this Strategy must be broke
 

I have alot of different little strategies Im trying and I can usually see the pros and cons. This one seems like I must be missing something. Its probably a "formula answer" that someone will give me in algebraic code since thats my weak point.

Anyway... I was having trouble developing a frontline fleet to stave off the AI. building large ships at safe backside shipyards then flying them forward had them all strung out and easy to pick off. I cried at the lost build time for losing a large ship that was meant to be a support-type unit in a fleet and not fighting alone.

So, I developed multiple Versions of the ship. 3 or 4 specialized combat Versions. And a shell which had only what was needed to fly it like hull, cabins, and engines. The backside shipyards built these shell ships then flew them to the more frontline shipyards. There I had them "refitted" to combat Versions. It seems like multiples can be refitted at the same time. My frontline fleet was intimidating even if it was mostly shells. And the repairs had them becoming combat ready gradually so in the event of an attack it might have a weapon, or two, or a shield. Sure they die if attacked while having 1 weapon but I only lose the shell and one weapon so it was still more usefull than before.

With some tinkering Ive improved things abit. Sometimes I add a solar sail or a couple of cargo holds so it will move forward faster and can carry some sats or mines while its going forward anyway. If the refit undoes that small add-on its not a big thing. I also found that I can send the shells to the farthest-forward shipyard for the refit command, then fly the ship farther forward to a fleet that has a repair ship so it can sit impressively in a fleet while it rebuilds itself.

So instead of a dozen dreadnoughts spread out trying to reach the front, I have a dozen dreadnoughts that quickly get built and sent to the front sitting there in a fleet on a forward planet with fleet training facilities (even though they are shells being armed). Surely there is some horrendous waste of resources or time that Im missing here?

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

Adding components via retrofit is more expensive than building them in the first place.

You can just group the ships together at a way point behind the front lines, in a safe system. Then send the fleets to the front lines. This will prevent individual ships from being picked off one by one.

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

If you have warp-point openers, find a huge planet, fill it up with cargo facilities, then fill it up with WepP, add some bases and make a WarpP to the front. You now have a secure pipeline. Never tried it, but it should work.

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

Also if your retrofit location has a training facility, they can be trained and repaired at once.

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

Thats what Im thinking. Even with added cost the other advantages seem to make it a viable tactic. You are training while you are "building" most of the ship. Plus you can quickly have a number of back locations whip off these shells and send them forward to be an "impressive" fleet (the other guy doesnt know they are shells). It seems to work to stave off the AI. Possibly human players also.

Ive also discovered that by building the ship this way Im ending up with better ships. By the time they are at the front I have already upgraded the end design once or twice. So instead of taking 1.2 to build a ship that is out of tech when its done; Im whipping out shells in .3, moving them forward, and then retrofitting them into the best I have available.

It also lets me put my newly researched ship size (apparently) into my fleets much quicker.

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

Interesting strategy....

Kana

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

Works great against AIs. But once a human opponent decides to take a pot-shot at that "impressive" fleet, and sees that a lot of them are only semi-built, they'll start bringing Long Range Scanners to see when there's a nice big juicy target for them to hit. You could compensate for this by placing a scanner jammer on each shell and warship, but then your opponents could also look for a large number of your repair-class ships to find a potentially easy target.

The main problem with the strategy though is cost. Once the shells are built, they start costing maintainence, and in vanilla SEIV, that equates to the cost of a new shell about every six turns IIRC. There's also the extra time and cost from retrofitting, and the 150% cost limitation, potentially causing the need for retro-series. Once you refit a ship, it starts costing the FULL maintainence for that design, while you might have to wait at least one turn for it to become active. It depends on your playstyle on whether this extra cost offsets the ability to have "bleeding-edge" tech on your fleets.

Generally, the better strategy is waypointing ships to a training planet (in vanilla, usually set up at a planet with two moons, to take advantage of three training facilities) to join a fleet, and go to the front from there, or to have a few construction centers with insane numbers of shipyards (depends on empire size, I've gone up to 100 BSYs against AIs before) in one spot, and either send the ships straight to the front lines, or train and send out.

The fortified WP over the Huge planet is one technique to bring large numbers of ships from one of the uber-yards to a front line. It usually cuts down a lot of the travel time for the mid-to-end game where warp openers/closers become common.

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

Without any maintenance bonuses, you pay 25% of the cost of every ship (which is not mothballed), every turn. A measely 500 racial points gets you a score of 110 in Maintenance Aptitude, which drops the rate to 15% of ship cost paid every turn... Pretty silly, but Aaron never wanted to fix this in SE4...

