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Lastly, ship maintenance, I've noticed some old hands going for ultra low maintenance strats with their ships - is this likely to be some kind of win through superior ship points strategy without needing to fight? Also, is there any tech root to reducing maintenance within the game?
In my current game, my opponent has twice as many ships as I do even though we both have the same resource production. The biggest difference between us is that he's paying half as much maintenance and can thus field a much larger fleet than I can.
Right now, it is possible to attain ZERO maintenance by choosing the Merchant Culture which gives you a 5% bonus to maintenance and then setting your Maintenance characteristic to 120%. This puts you at 2500 points. But you can get back down to 2000 by setting Repair Rate to 80%, for example.
Strangely enough, with your maintenance set to 125%, the game thinks your maintenance should be the 25% bonus *minus* the existing maintenance of 25%. Thus, you pay no maintenance at all.
Some folks think that no maintenance isn't worth it--especially in a human vs. human game where your human opponents probably put their points into either faster research or faster production. I, myself, think that zero maintenance would be an overwhelming advantage. It all depends on who you ask.
