space yard until they are really well developed. Space yards I didn't really change. Ships also take up to 13 turns to fully train.

The net result is that to get a lot of construction in Proportions, you need to build many space yards (generally bases), which have a lower rate than in the unmodded game (starts at about half the unmodded planetary rate). There is also a bigger difference in the cost of ships in Proportions between small ships and large ships.

PvK

[minipol]

I would like slow build rates if this wouldn't mean so much micro management. If yards build slowly, you need a lot more of them (orbitals for instance) to produce a fleet quickly (less slowly ). So this means more queues to check which can be a pita when you are dealing with large system maps. This is the main reason why i want to build quicker. With less yards, you could build more.

Anyway, it's a good remark that speeding up the game to fast would result in a major fleet loss not being significant because you could build a fleet in notime. Grrr

I guess i'll have to wait for my search and replace feature on queues in the next patch or SEIV. This would eliminate the problem of having
to speed up the game.
Anyway, as i said earlier, i still find the cargo spaces to small. I will increase those.

[Suicide Junkie]

There was once proposed a system that might do what you want...

(Exact exponents are arbitrary)
1) Make build costs rise roughly as the Square of the hull size.
2) Ship Effectiveness will be linear with size, no matter whether you use QNP or standard propulsion. (The smallest ships under standard fall a bit below the linear, but we can ignore that)
3) Reduce maintenance costs so they rise only as the square root of the hull size.

As such, a large ship 4x bigger would cost 16x as much time and money to build, while being 4x as powerful (same strength per KT), and costing only 2x as much in maintenance.

In emergencies, you could build small ships quite quickly, but if you have the time and resources, large ships will offer more bang for the buck in the long term.

During times of conflict, you will lose some of your big ships, the biggest of which will be effectively irreplacable.