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

It is however a good way of keeping ahead in the Technology upgrade game. As Races build ships and retrofit them or wait for the old obsolete class get destroyed you add the latest tech to your upgrades for the shell and retrofit pretty quick, It may cost more but you can be assured around 20% of your fleets are top of the line..

Against a Human this strategy would be defeated, the Ai however would probably get it's backside handed to it.

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

There are some things I regard as "must have's" (speaking here of plain-vanilla SEIV Classic)

Bonuses to Research and Maintenance are at the top of that list http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

Well it didnt feel like a "winning" strategy anyway. But it seems like its good for my "deck of tricks". It might be a one-shot in a game but in certain circumstances its (like having a dozen "dreadnoughts" while he is still trying to finish his first) it could gain you a small advantage you can capitalize on.

I just realized (from a post on the SEIV discussion list) that it duplicates the old SEIII build-queue arrangement.

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

So here's what you do, construct the dreadnought with a repair bay, begin the retrofit at the spaceyard, then send it on its way. Then it will repair in transit, and have something ready whenever it encounters an enemy ship.

I'm starting to use the retrofit building more and more. For a while, I would rarely build battleships and never build dreadnoughts. They take too long to build. I only built them when I had max spaceyards, and plenty of time to wait -- which means I've practically beaten the A.I. into submission anyway.

I would use boarding ships to steal opponent battleships and dreads, but their designs were weak, that inspired me to design dreadnoughts and retrofit. But I never did that with my own.

'Course once I got to build a battlemoon, I absolutely had to use the retrofit series. It takes 22 turns to build an almost empty hull, and moving only one sector a turn, that time was better spent filling the hull with components instead of having it be fully built.

That's when it hit me, why not do it whenever building will take a long time; dreadnoughts, starbases in nebulas, etc.

On some level this is an exploit, subverting the balance that long build times provide. But I dunno, you see half built starships in sci-fi all the time, seems kinda appropriate.

It kinda returns us the the multiple spaceyard queues of SE3, where you could see your partially built hull filling with components, and move it around according to your new priorities.

[EDIT]
Gandalf Parker beat me to that Last point, that'll teach me to get a snack mid-typing. Oh well, it's his thread anyway. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

This strategy works agaisnt humans too. As long as you don't build all your shell ships as the same class. Keep varying the class names and the other guy will never know until he attacks the strength of the fleet. Scanners will tell him, but you can counter that by putting scatterign armor on your shell ships.

The two biggest problems with this are the cost and the micromanagment headaches. Cost though is always easy to remedy in SE4. More planets.

Geoschmo

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

I recall that one of the best peaces of advise I was ever given about ship design and strategy was to not diversify your ship design, stick to solid one weapon platforms and build differant ships for differant weapons. It worked and I have yet to loose to an AI.

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

Gandalf,

Very Interesting strategy..as well as Arkcon's.

I have no real advise..but it is very interesting to me..and should be to lots of others that:

(1) based on the nuber of Posts you show;
(2) the length of time I have seen you on the Boards;

one would assume that you are one of the VERY Experienced Vets and would know everything about how to beat the game/ai's/others.

What I'm trying to say is that its refreshing to see a vet still working on strategies to play the game..and that us with less experience can take heart in that we arent as bad or hopeless as we might think we are when getting our but handed to us.

Hope that made sense and that it wasnt taken as an offense.

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

If these forums were only for Space Empires IV, that would still be a semi-truthful assumption at best... In this case, it is not. Most of GP's Posts have been racked up over in the Dominions 2 section.

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

Dominions 2 is one of those games that could be far far more than it has become. I like the game but hate the deludge of micro-management and lack of support infastructure that games like SEIV have built into them.

If you combined the best of Dominions 2, SE IV, Moo3, and GalCiv into one game, ohhhhhhhhhhh God what a game that would be. The manual alone would be as thick as a telephone book.

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

Amen!

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

And I don't play very much. I can beat the ai, but I tend to turtle.

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

That is what makes SE4 the greatest game of all time. Seriously, I'm never bored with the game and all its nuances. There is always something new to do. I don't know how to explain it to other people -- maybe to say SE4 wasn't written or even designed/crafted -- it was invented.

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

Well there is always room for another game at Shrapnel. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
I have some ideas for mega-sized maps without heavy storage overhead that Id be happy to toss in.

Everything has its Pros and Cons. When new Users complain about the lack of manual in Dominions 2 I kindof giggle because soon after they realize it would be an encyclopedia. The nations play so differently that its a whole new book for each of the 17 nations (soon to be 18). I LOVE a game where you can come up with your own strategies rather than just learn what the developer had in mind. Im kindof amazed that I came to the Shrapnel site following the Dom2 trail and found SEIV, because I think my enjoyment of both is for the same reasons.

