orbital shipyards

[von Runstedt]

I'm just running into some issues with orbital shipyards so far in this game. My first question would be how many factories need to be built per shipyard? Is there a limited number of shipyards that can be built? does the number of shipyards affect ship production, for instance would having 4 ship yards be any different from, say, having 3 shipyards and a commensurate number of ground factories to make up for the difference?

[Friese]

I'm just running into some issues with orbital shipyards so far in this game. My first question would be how many factories need to be built per shipyard? Is there a limited number of shipyards that can be built? does the number of shipyards affect ship production, for instance would having 4 ship yards be any different from, say, having 3 shipyards and a commensurate number of ground factories to make up for the difference?

For every three factories you can build one orbital shipyard. The maximum allowed number of orbital shipyards is 8.

Building more factories helps you a bit, but the orbital shipyards have a secondary production (hammers in blue circles). It's needed to build FTL-ships (anything that moves between stars on its own), and obviously more orbital shipyards help you more. Additionally an orbital shipyard produces more standard hammers than a single factory, so it's usually the best to stick to the 3-1 ratio. Even when you have 24 factories and 8 shipyards I wouldn't build more factories - usually you have some slots for mines left after filling 32 production slots, and more factories won't help you as much as more resources.

It's similar for orbital research facilities. You'll need five research centers for one orbital, though.