ship limits and surrender

[Puke]

so i was pondering the pros and cons of low-ship-limit games. i was thinking, hmm, sometimes good, sometimes bad.

but the interesting thing is this. say you have an alliance. in a low ship limit game, its better to have two empires fighting together than it is to have one empire twice the size. because with two empires, you can field twice as many ships (assuming you are producing enough to quickly hit the ship limit).

now, what happens when the game winds on? say an empire with 90 planets is allied with an empire with 10, and the ship limit is something like 100 ships. well, it would sure as heck benefit both empires for the bigger one to fork over 40 planets so they can both produce ships quickly and keep a joint navy of 200 ships, and replace them as soon as they are destroyed.

now, what happens when an empire with 100 ships surrenders to one with 100 ships, and the ship limit is 100? do half the ships go poof? do the new ships not get transfered with the surrender? or does the empire get to have 200 ships until some are destroyed, and he just cant build any more until some are destroyed or scrapped?

i guess this would be pretty easy to test, but im pretending to work at the moment, and it would be sort of hard to start a game. anyone know how this works, or have any ideas about it?

oh, and as a disclaimer, i would never advocate using surrender to bypass ship limits in a multiplayer game. i advocate using alliances to get arround it, but not surrender. if it is possible to get arround it that way, its an exploit that needs to be fixed.

[Baron Grazic]

I haven't tested it, but I think that it gives you all the ships even if it takes you over the limit.
I remeber that happening once to myself using the 'Allegiance Subverter' and I was forced to scrap the captured ships ever round to ensure my new ships were built. That was 1.49 however.

[Puke]

no wonder two of the players in a recent low ship count game took psychic! as long as you can upgrade ships instead of building new ones, you should be sitting fat and happy.

not a bad plan, to bad they didnt have enough success to take full advantage of it. i think the disadvantage of not being able to build new ships (and the difficulty of capturing them) outweighs the benefit of being able to caputure more.

[Suicide Junkie]

I would expect it to be best for the bigger player to just keep gifting replacement ships to the smaller player.

If you give your little friend all the ships you are producing, he would not have to worry about not being able to produce more on his own due to the limit...
After a while, you could have a combined force of 1000's of ships.

Personally, I see no reason why you should be limited to 100 ships unless your economy simply can't afford to support that many.
However, in a game that was started with the limit set low, the players have obviously agreed on that before hand and the limit should be enforced.

[Puke]

yeah, the gifting thing sound a bit too much like cheating. im okay with giving production capacity via planets, or capturing, but *giving* them is a bit out of line.

I was actually contemplating starting a game with P&N mod, or something similar, and setting a very low ship limit. that way the few ships that are built would be upgraded over time with premium components, nanotubes, and other such stuff. the game would be forced to focus more on ship design and tactics rather than industrial might.

[Pax]

Originally posted by Puke:
yeah, the gifting thing sound a bit too much like cheating. im okay with giving production capacity via planets, or capturing, but *giving* them is a bit out of line.

Agreements to teh sort of "I'll give you my two colonies in system X, if you give me your two colonies isn system Y ... then we'll each own ALL of the system we're left with" sounds reasonable, IMO.