Proportions 2.3 released

[PvK]

Originally posted by Captain Kwok:
I disagree with the exuberant mothball cost. It should be more than 20% yes, but less than 50%.

To unmothball a ship, it just requires some maintenance and recalibration of systems. Remember that unmothballing a ship does not update it technologically.

If you take in a refit at a maximum 50% of the ships orignal cost than that gives up to 100% to unmothball the ship and update it to most current tech. That seems reasonable doesn't it?

My interpretation of mothballing is a bit different in at least a couple of ways:

1) A mothballed ship has no crew. The old crew has been reassigned or laid off, so an entire new crew has to be raised and trained. In a space age society, superlatively-trained crew may be a major part of the cost of a ship.

2) The initial cost of a ship is only a down payment. I don't think a ship would necessarily start falling apart to the tune of 20% per month immediately after comission. So, consider the actual cost of fielding a ship is the build cost plus a year of maintenance fees, which is typically 100% + 10 x 20% = 300% the nominal cost of a ship.
If one builds a ship and immediately mothball it, the cost is only 100%. I would think this represents not providing a crew, and maybe not really finishing the design.

Other considerations:

In Proportions, empires don't just have 0-50k of resources reserve - an empire at peace usually has hundreds of thousands of resources in reserve. So it's not like the standard game, where the full price of a squadron of good ships could immediately deplete an empire's reserves. At 20% unmothball cost, in fact, it becomes barely noticeable to unmothball an entire armada. At 80-100% it's still not very much, but at least it's a noticeable dent, and not just the equivalent of a single turn's maintenance.

20% is just like one turn's maintenance for an average empire - it's like no cost at all. So without a high unmothball cost, there isn't even any noticable cost (compared to maintenance costs) of pre-building a massive armada and mothballing it.

I.e., 80% sounds like a lot until I consider that the purchase price is itself a drop in the bucket. Maintenance cost is usually 20% per turn, and it can take 10 turns to move to a training facility and train up, several turns to repair retrofitted components, several turns to even get to a first battle, etc.

PvK