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

I don't think there's anything 'wrong' with that strategy in terms of it being a way around the way SE4s mechanics are supposed to work. In fact, I can even think of historical precedent for it. My grandfather used to build cargo ships during WW2 on the west coast of Canada. I remember him saying a lot of the time he said they only built enough of the boat so it could get itself around to the east coast for loading, and most of the work on the inside of the ship (crew quarters etc) was done en route. Sure, they were cargo ships and not warships but the principle is the same.

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

Hey Gandalf, you stole my standard strategy ! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Well, I never considered it to be anything special. I always thought this was the only way to play once you have baseships, and even worth considering for battleships and up. Especially in a larger/longer game where you have enough resources at some point and only need to build ships fast.

Drawback? Weakness? Not good against humans? I don't see it. If you cannot even protect this single system with the retrofit/repair/train facilities from an enemy attack, you would have lost with any other strategy anyway...

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

Yep, it's a valid strategy, but one with trade-offs. It tends to cost more to do this, and it tends to reduce your fleet strength, but it can pay off if all goes well.

I would be careful though about placement and timing. If you find yourself thinking it's a great advantage to be "only losing shells", then I think your security is lacking, unless you are getting a great trade-off in terms of increased expansion.

PvK

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

OK this has GOT to be wrong. Repair can happen on a mothballed ship? Please tell me that fleet training cant happen on a mothballed ship also.

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

Mothballing a ship clears any experience levels.

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

Thanks for the tip - I wouldn't have assumed that for some reason, even though it makes perfect sense.

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

What is that supposed to mean? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/eek.gif

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

How do you figure? Don't you end up with more ships? Or do you mean in the very short term?

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

I dont want to hijack this thread too much.

If you mean each needing a book then the easiest answer is to go to the shrapnelgames.com pages and grab the demo.

If you mean the soon-to-be-18 then the answer is that Kristoffer is working on a new water nation

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

Short- to mid-term, rather than very short term. The reason is that more of your shipyard time and resources are going into working on ships which aren't ready to fight, because:

1) Retrofitting costs a significant amount more than building components on a ship in the first place, and they start out damaged, meaning even some of the upgraded ships have unworking equipment and/or extra repair ships and bases need to be built and maintained and/or ships are at planets instead of on the front lines.

2) A large part of a ship's cost is in its engines and control components (one of the reasons why big ships are dominant in the unmodded game), and these need to be built on the shells. So there is a lot of cost and maintenance going into ships which have little or no combat strength. Ships that are being fully built don't cost any maintenance until they are complete.

On the other hand, if you would soon be retrofitting your ships with new equipment anyway, then that's even more expensive. Particularly in a low or early in a medium research cost game, sometimes a few turns' wait can bring technology that multiplies the effectiveness of a ship. So I was talking about a situation where you have something that's worth building now that won't be obsolete by the time it reaches the front line.

So it depends on the situation, but my experience is that while this is a valid technique with distinct advantages, generally it costs resources and results in a weaker overall fleet strength at first. When a bunch of ships are in the middle of retrofits, shell stages, and mothballs, that's a lot of resources going into unready ships.

PvK

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

I tend to merely use a single retrofit step myself, mainly because of the reasons PvK had underlined (and because I am quite lazy as well). A single retrofit is usually enough to cut down the construction delay by one turn, and the vessel will then remain in orbit for repairs, which should be completed in one turn if you have a decent repair ability (82% with the Berserker culture). It is somewhat expensive, although nowhere as costly as the full retroseries way, but can be helpful if you do not have as many SYs as you should.

In the later game, the full retroseries way is probably much more appealing, when your basic income is a seven-figure number. *Coughs* Roanon's Collective. *Coughs* But when you are that wealthy, the galaxy will fall under your dominion no matter how you build your ships. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

You forgot about that hostile empire in the other side of quadrant with 2 x "your seven-figure number" income. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

Better than shipyard time going into ships not ready at all.
I usually do a 2-step retrofit, starting with a roughly 50% cost hull needing 2 turns to build, and going up to 70% then 100% in 2 steps. This produces a ship that would need 5 turns to be built completely otherwise.
If I need 2 turns to build a hull plus 2 turns to retrofit and repair, rather than 5 turns to build, I have MORE ships - short, mid, and long term. The real waste of shipyard time is continuing to build a complete ship turn 3, 4 and 5 instead of already building a second shell, and not using retrofitting which is unlimited and in addition to any shipyard capacity.

