this Strategy must be broke

[Fyron]

Will said:
Once the shells are built, they start costing maintainence, and in vanilla SEIV, that equates to the cost of a new shell about every six turns IIRC.

Without any maintenance bonuses, you pay 25% of the cost of every ship (which is not mothballed), every turn. A measely 500 racial points gets you a score of 110 in Maintenance Aptitude, which drops the rate to 15% of ship cost paid every turn... Pretty silly, but Aaron never wanted to fix this in SE4...

[Raging Deadstar]

It is however a good way of keeping ahead in the Technology upgrade game. As Races build ships and retrofit them or wait for the old obsolete class get destroyed you add the latest tech to your upgrades for the shell and retrofit pretty quick, It may cost more but you can be assured around 20% of your fleets are top of the line..

Against a Human this strategy would be defeated, the Ai however would probably get it's backside handed to it.

[Possum]

There are some things I regard as "must have's" (speaking here of plain-vanilla SEIV Classic)

Bonuses to Research and Maintenance are at the top of that list

[Gandalf Parker]

Well it didnt feel like a "winning" strategy anyway. But it seems like its good for my "deck of tricks". It might be a one-shot in a game but in certain circumstances its (like having a dozen "dreadnoughts" while he is still trying to finish his first) it could gain you a small advantage you can capitalize on.

I just realized (from a post on the SEIV discussion list) that it duplicates the old SEIII build-queue arrangement.