Shipyard Strategies

[randal7 (OP)]

As a general practice, do you build a dedicated SY for each class of ship, or just two or three and retool a lot?

Put a different way, where is the point that you feel the materials cost of building 8-10 continually larger SY outweighs the time cost of having 3 or 4 and waiting for retooling?

[Brian Neumann]

How many shipyards and slipways to build is partially a dependant on the ship classes it is intended to build.  For commercial ships I prefer to have 1 shipyard with lots of slipways per design catagory.  So the most common would be Freighters, Colony Ships, Troop transports, Sorium harvesters, Geo survey ships, Terraformers, Tugs.  A lot of the time the freighter and colony ships can be cross built if the yard is tooled for the colony ships.  If I have decided to make a particularily large size of one of these, ie a freighter with 50 cargo holds then I will generally only tend to have 1 shipyard of that size and retool.
For military ships it is more of which ships am I building lots of.  So usually there will be a bunch of destroyer/cruiser designs and comparativly fewer designs as the ship size goes up.  For the smaller ships I prefer to have seperate shipyards tooled up as that way I don't have to shut down production of all the smaller classes when I upgrade some of them.  For the larger designs there is more of a chance to cross build, and I try to enhance that with the design of the ship.  In that case I tend to have 1 shipyard with extra slips to build different designs of the same size.  For the really large ships there only tends to be 1 or 2 designs and I usually just retool 1 shipyard to handle the different designs as I need them.

Brian

[Hawkeye]

I usually have a large number of yards. Each major class gets its own yard. The reason simply is, I like to build a squadron in one go. With few yards, I would have to build, for example, the three BBs, then retool for the BC and build them, then again retool for the CV and after those have finished, retool again for the JBC. When those finaly gets finished, the BBs are very likely at least obsolecent, if not obsolete, so I´d have to retool to the new BB again, for refit. Basicly, the squadron would never realy be ready for action, because part of it is either not build yet, or in refit.

[UnLimiTeD]

Or you can standardize your ship Design you can build several classes in it.
I normally go for two navy shipyards for my main battle units, two commercial ones for the civilian needs, and a small one with uncountable slipways to build FACs.
However, I mostly quit my game when I reach that point, so I have no idea what I would do afterwards.

[Arwyn]

I build multiple yards, with one yard for each major ship class. For FAC yards, I build them with a large number of slips, while major warships average 3 to 5 depending.

I do try to leverage building similar size/cost classes so I can build less common classes at similar size yards. So if I have a standard primary missile armed DD, and a less commonly used beam or PD destroyer, I will try and get that secondary ship close to the same size/cost so I can build them at the same yard as the Primary class. You can see this in the F5 design screen, on the DAC/Rank/Information tab, it is the 3rd box down in the middle of the screen, listed as "Eligible additional classes if this is a primary class for a shipyard".