DW:U ship sizes in construction yard

[thewonderdude]

I've been trying to solve a small problem for some time now. There is nothing in google so apparently I'm doing something very basic, very wrong.

I've started a custom game in a prewarp time and been playing nicely along with construction research improvements. However, when I came to Large Scale Construction research I noticed that I can only make escort ships and the others are "too large". Checking my spaceport components, I see a construction yard with size 160.

I updated my tech tier to highest level via the game editor then automated everything. I then upgraded my spaceport but there were no changes in construction yard ship size.

Thanks for the help

[Jim D Burns]

Something is off here, I’m pretty sure you should be able to build all hulls up to a destroyer from start. The size of the ship is what is limited by the tech, have you over-sized your designs?

Try turning on automation for designs and construction and let the game run about a month (you don’t have to save progress this is just to test) until the AI updates all your designs. Then go in and see if you can build the AI created designed Frigates and Destroyers, if so something in your designs is off.

Jim

[FireStarterXoX69]

Go into your designs screen and check out the size for each design past escort. Large scale construction increases ship size to... 300? I don't remember exactly. Either way, you can just edit the designs so that you don't go past the maximum size, or you can just hit 'auto upgrade design' or something to that effect. Sometimes the auto upgrade will make designs that are slightly over the maximum so you'll have to make a couple changes.

[Aeson]

Check the sizes of the other ships (frigates, destroyers, etc). If you edit the designs, you should see a warning at the top that says something along the lines of 'ships of this size cannot currently be produced (maximum size XXX)' (be aware that the designs may not appear in the list using the default filter, as they are not buildable designs; changing the filter to any of the filters that do not contain the word 'buildable' should cause the design to appear in the list). If you want to be able to produce these other classes of ships, you'll have to strip out some components in order to bring the size back within the limits. Automating ship design will often produce this kind of problem at the low end of the construction size limits, especially on a pre-warp start, as the computer has a list of things that it wants on each class of ship and doesn't always sacrifice enough of it to fit within the size limit. The construction size limit is purely a function of research, so upgrading the space port will not change anything in terms of what you can or cannot build.

Also try waiting a little while after making the tech change - the game sometimes takes a little while to register that something has changed; usually this update occurs at the end of a game week.

[thewonderdude]

ok, I did that but nothing changed. Then I started a new game with auto design. I can make up to destroyers then. But I quickly researched up to Large Scale Construction and the consturction yard was still capped at 160 ship size when I checked design screen.

Can I not make larger frigates further in to the game? If so how?

Thanks

[Bingeling]

I am not sure what you are experiencing, I have never seen an issue with the build sizes and construction techs. Apart from always wanting more

You can build any military ship (except maybe carrier and resupply) as small as you want to along as it has the minimum component. But that is manual design. At 160 size, all classes would end up escort like, as there is not room for much more than what the escort design brings.

If you involve the auto designer, it tries to put a fixed list of components into the designs, as defined in the templates in the designTemplates folder. It will try to fit designs under the build size, but it will 'only go so far'... This is why you don't see capital designs until you have a quite large yard size.

At the very start, you lack a bunch of components. Destroyers typically lack their second weapon. There are no hyperdrive, shields or armor. The missing components could mean that the AI presents a destroyer design at 160 size at the very start, but that it would give up making new designs as soon as the missing components are researched.

Unfortunate things can happen, like when playing my AAR today with automated design (and research), hyperdrives were researched with 160 max build size. The frigate was "up for sale" but did not have a hyperdrive, probably because it hardly can carry any components apart from the bare minimum in 160 size. After upgrading yards to 230 max, the frigate design was at 225 size. Now it was the destroyer design squeezing in at 230 size, pretty much the same as frigate. Some more weapons, a lot less speed.

Messing with the editor could confuse things. Researching stuff the normal way trigger design updates, and messing with the editor to achieve things in this area may not trigger the same design update.