Shipyard Traditions/Historic Shipyards

Suggestions
1

I think it would be cool if shipyards themselves could gain a random permanent bonus over time. The idea is that the population around that yard becomes exceptionally good at shipbuilding through years of experience, creating a shipbuilding tradition.

The bonus would only have a chance to appear once a yard meets certain criteria, such as a minimum size, years of continuous operation or a certain amount of tonnage built.

Examples of bonuses could be:

  • +10% build speed.
  • -10% minerals required (less waste).
  • Faster retooling.
  • Ships built there gain a small reliability bonus.
  • Ships built there are slightly lighter, giving a tiny speed or fuel efficiency improvement.

Nothing game-breaking, just enough to make each famous yard feel different.

The catch is that the bonus belongs to the planet and workforce, not the shipyard itself. If you move or scrap the yard, you lose the bonus because you aren’t taking decades of skilled workers and supporting industry with you.

To stop it being cheesed, rapidly expanding the yard should temporarily reduce the bonus. For example, if a yard with a 10% efficiency bonus doubles its slipways, the bonus could drop to 5% and slowly recover over time as the new workforce gains experience.

I think this would add another layer of strategy. Instead of every shipyard eventually becoming identical and just towed around the galaxy as resource logistics become harder, you’d end up with famous worlds known for building the Empire’s best warships, carriers or transport vessels. It also encourages players to build industry around these worlds and makes them worth defending.

There’s also plenty of real-world inspiration for this. During WWII, US shipyards building the Liberty Ships became incredibly efficient through experience and standardisation, reducing build times from months to weeks. British shipyards such as those on the Clyde and at Barrow became famous for generations of naval shipbuilding expertise, while today South Korean yards like HD Hyundai, Hanwha Ocean and Samsung Heavy Industries are world leaders thanks to decades of continuous improvement.

I think something like this fits Aurora’s style well. It creates more narrative without adding much micromanagement and gives shipyards their own identity instead of just being another production installation.

I’m not sure how it would be implemented but the purpose of the post is to propose the concept.

5 Likes
2

It was already suggested this, though it never been implemented for some reason, IMO it should be there, pretty realistic and useful when you build large ships over and over again, the speed efficency and mineral save should be noticeable.

1 Like
3

While supporting the sugesstion’s core idea, I’d suggest to avoid giving bonuses, that wouldn’t benefit anything with the current Aurora mechanics despite the formal improvement.
For example, velocity bonuses are useful in two cases:

  1. there are very few ships of the class planned to be built and they are intended to operate independently;
  2. the shipyard is capable enough to build entire squadrons that would operate separately from the sisterships, built on other shipyards.

Consider the necessity of tracking every effectively-a-subclass built by a 10%- and 5%-quality bonus shipyard (so, potentially 3 subclasses for every present class) just to USE the speed bonuses they give.

So, I’d like to see either a general, broader randomization of every primary indicator (speed, fuel efficiency, endurance, targetting accuracy etc.) so there is just no identical ships at all anymore, and all the squadrons are effectively mixed-up and slowed down to their slowest ships regardless of what you do (and so little reason to be involved in micromanagement), or it’s just a very limited well-thought set of indicators involved in the suggested mechanics to not create separate annoying differences of “better-built” ships that just makes playr’s life more frustrating.

As an example of the general randomization - look at the Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnought mechanics. That’s a bit complicated, yet indeed interesting.

1 Like
4

I completely support this.

I also like the idea of unique bonuses to planets, making them more unique and adds value.

Industry bonuses / planet bonuses, no problem.

I think this would be an easy implimentation aswell

Ship bonuses, I’m not sure.

Having lots of different ship speeds, for example, i think would be alittle annoying, as they then become different classes in the dstabase.

But something to affect ships or their officers would be interesting.

5

That’s a good point actually, Although a player would be very incentivized to build a class solely at the improved shipyard for the bonus, so the task of retooling a separate shipyard to the same class of ship would be seldom but as you said still possible and a bit tedious.

The thought behind it was to incentives the player to do this though. “This new warship design is great i should try get it made in the Ganymede Shipyard for the target accuracy bonuses there” That is the purpose of the suggestion to turn the Shipyard in a Character instead of just a thing,

If the needs of the empire forced you to build a class in another shipyard that that would just be that, same thing does happen in real life i suppose.

6

Bonuses to planets are already there with ruins and the ground terrain buffs armys can get.
what other bonuses would you think off?

7

Ruins are very limited in their usefullness and mostly temporary - exploit it and lose the unique trait or keep the unique trait and get neglectable bonuses only.

Terrain is just irrelevant in all cases except of extremely rare planetary battles at major planets.

I think it would be indeed very good addition to Aurora mechanics to have semi-random historical colonial bonuses and maluses affecting such things as population growth, different types of production, wealth generation, etc.

8

What? You don’t lose anything by exploiting ruins.

9

You lose the unique trait of the colony. After exploiting the ruins it’s gone, you’d see no bonuses from it, no traces of the ruins at all, no sources of artifacts, etc.

10

You don’t get any bonuses from it.
You don’t get any artifacts unless you exploit the ruins.

11

Yep, exactly. That is the very thing I have said: “limited in their usefullness and mostly temporary”.

12

But you also said this, which does not make any sense:

exploit it and lose the unique trait or keep the unique trait and get neglectable bonuses only

There is no unique trait to keep or lose.
There are no bonuses to keep or lose.

13

For the 3rd time:

Unique trait is the presence of ruins.

They indeed give a bonus of starting the colony faster (with a randomized scale), a probable small boost to the research (with a bit of luck) and it was at least intended, that only colones with unexploited ruins would give artifacts as a trade good (so it’s a trade bonus). Yet you cannot excavate the planetary installations and ship components without killing the source of artifacts (wich was intended as permanent, didn’t work at all in previous versions, yet have to work in 3.0 a bit better, yet still as a finite excavate resource).

14

They indeed give a bonus of starting the colony faster (with a randomized scale)

What are you talking about? Ruins give no bonus to colony growth.

a probable small boost to the research (with a bit of luck)

Ruins don’t boost research.
Constructs do.
Constructs remain after the ruins are excavated.

it was at least intended, that only colones with unexploited ruins would give artifacts as a trade good (so it’s a trade bonus).

But they don’t do that.

Yet you cannot excavate the planetary installations and ship components without killing the source of artifacts

Excavation is the source of artifacts.
You don’t get any artifacts if you don’t excavate.

15

They do - you don’t need to ship the installations you’ve excavated at hand.

They do - you can excavate ship components and disassemble them to take RPs.

They were intended to do that previously (didn’t work as intended, it was a bug), they have to do that in 3.0, and this topic is FOR 3.0, so it has to take 3.0 features as the basis. I thought it’s obvious, sorry for the lack of time to overexplain every simple thing from a goddamn frontline bunker.

16

Really? Where does it say that?

17

Well it is not going to be for 2.0 or 2.7 is it

18

Also it is not hard to tell the bonus ships apart from non-bonus. Just copy the class design, rename it with bonus on the end, build that “new” class at the bonus shipyard.

1 Like
19

But multiple classest potentially across a whole fleets worth of designs.

I would almost not do it due to the teadiousness of it.

If it was just a modifier applied to the ship object, that could work.

Keeps everything clean then

1 Like
20

I like the idea, but I think any bonuses should be restricted to the shipyard itself and not give ships produced bonus stats. Easier to implement and keeps balance / technical / UI implications under control; I’m assuming we’d want to keep track of where ships were built + the bonuses they inherit, which would definitely add more UI clutter for what could be a small bonus.

1 Like