I was looking at the Developer Diary interview where it mentions emphasizing the tactical over strategic and had an idea about how ships are produced. I'm not sure how good an idea it is, so I wanted to see what people think.
What if the industry of more than one colony could be combined to make ships at one planet? What if production, instead of being discrete at each colony was more abstracted across the empire?
The immediate problem I can see is that you could start a new colony and have a pile of dreadnaughts built there almost immediately. However, I'm not sure how much different that is than having the kind of late-game big fleet that tends to get built. There are still budget limitations and it would be more expensive to scrap ships in one location to build new ones somewhere else when you could just move the big fleet you already have around. Also, you wouldn't be able to build big ships until you get a starbase in, although, if you focus all of your production on one colony, that would happen pretty quickly, too. It would also kill off the fiction of great ships surviving the war through many desperate battles if you scrap and replace ships frequently. The advantage would be that new ships would be up-to-date and already in the location you plan on using them. The main advantage of making ship production more abstract would be less micromanagement when putting a fleet together.
Which raises a completely different question: how will assembling a large fleet be managed? Right now, it seems that I'd have to build each ship individually on each individual colony and move them individually to wherever I wanted to assemble the fleet. Is there going to be a planetary or imperial production queue? The former is certainly something I could use and the latter would be interesting if it could be made to work.
And when I say imperial production queue, I'm thinking about something like this:
- Colonies have a flag which can be set to indicate they're available for imperial production. Otherwise, they produce whatever default item they are set for, which seems to be Research right now.
- When I want a fleet of ships, I specify where I want it assembled and it's composition. Then the game pools all of the colonies flagged as available for imperial production to assign each of them a portion of the ships I've ordered. When they're ready, they are piloted or delivered to the target I've picked.