The Ship That Builds Ships

In most RTS games, your base is a building. You put it down, you produce stuff from it, and if the situation gets bad you build another one somewhere else. In The Outer Line, your base flies.

The Mobile Shipyard is the most important thing you own. It's a capital ship, a massive vessel that produces your entire fleet, carries the modules that define how you fight, and moves across the map with you. It can jump between Gravity Wells, reposition to the front line, or pull back when things fall apart. If the enemy destroys it, you lose the game.

I spent a long time figuring out what progression should look like in a tactical space RTS. Early on I tried a traditional tech tree. Research building, branches, unlock timers. It felt disconnected from everything else. You'd click a button, wait, and your ships would magically get better. There was no physical weight to any of it, no risk attached. Your "research lab" sat safely in a corner while the real game happened somewhere else.

So I scrapped all of that.

Modules instead of a tech tree

The Mobile Shipyard carries modules. Physical upgrades installed onto the hull, each consuming slot space and costing Supply to build. Weapon calibration, shield harmonics, engine tuning, reactor cores, economy boosters. You bolt them directly onto the Shipyard, and their bonuses apply to your fleet for as long as the ship stays alive.

The catch is that there are far more modules available than you can ever fit. Even at the highest tier, you can install roughly a third of what exists. That forces you to specialize every single match.

Go deep into laser calibration, for instance, and your energy weapons hit seriously hard. But your shields stay at baseline, and your ships aren't any faster than stock. Or you could take a completely different approach: stack engine modules until your fleet is quick enough to choose its fights, accepting that you'll be punching with default firepower. The economy-focused path is its own gamble. You outproduce the enemy, sure, but every slot you pour into production is a slot not spent keeping your ships alive in a fight.

Most modules come in chains of three levels. The first is cheap, a small investment for a modest bonus. The second costs more, requires the first already installed, and starts to commit you in a direction. By the third, you've sunk a serious chunk of your budget into one area, and you'd better hope that bet pays off.

I'll be honest. I don't know yet if every combination works. Some paths feel clearly stronger than others right now, and I keep shuffling the numbers trying to find the right balance. The goal is that any focused build should have a counter, something that punishes overcommitment. I'm not there yet, but the foundation feels solid enough to keep pushing.

Three tiers, growing stakes

The Shipyard starts at Tier 1, producing light ships: Frigates and Destroyers. Upgrade to Tier 2 and you unlock medium hulls, Cruisers and Heavy Cruisers, along with more module slots to work with. Tier 3 opens the heavy classes: Battlecruisers, the Support Ship, and Battleships.

Each upgrade costs Supply and takes time. While the Shipyard is upgrading, it can't build anything. Your production goes dark. Timing this right is its own mini-game. Upgrade too early and you're defenseless with nothing coming off the line. But if you sit on Tier 1 for too long, the enemy is fielding Cruisers while you're still throwing Frigates at the problem.

The target on your back

Here's the tension I keep coming back to. The Mobile Shipyard is your most valuable asset and your biggest liability, wrapped in the same hull.

Your fleet, your module bonuses, your production capacity. All of it lives inside that one ship. And the enemy knows it. Kill the Shipyard, win the game. That's the rule, and it cuts both ways.

You can tuck it behind your fleet lines, safe and protected. But then newly built ships have to travel across the map to reach the fight. Or you push the Shipyard forward, closer to the action. One module I'm particularly fond of, the Emergency Repair Grid, turns the Shipyard into a mobile field hospital, slowly repairing nearby ships. Tempting, and risky.

Late in a match, you can build a second Mobile Shipyard from a Capital Shipyard structure. That's a big moment. Your fleet capacity stacks between them, production doubles, and you can specialize each one differently: one geared toward raw combat power, the other focused on economy and speed.

The flip side is obvious. Every Shipyard you own is another target the enemy can hunt down. I've had test games where the second one won the match by flooding the map with ships. I've had others where it cost me the game because I spread too thin trying to defend both. Still figuring out exactly where that line is.

What comes next

The Shipyard can also jump between Gravity Wells. Moving the most important ship you own across open space, defenseless for every second of the process. That's what the next devlog is about.