[raynfala]

Originally posted by Atrocities:
Retro is about economics. If you can aford it, do it. This is a viable alternative to races with weak production, but extra resources per turn.

The downside to retrofitting is that you lose precious time waiting for those ships to be repaired. This is the potential drawback to Fyron's suggestion of building without a couple of components, and then retrofitting them in after completion. If your tinkering only gets your ship built one turn faster, then your efforts have been wasted; you're going to have to wait another turn for the retrofitted ship to be repaired. You could have some other ship with repair facilities escort it to the front lines. But does anybody really want to micromanage this much? (you in the back: sit down... we all see you waving your hand )

In my current game, I've been doing a lot of retrofitting... mostly retrofitting of ships that I captured through Intel (yeah, yeah, I know...). At your retrofitting sites, it helps a lot to have ships/bases bristling with repair bays. Otherwise, your retrofitting takes way too long to be of use, and it hampers repairs on battleworn ships returning from the front lines.

If you retrofit a lot, invest in Repair tech. Repair-intensive bases should be sufficient to assist planet-based shipyards, but if you want to go mobile, you'll need some Ship Construction tech to efficiently cart around multiple repair bays.

Of course, when you go mobile, you can't retrofit "one-timer" components, such as Emergency Propulsion, planet building/destroying items, etc. You need a planet-based facility for that.

--Raynfala