10% extra cost for retrofitting. If you bild a ship with 50% of the total costs and retrofit it, this is a total of 5% extra on top of the total costs. Yawn.
Ok, you need some starbases with repair bases. Well some extra costs for that. If you are THAT short on resources, ok, do something else. Like looking for a way to earn more resources http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif.
And for the extra time to the front: the opposite is true as you cannot build every ship near the front (usually, the front planets have other things to do than building ships, like resource mines for example...). With the retro-technique, you build far from the front, and already send them towards the repair/train base (which should have a convenient location) during the 2 turns while they are being retrofitted. So after 4 turns you have a completely trained ship near the front rather than an untrained ship 1 turn later and far away from the front. Which costs a lot of maintenance until ready to fight.

The cost to build the engine and control components on a ship shell is not different from the cost to build the same parts on the complete ship which is ready much later. Absolutely no extra cost here.
And it is in fact CHEAPER to train an half-finished ship for half maintenance rather than a fully built ship for full maintenance.

All in all, it never depends on the situation, this strategy is always good as soon as you use battleships or better. The resource cost is actually lower, not higher, as you do not have to waste much maintenance costs for training a fully equipped ship. The overall fleet strength is actually higher, not weaker, as you have fully trained and equipped ships much earlier then when building complete ships.
Ok, you have a weak fleet the first turns - but with the standard build schedule, you have no fleet at all these turns.

You must have A LOT more resources and shipyard capacity to beat this retrofit strategy with standard complete-hull building.

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

You're assuming that your empire has a large excess of resources. To take from your examples, if you build the fleet the "standard" way, the full 100% cost will be spread out over 5 turns. IIRC, a component costs 20% more to retrofit into a design, so you end up paying 10% of the cost on top of the original design if you have 50% cost shells, and this cost is spread out across 3 turns (about 25% + 25% + 60%). If you're strapped for resources, or running a deficit, then this strategy could push you into negative resources, and cause random scraps. So, it's only viable if you have lots of excess resources, and want to spend around 15%-20% more (retrofit costs, repair base costs, extra maintainence) to get ships finished a few turns faster. Better than the Emergency build option for many cases though.

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

Yes, sorry retrofit is 20% more. But you do not pay 10% of the cost of the old design. You only pay 10% for components that you remove. If you design a retrofit series that only components are added, which is easy usually, there is no extra cost. So the cost to construct a retro-ship from a 50% hull is 20% of 50% = 10% more. Still not worth mentioning.
Again, you do NOT have extra maintenence, you have LESS. You have to train your ships anyway, and you pay more maintenance if you train them fully equipped rather than train them as a mere shell.

Yes, you pay more as you can build more. You pay nearly double for more than double the ship production. If you do not have that much resources, ok - still it may be better to use retroseries with half the shipyards and idle the other half. Then you either have too many shipyards, a too high racial shipyard rate, or not invested enough in resource mining.

Not using a resource like shipyard capacity is a waste, and game strategy should be adjusted so it does not happen. Wasting capacity with drawn-out buildings of complete ship designs may give you the illusion not to waste capacity, but you still are at a disadvantage not using your full potential even if you try to hide it from yourself http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

Sorry, I didn't follow the first part... I said you end up paying 10% above the original ship cost when you do retroseries on a half-cost shell, and you're seeming to say that the 10% is wrong, then using my exact same argument to say it's 10% more and "not worth mentioning"... odd. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

And again, you DO have extra maintainence. As soon as the ship is built, you're paying half maintainence on it until you do the retrofits, then you're paying full maintainence after the retrofits while you repair. While it's not a huge cost in itself, multiplying it by several ships over a period of time makes it more of a drain than standard build methods. Time spent on training is only relevant if all your ships are built at a training centre, then the reduced cost would come into play -- but most people (AFAIK) have a few seperate points as training centres, towards the borders of the empire usually, and most shipbuilding capacity in their core systems, simply because that's how the empire grew. If you're only building ships at training centres, well, that explains the using all your shipyard capacity comment, since you wouldn't have much capacity to begin with. Or you could have training centres on all shipbuilding planets, but that takes up facility slots that could have been used for greater resource generation, which cuts into the effectiveness of the strategy (fewer resources == fewer ships built).

I think the general consensus though, is... it's a valid strategy, you just have to use it at the correct times. Sometimes you should build more shipyards to boost production (long term), sometimes you should do retroseries to give a quick boost to fleet size (short term, oh-crap-he-opened-a-warp-point-to-my-home-system or jeebus-i-only-need-a-few-more-ships-to-break-his-line moments), and sometimes you're just farked and are gonna lose anyway http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

Ok, here's my math on it: Since halves are confusing, I will take 40% core and 60% weapons/shields/etc.

