Firstly, thanks a million for the heads up, I had missed this gem!

Secondly, I am getting very very very excited about the next alpha release after "plundering" the Founder's Vault! Mmmm, orbital shipyards... 

Have we heard anything from anybody about when the next build will be released? Is it a month away, a week, days? Brad??? Pretty please... 

how about this change..

Dual Queues.

Starports are capable of building only one ship at a time, space (no pun intended) being limited within a starport.

Within the planetary improvements queue, if you queue up more than one item at a time, the available labor gets divided amongst the queued up improvements. so you can actually be building multiple items, but they will take longer than if you have all the labor working on one improvement.

Shipyards need to be able to produce multiple ships per turn if their input exceeds what is necessary to produce a ship; we need swarms of fighters, which are useless when facing like numbers of heavier units.

Please, this one change will make sop many balance issues from GCII go away.

To me that is probably the only real solution--other than shipyards (somehow) having their own population.

While there may be other possibilities, the only other I can think of would be to have the shipyard build empty colony and transport vessels, and then require them to pick up their population from the nearest world. While this seems more realistic, I think it would greatly hinder gameplay.

I agree. If I can make a tiny ship or a medium ship in the same amount of time, why would I ever make a tiny one? I'm not sure how the new fleet dynamics will work, so maybe having tiny and small ships in a fleet (even if only one can be produced per turn) will be worthwhile.

Also, I know the "realism" of tiny ships being useful has been discussed elsewhere, and I don't want this comment to derail this thread (though we're already a little off-topic), however, I really think tiny and small ships become relatively meaningless if they don't have mid-to-late game usefulness.

And besides, being able to apply the full production output of a shipyard each turn, to me, just makes sense.

While I am thrilled with space-based shipyards for capital ships, and even small fighters / defenders, I will repeat the urging that trade vessels as well as colony ships (and maybe even military transports) should be built planet-side.  I will even accept that they need to be placed in the social project queue.

Merchant ships need to be linked to planets for trade routes, at least at present, so it seems they need to built on planets.

Colony ships must be loaded with people.  Why add the steps of building it in space and sending it to a planet to be loaded?

Military transports are a toss up for me.  Population, again, is planet-side, but military production could tie transports to the shipyard.

Work arounds -- (1) when a merchant ship is constructed, like the asteroid miner, we "assign" it to a nearby planet and send it on its merry way.

(2) when colony ships are built, with one button we "transporter beam" colonists from nearby planets without needing to enter orbit to pick them up.

(3) use the same transporter concept to fill military transports at the shipyard.

The only downside I see with shipyards is the A.I's ability to defend them.A well planned blitzkrieg effectively finish a faction in a turn.Suicide constructor ships would not be very effective.

Why on earth is there a single queue? It kind of dumbs things down and implies that somehow, on this vast planet, we can only work on a single thing at a time. 

Boo single queue. 

Now, shouldn't starports/starbases always have the ability to build a ship if so configured? A la distant worlds?

This I call an opportunity for more strategy. The trade could only happen between shipyards and the trade / income bonus is determined by the number planets attached under some ratio and distance to shipyard. Should have a max number of trade routes / planets one can attach to shipyard. Say shipyard is class 4, that means a max of 4 connections. 2 of your planets and 2 trade routes, or 3 trade routes and 1 of you planets. Or 4 of your planets... puts a strategy of managing a commercial port or a military port,

This would make more sense given one can control the environment on a space station more easily than on a planet. (gravity comes to mind of things difficult to control)

If the trade provides a bonus to planets it can be divided by the number of planets connected to the station. Simply one can now produce centralized trade hubs, be interesting if you could create a bonus between two of your own hubs this way... but I think that goes too far.

I am in favor of a single queue system. It allows complete control over what your planet is producing, without any potential loss.

In Gal Civ II, if a planet didn't have a starport, you immediately were wasting whatever % of production you have assigned to military production. Kaput, gone, no more. This, effectively, requires you to build a starport on every single planet, if you wanted to maintain as much production efficiency as possible.

With the current system, it allows for more specialized planets, without that nagging feeling like you're wasting whatever production the planet is coming up with by not building a starport.

