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This is a thread for discussing the Galaxies approach to unit construction, and how that is going to differ from previous VBAM iterations. Now that the Construction Phase has been destroyed in a supernova, we have some brainstorming to do about the best way to explain and resequence the rules.

Shipyards
As I noted in the GoogleDoc, I think we should eliminate Planetary Shipyards and go back to having only Orbital Shipyards. That is going to make life easier, and then we only have to worry about one type of Shipyards to manage.

The question becomes how to handle the construction limits at these shipyards? There seems to be two basic avenues for approaching this:

A) Each shipyard has a construction capacity which is the total construction cost of ships and flights that can be under construction there at one time.

B) Each shipyard has a slipway limit based on the system's Utilized Productivity which is the maximum number of ships and flights that can be under construction there at one time.

1E/2E used both of these options, and I think it did that mostly to prevent mass frigate spam from 60 capacity shipyards that otherwise would have no reason not to insta-build a horde of new escorts every turn. At least that's why I think dock space / slipways were introduced into the rules.

Both of these methods achieve the goal of limiting the amount of units that can be simultaneously under construction at a shipyard. This forces players to decide if it's important enough for them to build extra shipyards and shoulder the burden of that expense, or if they can get by with fewer shipyards.

Planetary Construction
I would propose that systems themselves be treated like a special type of shipyard that has its own matching construction limit, but that can only be used to build a limited scope of units:

1) Atmospheric Ships
2) Flights
3) Minefields
4) Special Items noted as being built on a planet

The entire benefit of Atmospheric for ships is that they consider every system to be a shipyard, which works out great when you have a larger empire and you need little picket forces to protect your frontier. Atmospheric ships tend to be cheap, and even a small colony could probably build an atmospheric corvette.

Using them to build flights and minefields makes sense, too. I think these (as with everything but troops) could be built at shipyards, too, but again a system would just be *special* shipyard with limits, if that makes sense?

Orbital Construction
This is probably one of the more contentious changes I'm proposing. Instead of having systems build bases, I think that this should be left to transport convoys. Have each convoy have a construction capacity and you have to have the construction capacity there to support the construction efforts.

Example: Babylon 5 is being built in the Epsilon system. This base has a construction cost of 20 economic points (it's a battlecruiser-size base with the Supply Depot special trait, which costs 10 EP). If each transport convoy has a fixed 10 construction capacity, then you would move 2 transport convoys to Epsilon and pay your 20 points to start building the station. The transports would need to be there every turn to advance the base's construction. After 10 turns the base is completed and goes online.

One issue I can see is that this is a special rule and removes the old concept of planets/systems building bases, which is ingrained in the VBAM rules. However, what this approach does accomplish is it removes the need for construction pipelines and special remote base construction rules. The concept would be baked directly into the rules.

This makes it easier for empires to build bases in systems they don't currently control. I'd say as long as the transport convoys can trace a supply route back to a supply depot, then they should be able to build a base. We could leverage that to then say that an empire owns any system where they have a colony OR a base of a certain cost threshold. We don't want a single satellite to be enough to claim a system, but maybe a 6-8 cost base would be enough to establish control? I'm thinking of situations like in "Balance of Terror" (TOS) where you would have bases arrayed along your border. You own the territory (controlled in VBAM terms), but you don't have any colonies there.

Repairs
I changed repairs in a few interesting ways that would be worth discussing. The first is that repairs are now completed in a single turn and are performed by shipyards, supply depots, or military supply ships. Repairing a ship at a shipyard costs 25% x construction cost, while a field repair at a supply depot or supply ship is going to cost 50% x construction cost.

It seems obvious now that I think about it to incorporate supply depots into field repairs since you already have Supply ships doing it. The difference is that supply depots don't (currently) have a limit on the repairs they can do, while military supply ships do. I could see applying some sort of a limit to supply depots to prevent them from auto-healing an entire fleet, however.

Repairs conducted at shipyards don't count against their construction limits. It's assumed that they keep a few slips open for repair operations. This helps to ease logistical bookkeeping so that you have one less thing to worry about.

The reason I've written in that repairs all take a single turn is because I want to provide players with another reason to cripple instead of destroy their ships when given the opportunity. If my battlecruiser (10 EP) is crippled, it's going to cost 3-5 EP and take 2-3 turns to repair if construction times are still in play. I might just decide it's easier to build a new one and take the hits. But if I can pay my money and have the ship repaired after a turn of construction I think I'd be more willing to cripple it because now it's saving me several turns of initial construction time and not just a few paltry economic points.

