It can be an interesting idea and there is a market for them
It would provide varied gameplay with new challenges in each new era.
It would be complex enough to remain interesting on the long run
The negative:
If you would want a ship builder that makes sense, it would be pretty hard to implement that and would cost a lot of time and money to implement.
Its complexity also creates high development costs
Again: to have varied gameplay you would have to focus on many different challenges for many different eras.
Lets see a bit about history:
In early times ships are built from wood, it limits their size. While you know their top speed (anything faster is unsafe) their actual speed depends a lot on wind, so you can’t maintain a schedule, which makes planning a nightmare. Also risks are high. The question is: if wind isn’t favorable, you spend much more time on the seas, how would you have enough food, sweet water, etc. for this. So travel was risky.
A bit later you have steam power, but not enough space to run on steam power for the whole time. So again, you depend a bit on the wind, you still have smaller ships, etc.
There are later ships where you have bigger and bigger steam engines. Some of them can run trans Atlantic routes on steam power alone. But you should see how these experiments were risky. While weather, etc. isn’t an issue, financing is. And as people plan with different engines (bigger and bigger) you face new risks. If you don’t keep up with the evolution of ships and release some ship classes later your ships won’t be competitive long enough to let you pay the full price…
Steam turbine ships… Time of the big ships. Some of them were advertised by showing how many freight trains are needed to refuel them once… At this size infrastructure for refueling and handling the ships can be an issue. Also they are big, so harder to fill…
More modern ships… Very different challenges. Diesel, Gas turbine, and the few nuclear civilian ships pose very different challenges. And if you have a ship builder, and offer some flexibility players can even turn that idea into a success story.
As you see you would have implement a lot of different challenges, and a lot of different parts for ship builders. And I have to tell you: Propulsion system can limit the size of the ships easily. So… it would be an interesting concept but would be difficult to make.
And if you also consider how many people would buy the game, how much would you have to spend on developing the game, etc. you would see this would lead to an expensive game where people want AAA quality…
