I use emergency for thing that take more than a year to build that I only need one of, or won't need something built for that next year. Examples are:
1). large, self-repairing stellar manipulation ships - maybe that's cheezy, but I do it anyway. Seriously, if my race has advanced technologically enough to build planets or warp points, why make me wait two years for the ship? OK, no realisim responces here, I know it's for balance. But someone else thinks it would be more realistic if the
process took a more time, rather than the ship building.
2). upgrades of 25 facility 1's of various types to the next level. If that's all the planet does, mine, research or Intel, I want the benefit as soon as possible. Maybe if when upgrading multiple facilities, it happened one facility at a time rather than waiting for the whole stack to upgrade, then I wouldn't use emergency.
3). Bases on warp points build by mobile shipyard. Build on emergency, turning a 0.7 yr build to 0.5 , shut off after construction, then send the 5 engine cruiser with spaceyard to the next warp point, the reduced rate time may be up by the time it reaches the next point, especially if it has to resupply (can't fleet with the base it just built anymore
)
4). Ringworld component. As I mentioned in another thread, if you want to build a ringword to prevent a star from going nova, you have to use emergency build at the Last possible moment or it won't be built in time. (Please don't tell me how to tweak spaceyard rate instead, this is just an example)
Whew, that's a long post. So what have we got. The only benefits of emergency are to work around/exploit some other rules. I'd like emergency to stay, until the others were fixed. Simply put, some building is too slow to be fun. Balanced -- yes, part of the planning a good empire needs -- sure, fun -- no.
I only once built a star destroyer. I had the tech, just wanted to see the message. Anyway, I was so bored I shut off the log message and end turn confirmation. So I could press the F12 key 24 times and get it. Feh, hardly worth it.
[ October 06, 2002, 21:15: Message edited by: Arkcon ]