2018-09-27 Ship Repair, University Morale, Delete Overlap, Craters

[Mr. Mortius]

Ships might then be built in 1/100th of the time.

What then are the limitations on ship building? Materials aren't one, since a colony optimized for the smallest world (1800 meters) can produce millions of any given resource in a short time, enough to build a maximum size ship.

The resource cost of ships should probably be increased as is, to balance them in relation to new style cities (the smallest of which has about 5000 workers & the largest of which has ~1M) as opposed to old style cities, which had maybe an average of 800 workers. For perspective, a maximum sized ship might cost a few million of each material right now, which could be produced by a single large city in only a few manufacturing runs (maybe 5-10 minutes, unless using adamantine or vulcium). Combine that with lowered build times along with no limits on volume based on the quality of resources available, and any empire can be throwing out the maximum sized ships left and right with just a few cities.

Edit: A quick example.
With a planet diameter of 17,000m (average), it is possible to have about 400,000 productive workers after subtracting out morale requirements and such. This alone is more than any single empire had total in the old city system.
Compared to the old average of 800 workersper city, this is 500 times more materials available from each planet. With maybe three to four planets colonized in a system, this is 1.6M labor jobs available. Each process usually produces around ten products, leading to a possible output of 16 million items every manufacturing run. This is about the average cost of the largest ship, although some of the products won't be directly used in making the ship.

This gives us maybe ten manufacturing runs, or maybe 100 minutes to produce enough for the largest ships. Quality isn't a limiting factor anymore, and with modules, time isn't a limiting factor either.

[Ikkir Isth]

Overall I think big ships do need to take more investment (especially economically) to build too, namely, no free lunches for empires and increasing the number of civilians required to work on them (and building up infrastructure over time to even be able to build the big ships, more or less).

[Vectorus]

Well, that infrastructure is what you build over time in the whole resource-processsing game, but if you are talking about orbital shipyards again, I think we could look at that more closely.

I've mentioned in my money thread that cash might help limit the number of ships you can keep operational, but that will also scale with new cities.

I get the sense that in the real world and most sci fi settings it is investment that limits shipbuilding. There are presumably enough raw materials in the world for the US Navy to build 100 ships every year, but they don't own those materials and can't afford to buy them. So if it could be balanced, I might prefer cash to be the limiting factor rather than increased material cost. 

Would part numbers' entering the billions, which they would if flatly scaled to new cities, break more of Haxus' variables? It might have a demoralising effect on new players who don't have city planners and stick to old-sized cities? I'm sure they would rise to the challenge, but the scaling might have to be non-linear and more generous at lower levels. Needing 1000x the rocket motors to build your first ship would sink the early game.

[AnrDaemon]

Ships might then be built in 1/100th of the time.

This is debatable.