I dont understand trade routes and piracy - What is happening here?

[Brucesim2003]

Given free alloy to do so, theres no reason not to place a single shipyard in nearest anchorage or trade hub, by replacing one slot, then, when the repair station isnt needed, you change it back. Think a permanent secondary shipyard isnt all that useful.

Which is why you don't make it a big one, as it's not permanent. You are assuming that there is an anchorage/trade hub in the area. A trade hub might not have the spare module slot in any case, with range being so important.

You can't manufacture replacements/reinforcements from a captured base. Early/mid game, if your shipyard is 10 jumps away from the front line, that's a looooooong replacement pipeline. And because it is only starport size, it's only cost you 350 alloys and a bit of time. Once the frontier has moved, scrap it.

 

[Scribbit]

Which is why you don't make it a big one, as it's not permanent. You are assuming that there is an anchorage/trade hub in the area. A trade hub might not have the spare module slot in any case, with range being so important.

You can't manufacture replacements/reinforcements from a captured base. Early/mid game, if your shipyard is 10 jumps away from the front line, that's a looooooong replacement pipeline. And because it is only starport size, it's only cost you 350 alloys and a bit of time. Once the frontier has moved, scrap it.

Well, you can build ships from a captured base, although I rarely do. You just have to do it manually and then either leave the fleet you're reinforcing at the shipyard or merge the new ships into your fleet. I just rarely bother because I like having the fleet academy and that extra tasty 100xp, especially on ships that take less time to get to the front then it takes to build in the first place.

 

[Brucesim2003]

Well, you can build ships from a captured base....

You can? Well, we learn something every day.

 

[KingAlamar]

I made a slightly different suggestion to help alleviate this problem, to be able to set up patrol routes and then assign fleets to them separately - https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/patrol-route-assignment.1139183/ /shamelessplug. The main problem with this algorithm is that it would result in a lot of wasted travel time when the areas on extreme ends of the routes have the most piracy, which will probably often be the case. You could create custom patrol "sectors" instead to limit each fleet to and alleviate that issue.

I would think that we would certainly want to allow players to set up their own optimized routes esp. as piracy can be a real hindrance in the early and mid game. The automation that I'm suggesting shouldn't replace the player's ability to set up patrols / assign fleets to the patrol routes / etc.

The automation would be present as a choice. These sort of choices would allow the player's active attention to be placed in other areas -- like balancing out planetary growth vs. empire-wide objectives / conducting a war / deciding where & how to expand to / review Branch Offices / etc.