Shipyards: Slips or Tonnage first?

[Serpentine]

Good advice for a new player, so it looks like my plan for a standard size freighter of around 30 to 40 k tons is a pretty rational size to plan my shipyards around, with smaller freighters/tankers for resources (hadn't really considered that yet, as I'm mainly getting resources back to Earth using automated mines and mass drivers).

I was going to have a couple of really big yards (in slips and tonnage) but the retooling and expansion costs are quite considerable and it looks like I might be better at this early stage in my game in getting a good number of shipyards (both civ and military) up and running, then deciding on expansion (in slips and tonnage).  It is quite frustrating in a good way trying to work out the best mix of ship types and numbers and shipyards, tonnage and slips to match it. . .

[Jorgen_CAB]

The general advice would probably be to have your current economy decide the number, size and type of yards to develop, there are not really a "right" way to do it. You obviously need to consider your population, wealth and resource production and where you think you will find your first bottleneck and build in a way to mitigate it, then you need to figure out the next one and the one after that and around you go...