Yes, only Construction yards can make "buildings" of any kind. Shipyards make ships and fighters, and Training Facilities make troops and Generic Characters (like Espionage Droids, Guerillas etc)

to get a factory somewhere else: Youll have to go to your factory, Select Destination to a system that has an available Energy Slot (white meter) and click accept. Youll have to do this sometimes to get factories to a new sector where youre just starting out.

It is my recommendation that you select one system per sector and make it your factory planet with atleast 4-8 Factories on it plus a shield and defense battery. Now granted, the AI on Expert difficulty wont cause you much trouble, but to play with that knowledge is kinda cheating, I think

also, no, you cannot queue up things to build. The game is slow in the beginning, but keep in mind its one of the most important phases of the game regarding long-term planning and strategy

Have fun and good luck!

Thank you both for your replies. I'll try a few rerolls to see if I can at least get one more construction yard to start. At least I know that I'm not doing anything wrong, and that the Empire is on roughly the same footing.

So, would it be a fair strategy to try to specialize systems within a sector? That is, one planet with lots of construction yards, one with lots of starports, etc..?

yes!

You can do 3 planets, one of each type, but I like to save real-estate in a sector for more refineries so I set aside 2 systems: one with 9 shipyards a shield and a gun, and my other production planet with 6 Construction Yards and 4 Training Facilities, a shield and a gun

keep in mind, as you get characters that can conduct research you will unlock Advanced versions of all the production buildings that are better in every way (albeit more expensive to maintain)

Thanks, I'll give that a try.

One thing that's thrown me for a loop was transit time, as I started out sending construction facilities too far away.

On the other hand, I'm surprised at how fast the game is. Missions seem to go pretty quickly, and the ability to rapidly convert neutral planets is quite nice. The main limiting factor seems to be how most planets have little to no production capacity to start.

I've already recruited a bunch of agents and just discovered the Mon Calamari cruiser. Tremble, imperial scum!

Yeah. And as a tip for everyone, making construction yards one at a time is the best way to do it due to how hardcoded the game is in its mechanics. ITT, here's an example. It takes about 40 in-game days to build a construction yard, building with a single construction yard. However, if you try quieing up say 3 construction yards at the beginning with one construction yard, it'll take around 120 days to build those. If you built them one by one however, you'd gain the benefits of having those additional construction yards as you continue to build more. So 40 days for the first one built, then 20 days for the second, then around 12 days for the third one adding up for 72 days total.

So until the mid game when you have your infrastructure going and enough construction yards to not have to build or upgrade buildings one at a time, you'll have to micromanage your manufacturing planets to get the most efficiency out of them and pick which planets you'll want to defend with your limited manpower (at least in multiplayer your manpower is quite limited at the start, single player the AI is generally dumb enough to not cause much trouble). To get a grasp of a few of the things that may not be apparent to a new time player, I'd recommend reading an FAQ on Gamefaqs for the game. Since the game is randomnized at the start and you don't really have to worry about any sorts of spoilers, it would be best to know and understand the mechanics of the game (and some of the annoying flaws that may be frustrating to deal with until you figure out how to work around them). For example the differences between Rebels and Imperials, or things like Han Solo's travel time between planets and systems cus of the Millenium Falcon, jedi training, different special events, espionage, various forms of tactics, and ship descriptions that may offer more than the in-game encyclopedia (plus since the game is in real time, you can't just sit down and read the encyclopedia at your own pace). Also know the game has some borderline exploits or cheesy tactics people tend to use in multiplayer, or ways to take advantage of broken or hard coded game mechanics that could heavily benefit one side or the other. Things in the game just take some getting used to as to what works, what doesn't, and what the generally better tactics are for various situations.

I had this game years ago (Just bought again it but have not played yet). But if I remember correctly (you can build new construction yards on a planet that has then an "ship" them to another word. You just hit build and then click the planet you want to send it to.

Lots of good info here, thanks guys!

Nope. It doesnt take longer. The remaining building time will be shortended with every finished yard. So it will take the same amount of time then building it one by one....

Same for the ship yards. If you start building your Ship with one yard every coming yard will shorten the max build time.

True, the time on construction yards is reduced, but there exists a very real possibility that you'll want to change your mind about your next build before you finish several structures. Say you recruit another planet nearby that already has multiple construction yards, or R&D comes back with plans for...the ADVANCED construction yard. You'll feel bad having to cancel production days later, when you realize that one world is still building something redundant.

This is a game of micromanagement, as was common for the day, and things DO change pretty fast at times, meaning it's best to re-think your production choices each time you finish something instead of queuing up items for hundreds of days in advance.

For those who want to know maybe you'll find this useful.

Construction Cost x 4 (Regular Shipyard) / Total Number Shipyards

Construction Cost x 2 (Advanced Shipyard) / Total Number Shipyards

Example: Victory II Star Destroyer Cost 72; 11 Regular Shipyards
72 x 4 / 11 = 26 days

Victory II Star Destroyer Cost 72; 11 Advanced Shipyards
72 x 2 / 11 = 13 days

This formula works for ships, troops and structures as well.

These FAQs are great.

gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/198776-star-wars-rebellion/faqs

Long live the Empire =)

That's incorrect actually, increasing numbers of construction buildings have a penalty - diminishing returns kind of - that starts already from building number three. I'm sure of this for construction yards, I'd be surprised if the same isn't true for other buildings.

As a result, 2 planets with 2 constr. yards build faster than 1 with four, although 1 with four has a quicker "time to market" of the built item. So if nothing happens 2 with 2 are better, but if you're under attack it's the opposite.

No, you're wrong. There are no diminishing returns. What you're most likely seeing is that the game loses some points on the last object in a construction queue if construction points vs cost does not divide evenly.

If you have 4 regular shipyards, you produce 1 construction point/day, so regardless what anything costs, no points will ever be dropped.
If you have 8, you produce 2/day, meaning that if you build something that costs 5 and set each newbuild manually, then every 3rd day you will get 1 completed and lose 1 construction point.
But if instead you set a queue to build 2 or any multiple of 2, no points will be dropped and a build will be completed every 3 and 5 days.

This becomes very obvious if you edit construction to be twice as fast, meaning that advanced shipyards EACH produce 1 point/day, and then set up the primary planets for both empire and rebellion to start with enough energy that they can have at least 16 shipyards. Then that planet can finish cheap stuff like fighters several times every day. If you can pay the refined materials cost at least.
Which is why you also edit the map so that a few more sectors begins active and go ahead and use save followed by bombard military only on a few planets in the sectors you want, reload if you hit anything civillian.

Then to let the AI become a threat, when starting you have AI units set to half or less maintenance(beware of setting too low, or you might end up with an Empire with many dozens of ISDs and VSDs at start), followed by having a small ship(one with minimal bombardment value that is greater than 0) of yours in each sector you want to let the AI have, fly around to neutral planets and bombard civillian only, 1-3 pieces items destroyed on 1-3 planets is usually enough to make a whole sector go hostile.

Oh, and don't do this without having set all characters to not being able to go traitor, or you might end up with very few characters that do anything useful.