Some people here have mentioned that they feel like their wasting productivity by not having a dual-queue system, when it's actually the opposite, if we're talking about the same total effective production.

If, lets just go arbitrary number here, in the older system a planet has 50 social and 50 military production, and you want to build a Farm and a Death Star. Each cost 200 production units to make. In 4 turns, you get both. Horray!

In the single queue system, your planet has 100 production (which is equivalent to the old system), and you want to build the same things. Your Farm gets done on turn two, and you reap the benefits from it for two turns until your Death Star gets completed on turn 4.

Same end result, better overall I feel. I know in Gal Civ 2 you could just not produce anything social and its production would move on to military, but if you weren't producing any ships, you wouldn't get any bonus social. The single queue system, effectively, does.

I realize that this system can indeed force you to be more micro managing in some situation, like if the political landscape changes and you need to start producing a lot more space ships. But really, war should take some time out of your schedule and re-organize your building queues.

There's pros and cons to both, and while a dual queue system certainly can work just fine in my opinion, it would need to be quite different then Gal Civ 2's for me to favor it.

TL;DR

Single Queue Pros: No 'forced' starport on every planet, more effective focused production

Cons: Changing queues when shifting military focus takes longer

Apologies for any lack of clarity or tangled thoughts.

It is something that needs to addressed that it should default to giving back the military production to civilian production when not producing military projects, regardless of the slider. Hence no loss of productivity. You should take a gander at sy100 in the vault if you haven't already.

That is not true, The production was returned to you in BC then so it was not technically lost.  Still I agree that part of the system was not top notch.  But in the vault document it has been specified that now an inactive Shipyard would see all its production returned to the planet for social improvement, so that will no longer be an issue. 

I totally support this.  If you have several tiny ships in queue and you have enough production to build all of them in one turn, it should happen.  I may remember wrong, but did not MOO2 work that way? Not sure.

Building freighters in a shipyard is another interesting problem. How would you designate the origin planet for a trade route? Or would sending the freighter to a trade partner world be handled differently than in GC2? Or how is trade going to be handled in GC3? Will there be trade in GC3? It was too big a part to just drop it entirely. IMHO.

I have suggested to have trades between shipyards instead of planets. The bonuses are then divided amongst the connected planets. reply 108

What if you want to trade with another civ or a minor civ and they haven't built any shipyards?

The glory of the dual queue was not in producing two things at once. It was the focus button. It let's us save Time by taking both productions and research to save turns. The example you gave lethallin was wrong, in a normal game it speeds up all production by 25%, on a good world even more.

The production "waste" has been fixed this time around as EMW said. (Lethallin is a good screen name )

DARCA.

How productive would trade be with a failed space civilization? I wouldn't stop trade from planets, but it would be connected to your space station anyway.

Wow! This topic is generating a lot of heat!

I just want to mention I like EvilMaxWar's idea re: starbase shipbuilding. I really like the way starships were built in Sins. I would like to see that tried in Alpha at least.

EDIT: Just checked out the latest from the founder's vault and I am happy.

I tend to disagree.  In GC2 with an established planet it would auto upgrade the facilities via the planet queue while it continued to pour out Constructors.  With the single menu if auto upgrade is incorporated it will interrupt my ship building and if auto upgrade is not incorporated then I will have to go around all my planets to select the facilities I want to upgrade.

I would like to see, at some stage during the game, where ship construction and facility construction are separated.   

[del]

Alternatively, it's a percentage purely determined by the number of starbase modules (and maybe research). Give some control, and somewhat harder consequences. 

Or it's a fixed amount per module - depending on tech level - distributed over the contributing planets. 

OTOH, I don't have a fundamental problem with gimmicks. 

I guess because I play a lot of 4x games (and have a game of Civilization V going when I'm not testing GC 3), I am used to single queues. Therefore, I could live with it, though I miss the dual queue as many others have said.  I would support the idea of adding starbase modules that could manufacture ships, but like a military starbase, such modules would have to preclude the starbase being used for anything else. And, the defenses of such starbases should be weak enough that they must be defended with ships/fleets in times of conflict (and would discourage such starbases from being built all over enemy or soon-to-be enemy territory).