The Dockyard is a type of port in Napoleon: Total War.
Description[]
A dockyard gives a region a basic shipbuilding capability, and allows the construction of smaller warships.
Dockyards are small industrial villages in their own right, and usually have all the tradesmen and artisans needed to get a ship built on site and permanently employed. They have extensive workshops such as ropewalks, smithies, sawmills and furnaces: the skilled craftsmen include coopers, sailmakers, chandlers and master carpenters. There are also large stocks of timber held in seasoning sheds. Seasoning, the process of slowly drying out sap, can take months or years, so wood is laid up anticipating future demands.
Historically, losing a dockyard to enemy action, even for a short time during a raid, was often a disaster. Apart from the damage to ships in harbour, the loss of timber stocks was far, far worse. The fixed workshops could be replaced, given money, but the timber was gone for good. Loss of these stocks set back shipbuilding by many years, and meant that battle damage was hard to repair. It must have gone against the instincts of many naval officers to burn a dockyard and its contents rather than loot it and purloin and ships for prize money, but they did it anyway!
General Information[]
Dockyards produce light warships, allowing factions to start training fledgling navies. To build ships of the line, the mainstay of mid-late game naval battles, dockyards need to be upgraded to drydocks.
Dockyards compete with trading ports for port slots. Trading ports are highly valuable, so dockyards should only be built ideally when the faction is facing, or wants to create, a significant naval threat. Dockyards are also better placed closer to hostile factions, so that new ships spawn closer to their targets.