this Strategy must be broke

[Roanon]

Yes, sorry retrofit is 20% more. But you do not pay 10% of the cost of the old design. You only pay 10% for components that you remove. If you design a retrofit series that only components are added, which is easy usually, there is no extra cost. So the cost to construct a retro-ship from a 50% hull is 20% of 50% = 10% more. Still not worth mentioning.
Again, you do NOT have extra maintenence, you have LESS. You have to train your ships anyway, and you pay more maintenance if you train them fully equipped rather than train them as a mere shell.

Yes, you pay more as you can build more. You pay nearly double for more than double the ship production. If you do not have that much resources, ok - still it may be better to use retroseries with half the shipyards and idle the other half. Then you either have too many shipyards, a too high racial shipyard rate, or not invested enough in resource mining.

Not using a resource like shipyard capacity is a waste, and game strategy should be adjusted so it does not happen. Wasting capacity with drawn-out buildings of complete ship designs may give you the illusion not to waste capacity, but you still are at a disadvantage not using your full potential even if you try to hide it from yourself

[Will]

Roanon said:
Yes, sorry retrofit is 20% more. But you do not pay 10% of the cost of the old design. You only pay 10% for components that you remove. If you design a retrofit series that only components are added, which is easy usually, there is no extra cost. So the cost to construct a retro-ship from a 50% hull is 20% of 50% = 10% more. Still not worth mentioning.
Again, you do NOT have extra maintenence, you have LESS. You have to train your ships anyway, and you pay more maintenance if you train them fully equipped rather than train them as a mere shell.

Sorry, I didn't follow the first part... I said you end up paying 10% above the original ship cost when you do retroseries on a half-cost shell, and you're seeming to say that the 10% is wrong, then using my exact same argument to say it's 10% more and "not worth mentioning"... odd.

And again, you DO have extra maintainence. As soon as the ship is built, you're paying half maintainence on it until you do the retrofits, then you're paying full maintainence after the retrofits while you repair. While it's not a huge cost in itself, multiplying it by several ships over a period of time makes it more of a drain than standard build methods. Time spent on training is only relevant if all your ships are built at a training centre, then the reduced cost would come into play -- but most people (AFAIK) have a few seperate points as training centres, towards the borders of the empire usually, and most shipbuilding capacity in their core systems, simply because that's how the empire grew. If you're only building ships at training centres, well, that explains the using all your shipyard capacity comment, since you wouldn't have much capacity to begin with. Or you could have training centres on all shipbuilding planets, but that takes up facility slots that could have been used for greater resource generation, which cuts into the effectiveness of the strategy (fewer resources == fewer ships built).

I think the general consensus though, is... it's a valid strategy, you just have to use it at the correct times. Sometimes you should build more shipyards to boost production (long term), sometimes you should do retroseries to give a quick boost to fleet size (short term, oh-crap-he-opened-a-warp-point-to-my-home-system or jeebus-i-only-need-a-few-more-ships-to-break-his-line moments), and sometimes you're just farked and are gonna lose anyway

[Suicide Junkie]

Ok, here's my math on it: Since halves are confusing, I will take 40% core and 60% weapons/shields/etc.

You build the ship and start paying maintenance early, but you get it into service early too, so there's no net change there.

So, the plan is to build 40% of the ship now, and to retrofit 60% of the components on later.

You pay 40% of the maintenance while it flies to the training centers near your front lines. This is pure discount since a full ship would take the same time to get there.

Once there, you sit and train for a couple turns at 40%. More savings.

Now you retrofit over the training world. You are adding on components worth 60% of a full ship. (This will take multiple retrofit steps). You pay 120% of the build cost of the 60% added now.
No components are removed, so that cost is zero.
In total, you pay (1.2 * 0.6) 72% of the cost of building the whole ship at once. Add on the 40% you already paid for, and the ship cost you a total of 112% of the normal cost.

While the components are repaired, you finish the training at the regular-price maintenance.

So, we have...
Extra costs: 12% more per ship.
Savings: 3/5ths of normal maintenance for 2 to 8 turns or so, depending on distance from the training center and training rate.

