Currently shipyards use the same amount of workers regardless of whether they’re actively building. And it’s a LOT of people. In my current game I have >100M workers in the shipyards orbiting Earth, and I’m sure other players have far more. That’s the single largest consumer of labor for Earth in my game.
What’s weird, and unsatisfactory to me, is it doesn’t matter whether any ships are actually being built or not. When ships are being built you spend more money and minerals, but the number of workers is the same.
I suggest that there be a baseline number of workers (maybe 50%) employed regardless of current shipyard work, and the rest scales with current shipyard activity. This would force some tradeoffs in either keeping extra worker capacity available, pausing other work, prioritizing work within shipyards (do I need that frigate more than that new tugboat?), etc. It would also slightly reduce tax income when not actively building ships.
The same is true for all production installations. Ordnance and Fighter Factories use the same workforce regardless of whether there are production orders.
The upshot is that a feature like this would probably need to come with an overhaul of population mechanics. Otherwise, this would just be a way to solve population crunch by turning shipyards on or off as needed. Having a revoloving-door workforce model might be more realistic, but I’m not sure it adds anything mechanically besides additional micro since the population mechanic balance needs to be maintained in either case.
When there is no orders, any produсtion facility under the wisest administration of the Emperor, switch to producing consumer goods and provide services to the Empire population, so that said population would be satisfied and thankful and would work longer without additional goods and services when orders arrive.
You can tractor an inactive shipyard. Doing so removes it from the colony’s shipyard list, and frees up the workforce.
You can release it at any other colony. You might consider designating a nearby moon as the place you store shipyards that are not presently needed for production.
You can also just leave your tug in orbit with the shipyard. In fact, for just a bit more than 100BP you can build an armourless space station with a tractor beam. Think of it as an off switch for any one shipyard at a time. Build as many as you need.
I know I can play games with shipyards to stop them using population. That’s not my goal or complaint. I’m looking to create gameplay decisions around utilizing available workers.
I do see that it might be tricky to design the game mechanic to avoid creating a micro intensive situation. And it’s true that existing installations like factories, ground combat training facilities, ordinance factories, etc ALSO use a constant amount of pop regardless of whether they’re being used. Maybe all of them should have the same mechanism… a base level of workers to keep the lights on plus variable amount based on utilization, combined with the ability to prioritize industries in event of insufficient workers to perform all desired work.
In some real world industries, workers are paid to come in to work, even if there is nothing to do. They do this so that they can begin as soon as the work becomes available. It’s expensive, but is the only way to guarantee the ability to kick things into high gear at a moment’s notice when skilled labor and specialized knowledge are required.
A workforce reduction mechanic should include a significant delay whenever production is resumed to account for things like hiring new people, training them, possibly relocating them and their families, etc.
It seems to me that the most logical way to understand this is as follows: it is simply the maintenance and preservation of the working functions of the enterprise. After all, if a huge and multifunctional plant stops working for a while, then some parts may become unusable or need maintenance.
Hence likely why there was a cool down on it that could simulate repair/reactivation but even so it was removed. I do not recall why but suspect it was for balance (with the wealth update) reasons.
Also if you really want to free up workers you can just destroy the factories.
ImO that’s the player decision right there.
Building factories is not just the physical buildings - it is training the people that are suposed to work there as well and in an interstellar setting this may even be the bigger factor.
Of course this breaks down when you transport the factory elsewhere, but I can still handwave this with claiming, that key personnel are going along and other people are being invisibly moved to the origin place.