Maintenance Formula

[sapperland]

Does anyone know the formula for calculating ship maintenance cost?

[LintMan]

There's a setting in the Settings.txt file that lets you set the ship maintenance cost percentage. Unfortunately, it may not be working...

The default is 25% of the ship's original cost, per turn. I tried to adjust this to 10%, but the game still seemed to be working off the 25% figure. (Last week sometime I posted a message about this is some detail; you can still find the post if you look back a ways.).

The other factor in the maintenance cost is that you can use racial points to raise/lower your maintenance. It appears that if you pick a 10% maintenance reduction, the total maintenance percentage is reduced by 10% of the base percentage. So instead of 25% maintenance, you would have 22.5% maintenance cost.

As a side note - isn't that maintenace cost horrible? The 25% a turn means that maintenance costs for a ship add up to 250% of its build cost per year. If you won't need a ship for more than 4 turns, it's cheaper to scrap it and build a new one when you need it!

[Talenn]

Lintman:

I believe the Upkeep amount is so high as a play balance mechanism. Personally, I think its about right. Operating a fleet is a VERY expensive operation TODAY. Who knows what the future will bring.

That said, do you have problems in your games with resources? I always seem to have resources falling out my ears. I have custom data set in which I reduced the amount of resources that facilities produce AND I've upped the cost on many ship components and hulls. Even at that, I find that I am usually hovering around the 50k mark in all three resources.

I just rarely need to maintain a large fleet. The AI tends to be extremely passive and treaty happy. By the time it starts getting uppity, my Tech levels are so far ahead that I usually need very few ships to overpower them.

If the AI was more aggressive, it might force me to keep a larger fleet in being and thus slow my exponential growth. I am currently fiddling with the AI to accomplish just that.

Talenn

[Seawolf]

Lint,

2 suggestions, 1) mothball ships when not in use to reduce maintaince. 2) in the begining of the game you should build storage facilities. SInce you hardly use all the production in the first turns build up your reserve.



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Seawolf on the prowl

[Taqwus]

Heh. I must have a more violent, impatient playing style -- involving both rapid expansion and peace through superior firepower. If, say, you try to colonize one planet per turn (on average), and meanwhile try to build them all up, and then add ships for patrolling your borders, finding systems to colonize, and removing threats in the form of neighbors... it gets expensive. I've been spending just about every Last mineral on building facilities. I do need to scrap some of the older mining ships, 'tho.

In my present game (the one in which by sheer luck I got all three colony techs very VERY quickly) my construction expenses are pretty obscene, exacerbated by the fact that I put points into construction rate, and that I've got multiple conquered planets to population (had been fighting for most of the game, including turn 1. Conquered something like 2 neutrals, plus the Terrans, the Hive, the Xiloti (sp?), and the Pindons (sp?) so far, at least, of which the Terrans and the Xiloti both surrendered only very recently. These races were also quite fond of mines, meaning that a decent number of minesweepers was needed to make sure that my warships weren't obliterated on going through warp points.

In the meantime, I've also been pushing hard on research (working towards *good* phased shields, dreadnoughts, quantum engines and what-not), and trying to ramp up intelligence (because it'd be a shame if an AI managed to capture one of my prize CAs -- I've had the BC and BB techs for quite some time but haven't seen fit to build one yet; am waiting to get better tech to put in 'em). I could probably put together a nasty carrier, but I'm waiting for heavy carriers and better cargo tech. Why settle for only ~120 Large Rocket-Pod III Fighters?

(Hey. It's in character -- given that my portrait is of Vader, and the Empire wasn't known for tiny fleets of small ships. )

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[LintMan]

I agree it's a play balance issue, but given my love for large fleet clashes, it makes that a bit tough. I also think it hurts the AI sometimes (see below).

I also agree that real-life fleet costs are expensive, but it couldn't be 250% a year! The would imply that a $20 million jet would cost $50 million a year to maintain, or a $500 million aricraft carrier would cost $1.25 billion/year!

I'm not really hurting for resources, and am able normally able to keep 50K+ of reserves, while doing heavy colony expansion/development. But I'm in a peaceful mode with almost no fleet to speak of. But once I start putting together a few decent fleets (not unreasonable for an empire with 30-40 planets in 20+ systems (I'm playing a huge 255 system map)), my production and expansion capacity will go to nil.

That's really not that bad a thing for me; I almost expect it, but I think it hurts the AI a lot. I think in a game like mine where there is a long period of buildup before contact and war, the AI drains a lot of its resources building and supporting ships that goes mostly unused and become obsolete before they're needed. If the maintenance was less, it could have used those resources to expand and research and maybe it wouldn't have gotten so far behind.