If you have maxxed out your maintenance reduction and are paying the minimum 5% of hull cost per month, your savings turn out to be:
3% of full hull cost per month.

After only 4 months, you break even!
Without maxxed maintenance reduction, the retrofits give you a net resource savings sooner.

If you have just one training center at 3% per month, your ship will sit there for 7 months training. If it takes 2 months to repair the components, even ships built in the sector see a small net savings from the 5 months of reduced maintenance.

[Fyron]

Of course, using a huge planet with 2 moons for training skews this, as it only takes 3 turns to get full training.

[Gandalf Parker]

Plus the original purpose I had of having a partially capable and visually impressive warship at my front lines. And it gradually increases its war capability rather than count as a 0% war ability until its suddenly a 100% war ability (when it arrives there fully built in the old method though untrained)

All in all this is beginning to look much better than I expected. I was sure it would net me a "you missed something obvious". Even if it does have drawbacks at least none of them seem to have been obvious-everyone-knew-it things.

[rdouglass]

Just my $.02...

Yeah, I do that too; build my shells and send 'em to a waypoint with training facilities and baseyards full of repair components (the more of both the merrier), but I do it for another very important (at least to me) reason - I'm able to use the population better IMO.

See, if I build just shells at lightly populated SY worlds (I build at least 1 in every system as I'm sure most do), I can move all my population and concentrate them at a few huge worlds where I can build those WarpPoint ships (and other very expensive ships) at those full huge planets more quickly. Population is a very significant modifier for planet-based Ship Yard production; probably the greatest in most Mods.

Yeah, build the shells and retrofit while they're training seems a good efficient use of the time to me and I can build those expensive ships in far less time earlier than most others.

If you look at this, think about it a few minutes, and try it out, you will see exactly what I mean....

</$.02>

[Roanon]

Will said:
Sorry, I didn't follow the first part... I said you end up paying 10% above the original ship cost when you do retroseries on a half-cost shell, and you're seeming to say that the 10% is wrong, then using my exact same argument to say it's 10% more and "not worth mentioning"... odd.

20% on a 50% retrofit is 10% of the total costs, rather than 5% as I calculated before using 10% on 50%... yes, a bit confusing these numbers

And again, you DO have extra maintainence. As soon as the ship is built, you're paying half maintainence on it until you do the retrofits, then you're paying full maintainence after the retrofits while you repair. While it's not a huge cost in itself, multiplying it by several ships over a period of time makes it more of a drain than standard build methods.

Of course, this strategy only works if you have enough repair capacity... As retrofit happens first, then repair, you should never ever have any unrepaired ships wasting maintenance. As with all good strategies, poor execution can easily turn them into a bad strategy... Experiment a bit, and you should find the optimal way. Like with training:

Time spent on training is only relevant if all your ships are built at a training centre, [...]

Again, knowing the turn sequence is important . Training happens after movement. So you build, retrofit, move, train and repair in this order in a single turn. First training does not have to happen on the planet where the ship was built, but on the first planet they move to after being built. I call them pre-training centers. I usually need about 1 per 3-4 sytems, and from all of them it is one turn to one of my 2 main training centers (warp openers are your friend).
When using FQM, you can have 2 moons on a planet and that makes an excellent training center, 9% per turn. 2 turns, and with the 3% from the pre-training center you have 20%. In these 2 turns you can do 1 or 2 more retrofits, of course have enough repair bases ready to repair the retrofits instantly.
If you have too little repair capacity, and a constant flow of new ships, this creates new unrepaird ships every turn. And you end up with an ever increasing amount of unrepaired ships, and this IS costly. Takes a bit calculation about what you are going to produce with how much repair neded per retrofit so you can plan the number of repair bases accordingly.

The advantage of this strategy is it increases the effectiveness of your shipyards. I very often encounter the stage where you need capacity but building more shipyards is not an option - I usually build a shipyard on every planet. And see others build lots and lots and lots of expensive maintenance-costing ineffective starbase shipyards. Probably while complaining about the high costs of oh-so-inefficient retrofitting