You build the ship and start paying maintenance early, but you get it into service early too, so there's no net change there.

So, the plan is to build 40% of the ship now, and to retrofit 60% of the components on later.

You pay 40% of the maintenance while it flies to the training centers near your front lines. This is pure discount since a full ship would take the same time to get there.

Once there, you sit and train for a couple turns at 40%. More savings.

Now you retrofit over the training world. You are adding on components worth 60% of a full ship. (This will take multiple retrofit steps). You pay 120% of the build cost of the 60% added now.
No components are removed, so that cost is zero.
In total, you pay (1.2 * 0.6) 72% of the cost of building the whole ship at once. Add on the 40% you already paid for, and the ship cost you a total of 112% of the normal cost.

While the components are repaired, you finish the training at the regular-price maintenance.

So, we have...
Extra costs: 12% more per ship.
Savings: 3/5ths of normal maintenance for 2 to 8 turns or so, depending on distance from the training center and training rate.

If you have maxxed out your maintenance reduction and are paying the minimum 5% of hull cost per month, your savings turn out to be:
3% of full hull cost per month.

After only 4 months, you break even!
Without maxxed maintenance reduction, the retrofits give you a net resource savings sooner.

If you have just one training center at 3% per month, your ship will sit there for 7 months training. If it takes 2 months to repair the components, even ships built in the sector see a small net savings from the 5 months of reduced maintenance.

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

Of course, using a huge planet with 2 moons for training skews this, as it only takes 3 turns to get full training. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

Plus the original purpose I had of having a partially capable and visually impressive warship at my front lines. And it gradually increases its war capability rather than count as a 0% war ability until its suddenly a 100% war ability (when it arrives there fully built in the old method though untrained)

All in all this is beginning to look much better than I expected. I was sure it would net me a "you missed something obvious". Even if it does have drawbacks at least none of them seem to have been obvious-everyone-knew-it things.

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

Just my $.02...

Yeah, I do that too; build my shells and send 'em to a waypoint with training facilities and baseyards full of repair components (the more of both the merrier), but I do it for another very important (at least to me) reason - I'm able to use the population better IMO.

See, if I build just shells at lightly populated SY worlds (I build at least 1 in every system as I'm sure most do), I can move all my population and concentrate them at a few huge worlds where I can build those WarpPoint ships (and other very expensive ships) at those full huge planets more quickly. Population is a very significant modifier for planet-based Ship Yard production; probably the greatest in most Mods.

Yeah, build the shells and retrofit while they're training seems a good efficient use of the time to me and I can build those expensive ships in far less time earlier than most others.

If you look at this, think about it a few minutes, and try it out, you will see exactly what I mean....

</$.02>

Re: this Strategy must be broke
 

20% on a 50% retrofit is 10% of the total costs, rather than 5% as I calculated before using 10% on 50%... yes, a bit confusing these numbers http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Of course, this strategy only works if you have enough repair capacity... As retrofit happens first, then repair, you should never ever have any unrepaired ships wasting maintenance. As with all good strategies, poor execution can easily turn them into a bad strategy... Experiment a bit, and you should find the optimal way. Like with training:

Again, knowing the turn sequence is important http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif. Training happens after movement. So you build, retrofit, move, train and repair in this order in a single turn. First training does not have to happen on the planet where the ship was built, but on the first planet they move to after being built. I call them pre-training centers. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/cool.gif I usually need about 1 per 3-4 sytems, and from all of them it is one turn to one of my 2 main training centers (warp openers are your friend).
When using FQM, you can have 2 moons on a planet and that makes an excellent training center, 9% per turn. 2 turns, and with the 3% from the pre-training center you have 20%. In these 2 turns you can do 1 or 2 more retrofits, of course have enough repair bases ready to repair the retrofits instantly.
If you have too little repair capacity, and a constant flow of new ships, this creates new unrepaird ships every turn. And you end up with an ever increasing amount of unrepaired ships, and this IS costly. Takes a bit calculation about what you are going to produce with how much repair neded per retrofit so you can plan the number of repair bases accordingly.

The advantage of this strategy is it increases the effectiveness of your shipyards. I very often encounter the stage where you need capacity but building more shipyards is not an option - I usually build a shipyard on every planet. And see others build lots and lots and lots of expensive maintenance-costing ineffective starbase shipyards. Probably while complaining about the high costs of oh-so-inefficient retrofitting http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif