Requires: Galactic Civilizations 2.0
Price: $19.95
Introduction
Shipyards comes with many updates to the base Galactic Civilizations 2 along with the ability to design your own ships from scratch as opposed to having use the pre-made ships that come with the game.
Galactic Civilizations 2.1 (GalCiv.exe)
Once you run Galactic Civilizations with the new Ship.DLL properly installed you will see a new button on the iconbar (after you start playing). This button allows you to get to the main Shipyards dialogs.
The Main Shipyards Dialog
The Shipyards Dialog allows you to create or discontinue ship designs. It also allows you to turn on and off the computer ship building AI (so that the computer players can't build custom ships also). If you only want the players to use the custom shps you can turn that on and off from here as well. A button that lists the other shipyard companies in the game is also available.
If you want to create a new ship, just click the "Create" button. Be aware that once you have used up all four slots, if you want to create a new slot, you will have to discontinue a design. When you do that, any ships using that design are discontinued as well. The dialog will tell you how many ships you have using that design. Generally, you will rarely have more than two ship designs in heavy use as designs become outdated by your enemies designs and the resulting casualties quickly decreases the number of obsolete ships.
The Design Dialog
At the top of the screen you will see the different categories of components. From weapons to shields to engines. You can have a primary set of weapons and a secondary set of weapons.
Displayed underneath the category buttons are the various components available. As you research new technologies, new components will show on the screen. For example, when you begin a new game, you only have a few components to use from and they are can expensive and take up a lot of space. Each component will have its own unique strengths and weaknesses. Some will be powerful but may be expensive or take up a lot of room on the ship. Be sure to look at the calculated statistics at the bottom of the screen. Many a new player will design a powerful ship only to learn that it has a grave weakness such as a high maintenance cost.
At the bottom of the screen you not only have the ship design's statistics but also controls for deciding what the ship is going to look like as well as choosing its size. The larger the ship, the more room it has to fill with weapons. Unfortunately, the larger the ship, the more expensive it is to build.
The amount of room on a ship is critical. The player will quickly learn that the limiting factor is not just the price or maintenance but running out of physical room on the ship to put new items. You may want your new cruiser to have 8 photon torpedo banks but unless you have a very large ship hull, you won't be able to fit them all. There is a science for building larger ships as well and you won't be able to build large ships right away. Technologies such as large scale building, Battleship technology, etc. will make larger hulls available.
Using Enhanced Governors
Galactic Civilizations 2 added a new time saving feature -- governors. They automatically set up your resources on a planet. However, many new players have asked for the governors to be able to build your social projects for you so that you are free to concentrate on the government and not micromanaging the planets. Enhanced governors brings automated social project building to Galactic Civilizations 2. Now, you can decide the order in which to build by going to the Foreign Policy dialog on the button bar and giving orders to your governors. When you want a governor to take care of a planet, click on the "Govern" button on the star dialog (on star systems you own) and a small checkbox will appear. Click on the checkbox to begin auto-building social projects. If you add new colonies to the star system later on, you will need to start the first project by yourself so that the governor knows you want to build social projects on that planet.
How Battles Work
In order to build the most effective ships, it is important to know how battles work in Galactic Civilizations 2. Every ship has 3 very important variables. Its ATTACK, DEFENSE, and STRENGTH variables. When a ship attacks another ship, the Attacker rolls a random value between 0 and its attack value. The Defender rolls a random value between 0 and its defense value. The loser loses the amount rolled by its opponent from its Strength variable. Once Strength (hit points) goes below 0, the ship is destroyed.
Hints and Tips from Stardock
We confess that Shipyards was made partially for our own enjoyment and as a result we have many many hours of experience in playing it. We have found that building ships that are fast can make more of a difference in the game than a ship that is super powerful but slow. The attacker in a battle has a significant advantage in GalCiv2. If your ship can attack several times per turn it will do more damage than a ship that can only attack a few times per turn (a kill is a kill) and then be destroyed by a counter attack. The SDS/AI has been significantly enhanced over v2.0 which shipped with GalCiv 2.0 and it will likely have a numerical advantage over you. Use tactics and good ship design to counter this and you will have the final victory.