quote:
It becomes a cheesy way of speeding up the building process.
Using a retrofit series will typically increase the build speed by a huge amount. It also increases the cost by a lot, since you have to pay about 90% of the cost of each design in the series.
For most mods, the repair time of the final product is insignificant.
However, in P&N, retroseries are a fact of life, and I consider it a valid "Rush Build" strategy.
In my case, a number of factors combine to reduce the exploitation of retroseries:
- I've reduced the repair ability of the spaceyards. Actually repairing the final product can take longer than building it straight up in some cases.
- Changes in armor and engines mean lots of small components to repair during a retroseries. 100 armor and 20 engines on a Cruiser is not unreasonable, so if you use a retroseries to build the cruiser at a space yard 3, you'll have 40 turns to wait before the ship is done, rather than 4 turns for a normal build.
- The cost of longer retroseries becomes enormous. Going more than a few steps can double or triple your construction costs, plus you pay maintenance on the ship.
In the end, retroseries are useful only for very expensive components, such as SM, BattleMoons, or retrofitting the cheap AI ships. In order to effectively Rush Build normal ships, you must have lots of auxiliary bases dedicated to component repair.