going nuts on retrofit

[PvK]

Gandalf, your ideas aren't crazy and can work well... or they can be inefficient and/or risky, depending on the specifics. I like your idea B best, but the others can be good too. B is cool because the money you use retrofitting would otherwise be spent on maintenance sending a cargo ship home empty.

I tend to muck around with retrofits a lot myself, mainly because I'm a perfectionist micromanager type. However I know from experience that it can easily end up costing a LOT of resources, and that effect has at times snuck up on me even when I thought I was being careful, and suddenly it was a problem trying to afford to retrofit ships to combat readiness due to suddenly not being able to afford the retrofits, and/or not being able to repair all the vital components in time, etc.

Also it _is_ a big sink of player time, especially when you need to compute the 50% resource limit etc.

Let us know if you have any luck using the Retrofit Minister to help with this. In my experience, it isn't going to understand your subtle plans - what it does is choose the "best" design for a hull class, and if any are sitting at a construction location, it might retrofit some of them to that design. It might be based on whether they are marked as obsolete or not, though, so you might have some success there. Watch out though as it will do silly things like retrofit Ion Engine II ships to Ion Engine III's (huge waste of resources), or take a specialized ship and retrofit it into a standard warship design.

PvK