Firstly, thanks a million for the heads up, I had missed this gem!

Secondly, I am getting very very very excited about the next alpha release after "plundering" the Founder's Vault! Mmmm, orbital shipyards... 

Have we heard anything from anybody about when the next build will be released? Is it a month away, a week, days? Brad??? Pretty please... 

Shipyards need to be able to produce multiple ships per turn if their input exceeds what is necessary to produce a ship; we need swarms of fighters, which are useless when facing like numbers of heavier units.

Please, this one change will make sop many balance issues from GCII go away.

While I am thrilled with space-based shipyards for capital ships, and even small fighters / defenders, I will repeat the urging that trade vessels as well as colony ships (and maybe even military transports) should be built planet-side.  I will even accept that they need to be placed in the social project queue.

Merchant ships need to be linked to planets for trade routes, at least at present, so it seems they need to built on planets.

Colony ships must be loaded with people.  Why add the steps of building it in space and sending it to a planet to be loaded?

Military transports are a toss up for me.  Population, again, is planet-side, but military production could tie transports to the shipyard.

Work arounds -- (1) when a merchant ship is constructed, like the asteroid miner, we "assign" it to a nearby planet and send it on its merry way.

(2) when colony ships are built, with one button we "transporter beam" colonists from nearby planets without needing to enter orbit to pick them up.

(3) use the same transporter concept to fill military transports at the shipyard.

Why on earth is there a single queue? It kind of dumbs things down and implies that somehow, on this vast planet, we can only work on a single thing at a time. 

Boo single queue. 

Now, shouldn't starports/starbases always have the ability to build a ship if so configured? A la distant worlds?

I am in favor of a single queue system. It allows complete control over what your planet is producing, without any potential loss.

In Gal Civ II, if a planet didn't have a starport, you immediately were wasting whatever % of production you have assigned to military production. Kaput, gone, no more. This, effectively, requires you to build a starport on every single planet, if you wanted to maintain as much production efficiency as possible.

With the current system, it allows for more specialized planets, without that nagging feeling like you're wasting whatever production the planet is coming up with by not building a starport.

Some people here have mentioned that they feel like their wasting productivity by not having a dual-queue system, when it's actually the opposite, if we're talking about the same total effective production.

If, lets just go arbitrary number here, in the older system a planet has 50 social and 50 military production, and you want to build a Farm and a Death Star. Each cost 200 production units to make. In 4 turns, you get both. Horray!

In the single queue system, your planet has 100 production (which is equivalent to the old system), and you want to build the same things. Your Farm gets done on turn two, and you reap the benefits from it for two turns until your Death Star gets completed on turn 4.

Same end result, better overall I feel. I know in Gal Civ 2 you could just not produce anything social and its production would move on to military, but if you weren't producing any ships, you wouldn't get any bonus social. The single queue system, effectively, does.

I realize that this system can indeed force you to be more micro managing in some situation, like if the political landscape changes and you need to start producing a lot more space ships. But really, war should take some time out of your schedule and re-organize your building queues.

There's pros and cons to both, and while a dual queue system certainly can work just fine in my opinion, it would need to be quite different then Gal Civ 2's for me to favor it.

TL;DR

Single Queue Pros: No 'forced' starport on every planet, more effective focused production

Cons: Changing queues when shifting military focus takes longer

Apologies for any lack of clarity or tangled thoughts.

That is not true, The production was returned to you in BC then so it was not technically lost.  Still I agree that part of the system was not top notch.  But in the vault document it has been specified that now an inactive Shipyard would see all its production returned to the planet for social improvement, so that will no longer be an issue. 

I totally support this.  If you have several tiny ships in queue and you have enough production to build all of them in one turn, it should happen.  I may remember wrong, but did not MOO2 work that way? Not sure.

I have suggested to have trades between shipyards instead of planets. The bonuses are then divided amongst the connected planets. reply 108

The glory of the dual queue was not in producing two things at once. It was the focus button. It let's us save Time by taking both productions and research to save turns. The example you gave lethallin was wrong, in a normal game it speeds up all production by 25%, on a good world even more.

The production "waste" has been fixed this time around as EMW said. (Lethallin is a good screen name )

DARCA.

Wow! This topic is generating a lot of heat!

I just want to mention I like EvilMaxWar's idea re: starbase shipbuilding. I really like the way starships were built in Sins. I would like to see that tried in Alpha at least.

EDIT: Just checked out the latest from the founder's vault and I am happy.

[del]

I guess because I play a lot of 4x games (and have a game of Civilization V going when I'm not testing GC 3), I am used to single queues. Therefore, I could live with it, though I miss the dual queue as many others have said.  I would support the idea of adding starbase modules that could manufacture ships, but like a military starbase, such modules would have to preclude the starbase being used for anything else. And, the defenses of such starbases should be weak enough that they must be defended with ships/fleets in times of conflict (and would discourage such starbases from being built all over enemy or soon-to-be enemy territory).