Quote:
Roanon said:
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.
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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.
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