this Strategy must be broke

[PvK]

spoon said:

How do you figure? Don't you end up with more ships? Or do you mean in the very short term?

Short- to mid-term, rather than very short term. The reason is that more of your shipyard time and resources are going into working on ships which aren't ready to fight, because:

1) Retrofitting costs a significant amount more than building components on a ship in the first place, and they start out damaged, meaning even some of the upgraded ships have unworking equipment and/or extra repair ships and bases need to be built and maintained and/or ships are at planets instead of on the front lines.

2) A large part of a ship's cost is in its engines and control components (one of the reasons why big ships are dominant in the unmodded game), and these need to be built on the shells. So there is a lot of cost and maintenance going into ships which have little or no combat strength. Ships that are being fully built don't cost any maintenance until they are complete.

On the other hand, if you would soon be retrofitting your ships with new equipment anyway, then that's even more expensive. Particularly in a low or early in a medium research cost game, sometimes a few turns' wait can bring technology that multiplies the effectiveness of a ship. So I was talking about a situation where you have something that's worth building now that won't be obsolete by the time it reaches the front line.

So it depends on the situation, but my experience is that while this is a valid technique with distinct advantages, generally it costs resources and results in a weaker overall fleet strength at first. When a bunch of ships are in the middle of retrofits, shell stages, and mothballs, that's a lot of resources going into unready ships.

PvK