[geoschmo]

Oh hey, light bulb moment here. Why not give a facility with this ability to every race. Make an expensive "Ship Maintainance facility" that you can build in your established systems. And then increase base maintenace across the board. This will simulate how it should be more difficult to keep your ships and fleets mainatined when they are out of your own established territory. You could build a bunch of ships for defense, but if you want to go offensive and leave your own space it will cost more for upkeep. This will also encourage conquering of planets instead of glassing them as you will want to capture the maint facilities intact so the war effort doesn't stagnate while you are waiting to build them in newly captured systems.

One think I never tested is if this ability stacks with multiple facilities. If so you could give a small maint reduction to space yards and resupply bases, maybe even space ports. This would seem logical as they are more common in well developed systems. Would give you the overall effect that the farther you get fomr your own planets, the harder it is to maintain your ships.

Geoschmo