[spoon]

Originally posted by Phoenix-D:

You can only expand more quickly with maintance reduction if your maintance is causing you to run out of resources. Unless and until the non-reduction player's shipyards have to sit idle for lack of cash, the player with it has no advantage.

If you aren't running out of cash, you aren't expanding quickly enough (or you have a very nice starting position chock full of mineral planets (which I hear are best...)