Convoys
This is a question I throw out to you guys: do you want to keep convoys as something you just pay money for and they appear at a supply depot, or would you rather have to build them at shipyards? I can see an argument either way. I think I like keeping them as an instabuild, but at the same time it may not make sense to be able to spam convoys without limit. Being forced to use limited shipyard capacity to build them would definitely add another decision that players would have to balance.

For example, let's say we are using the construction capacity option for our shipyards, and our homeworld has 5 Raw and 6 Utilized Productivity for 30 capacity. That would be just enough for that homeworld's shipyard to build a colony convoy (30 EP), but it couldn't build that colony convoy if the shipyard was already busy building other units. Therefore a player that was doing a lot of expanding might consider building a second shipyard to handle his civilian convoy construction plus spill over from the military yards. Again, it poses an interesting decision -- and good 4x games are all about important (and meaningful) decisions.

I tend to think of convoys as civilian freighters called into service so I like the instabuild rules. However you shouldn't be able to spam them without consequence.
Allow one convoy to be called in a system without a problem, but each additional convoy reduces the effective Production of the system for the turn as the freighters pulled out of civilian service impact the local economy.
This is a significant, but temporary penalty and should discourage spam while leaving the option open for emergencies.
I would also limit the number of convoys to total Production. That way rule's lawyers don't wipe out some small colonies production by building 10 convoys...
I just thought of another way to do it. Allow shipyards to build them, but you can instabuild a single convoy in a system with a trade fleet. This reduces the trade bonus by half for a turn until normal traffic returns to the area. In an emergency you could break down the trade fleet to create three convoys, but that of course loses the trade and would almost never be worth it.
Just something to think about.

I was rereading this post topic and have a question. If military supply ships and supply depots can make field repairs shouldn't they burn up a lot more supplies? This would force some decisions on the fleet commander depending on the supply situation, current operations and distance from a ship.yard.

wadewan wrote:I was rereading this post topic and have a question. If military supply ships and supply depots can make field repairs shouldn't they burn up a lot more supplies? This would force some decisions on the fleet commander depending on the supply situation, current operations and distance from a ship.yard.

The direction that I'm headed on this right now is that you're no longer going to have to manage how many points of Supply were "used" over multiple turns. Instead, Supply ships are going to allow players to trace "extended supply routes" instead of basic supply routes, and the total Supply you have in a system is the distance that you can trace one of these extended supply routes. For example, if I have 5 Supply in my fleet then I can trace the supply route up to 5 jumps to reach a friendly supply depot.

The issue with field repair is a bit more nuanced, as it strikes a balance between 1E and 2E (and your question also raises some timing issues that need addressed!). The cost of field repairs would increase to 50% of construction cost (round up), and the total cost of repairs that Supply ships could perform each turn would be equal to their Supply. That 5 Supply would be enough to perform 5 EP of field repairs; the player still has to pay for those repairs, but he doesn't have to return to base.

Supply depots in my notes don't have a field repair limit right now, but I think they should, and keeping that as a round number like 10 would work great. That would keep a supply depot from insta-repairing a damaged fleet, but would be very useful for getting some ships repaired and operational again.

Now the timing issue I just noticed is that Supply ships that are used to extend supply routes should NOT be able to perform field repairs. I will add a note about that to the Field Repairs to clarify that.

I am playtesting the Supply changes in my Prelude to Federation campaign and so far they are helping address some long standing issues regarding keeping scout fleets in supply when they are out on the frontier. And the bonus is that I don't have to track how much supply the fleets have used! I haven't had a situation where I've need to used the field repair capability yet, though, largely because out of supply levels directly reduce DV and kill you outright rather than crippling you first.

That answers my question pretty clearly regarding how the repair logistics/capacity is handled. What if my fleet is cut-off from supply but I have Military Supply Ships? Maybe I missed that answer.
Thanks.

wadewan wrote:That answers my question pretty clearly regarding how the repair logistics/capacity is handled. What if my fleet is cut-off from supply but I have Military Supply Ships? Maybe I missed that answer.
Thanks.

With the way I have the Galaxies supply rules written, if you're cut off from supply then your Supply ships can't bring in supply and you're going to be out of supply. The concept shifts from "my freighters are carrying supplies" to "my freighters are running back and forth and keeping me in supply". Which might not be the best solution, obviously, but it is easier to keeping track of how much Supply has been used, which was a pain turn-to-turn.

I know the old rules made it easier to strike and just live off of the supplies that the Supply ships carried. But they were also tied to the squadron rules, and didn't scale well at all. 1 Supply could resupply 3 corvettes or 4 battleships. I'm really not sure what the cleanest way of keeping that old system alive would be. Requiring 1 Supply per 10 construction cost for "emergency resupply" sounds fairly fair. That way a single Supply 2 freighter could resupply 20 EP of units before exhausting its stores. That would be enough to keep 5 destroyers operational. It would leave it as an option, but nothing that you could count on. Even a good supply train of 6 Supply (enough to extend supply out to 6 jumps) would only be able to supply 60 EP of ships for a single turn.

Of course, following in the vein of 1E, you could just say that 1 Supply is enough to keep the entire fleet in supply for a turn. That doesn't scale well either, but in most cases it would get the job done pretty easily. That way the 6 Supply fleet could stay completely out of supply for 6 turns before it drained the last of its supplies.

Bumping this topic because I was working on the Construction section a bit last night and, if we go with Extended Construction Times as an optional rule, then I think that the recommendation to have construction capacity be 2 x Utilized Productivity is going to be a fair per shipyard construction rate. A homeworld with 6 Productivity could then build 12 EP of units per turn, which is enough to push out an extra battleship each turn, or a pair of light cruisers.

For the Extended Construction Times, this change would work better than traditional construction capacity because then we don't have to worry about how much construction capacity is being occupied by new construction. That removes one thing you have to track, which is nice.

Reconciling some other rules got me thinking: would it just be simpler if a shipyard ALWAYS had a construction capacity of 10, regardless of where it is built? That would standardize it across the board and work well without construction times, and would be consistent with convoys having 10 construction capacity for bases. It also "solves" the persistent problem of situations where a player wants to build a shipyard in an out of the way location and use it to build ships.

I'm going to give that a try as I finally try to get the rest of this campaign year of my playtest campaign finished. I just spend too much time writing rules.

Tyrel Lohr wrote:Reconciling some other rules got me thinking: would it just be simpler if a shipyard ALWAYS had a construction capacity of 10, regardless of where it is built? That would standardize it across the board and work well without construction times, and would be consistent with convoys having 10 construction capacity for bases. It also "solves" the persistent problem of situations where a player wants to build a shipyard in an out of the way location and use it to build ships.

I'm going to give that a try as I finally try to get the rest of this campaign year of my playtest campaign finished. I just spend too much time writing rules.

I really like this idea! It means that if players want to build a huge amount of construction capacity - to build two battleships at once, for example - they need a pretty huge shipyard complex to undertake it. It also gives us another reason to pay the premium for Atmospheric ships when construction capacity has a stronger cap and a bigger price to expand it.

BroAdso wrote:I really like this idea! It means that if players want to build a huge amount of construction capacity - to build two battleships at once, for example - they need a pretty huge shipyard complex to undertake it. It also gives us another reason to pay the premium for Atmospheric ships when construction capacity has a stronger cap and a bigger price to expand it.

In trying to plan out some future construction in my playtest campaign, It seems like most players will want to build a few shipyards just to have enough to build replacement units fast enough. 10 construction capacity doesn't go far, that's just enough for a CL + DD every turn, which is slower than most players would want to build ships. Not to mention that once you get flights in the mix and having to build them with construction capacity you could really end up with a construction bottleneck.

2-3 shipyards seems like the sweet spot for a well-developed home system. That's 20-30 construction capacity, enough for the two battleships per turn with a little excess in case you needed to build some escorts or flights to go with them.

Planetary construction capacity then becomes a bit beefier than a shipyard on the high end, and like you said it makes Atmospheric ships very appealing. It also explains why some smaller empires might rely more on minefields and flights for defense as that is what they can most easily build on a planet's surface. You can still build the non-Atmospheric ships there, too, but at double cost (and construction capacity).

I just got done updating the Activation/Deactivation rules in the Construction Phase to make them internally consistent and get rid of as many of the special cases as I could.

Activations and deactivations now all work like mothballing did before where you need to take a unit to a location with construction capacity to let them be stripped down or rearmed as needed. The unit's construction capacity then counts against the construction capacity of the shipyard or system that is performing the activation/deactivation.

Example: I have 2 shipyards at Altair (20 construction capacity). I just moved 4 Burlington CA (cost 8 each) into the system and want to put them in reserve status. I have enough construction capacity at the shipyards to deactivate 2 Burlingtons per turn (16 construction capacity) with 4 construction capacity leftover that I could use for other projects. That means it will take two turns to put them all in reserve status.

This makes the advantage to activations/deactivations that you don't have to spend economic points to perform the maintenance status change, but it will eat into your available construction capacity. During peacetime after a war that really won't be a problem, because you're not going to be building anything anyway. Reactivating to go to war, however, will require you to eat up shipyard or system construction capacity to get those ships reactivated and ready for the fight. This ties up the shipyards, but at least you aren't having to spend any extra money.

The reason I went with construction cost rather than "maintenance cost" from 1E is that the construction costs are much easier to ascertain without trying to quibble over what the "maintenance cost" of a single unit is. I also don't mind having the activations/reactivations take a bit of time. If you guys think those costs are too high, I could drop it to being 1/2 construction cost (round up).

I also standardized the effects of reserve for non-ground forces so that they are treated like crippled ships for the purposes of movement and combat. This means you can move and fight with your reserve units, but they only have half their normal AS/AF and are destroyed when they take damage rather than becoming crippled. In other words: you don't want your reserve units to get into a firefight!

Another question for the group, this time regarding base construction.

Right now the rules say that bases require construction capacity from convoys to build, but in previous versions of the rules we let systems use their construction capacity to build bases, too. Part of me likes letting a planet build some satellites and toss them up in orbit, but the other side of me thinks that is flows better to have convoys be responsible for all base construction so that it is consistent no matter if you are building bases in orbit of Earth or out in the uninhabited Epsilon Eridani system.

Is there any preference either way?

For consistency, I like it being a convoy-based model where convoys bring construction capacity for bases with them wherever they go. Players are already using the same convoys for trading, transport, and colonization so it makes sense to add one more non-combat function to these all-purpose "civilian shipping and infrastructure" type units.

I agree, the KISS principle is always a good one to stand by. While logically there is no reason planets shouldn't be able to build bases in orbit, rules wise the convoy rule makes more sense.
Although having planets able to build bases in orbit (and only in orbit of an inhabited planet) for the Admiral level systems would be a good optional rule.

aelius wrote:I agree, the KISS principle is always a good one to stand by. While logically there is no reason planets shouldn't be able to build bases in orbit, rules wise the convoy rule makes more sense.
Although having planets able to build bases in orbit (and only in orbit of an inhabited planet) for the Admiral level systems would be a good optional rule.

I think it might be a good optional rule in general for players that don't want to have to deal with convoy construction all the time. I know that fully implementing this rule is going to require me to make convoys explicitly Atmospheric units so that THEY can be built on a planet, otherwise you end up in a situation where a player can never build bases because they can't build the ships that can build bases.

This side of the construction rules is also what made me begin questioning the need for the low tech empire rules I had written for the 2E Companion. I think it's better to just use the Era system we've been hammering out, and if you find an empire that has a negative Era they'll just have worse units, but then you don't have to deal with any empires that are limited to their own star system. I would still head canon that the negative Era ships are all interplanetary leftovers, but it's never much fun to run into an empire that can't do anything. They make good invasion targets, but usually end up just eating up galactic real estate.

From the numbers that I've been running so far, the dramatic reduction in available construction capacity combined with the smaller economies would seem to more or less "patch" part of the issues that extended construction times were trying to "fix" in the existing rules. Before, you commonly had a single shipyard with 60 construction capacity, and a heavy cruiser might only cost 6 EP so you could theoretically churn out 10 of them a turn without breaking a sweat.

With the revised rules, that shipyard has a fixed 10 construction capacity, a heavy cruiser is now going to cost 8 EP. That limits you to only building one per turn at the shipyard, and building up additional shipyard infrastructure is going to be a bit costly because you'll need 2 convoys to build one in a turn (40 EP of convoys right there), and the maintenance cost is going to be pretty high. We do end up with the issue again of shipyards being instabuilt, but If you happen to have 2 convoys just sitting there doing nothing then I guess I can't fault you.

Speaking of the cost of maintaining infrastructure, up to this point I have had supply depots and shipyards at 2/1 maint, and convoys at 0 maint. I see that BroAdso is playing with supply depots and shipyards at 1/1 maint and convoys at 1/6 maint. Having some cost for the convoys is appealing, but the trick is to make sure the cost is always low enough that you could still make money trading in systems with low Productivity. With the bigger bases, does the 1/1 work better?

The concern I have with supply depots is that players may end up spamming them everywhere if the cost is low enough. Do you foresee that being an issue, or has it come up in any of your games so far?