Re: Maintenance Formula
I'm not sure about the need for upkeep. For all their various capabilities, mines, sats, and fighters are ultimately defensive weapons unless deployed by a fleet. You can deploy thousands of mines, but they won't bring the enemy empires to their knees.
The need for big, balanced fleets brings up the second problem with maintenance and resource use: minerals are king. How many of the rest of you research "resource manipulaiton" so you can turn radioactives and organics into minerals? 8)
Seems to me that ship maintenance ought to be tweaked so that the bulk of the maintenance costs come in organics and radioactives, and not minerals. Then you'd need minerals to build stuff, and organics/radioactives to maintain them. Perhaps the formula could work by taking the net cost of the ship (all three resources combined), and splitting up a given fraction of this as a per-turn cost, with the cost divided out as 10% minerals, 45% organics, 45% radioactives?
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