this Strategy must be broke

[Arkcon]

Will said:
, but then your opponents could also look for a large number of your repair-class ships to find a potentially easy target.

So here's what you do, construct the dreadnought with a repair bay, begin the retrofit at the spaceyard, then send it on its way. Then it will repair in transit, and have something ready whenever it encounters an enemy ship.

I'm starting to use the retrofit building more and more. For a while, I would rarely build battleships and never build dreadnoughts. They take too long to build. I only built them when I had max spaceyards, and plenty of time to wait -- which means I've practically beaten the A.I. into submission anyway.

I would use boarding ships to steal opponent battleships and dreads, but their designs were weak, that inspired me to design dreadnoughts and retrofit. But I never did that with my own.

'Course once I got to build a battlemoon, I absolutely had to use the retrofit series. It takes 22 turns to build an almost empty hull, and moving only one sector a turn, that time was better spent filling the hull with components instead of having it be fully built.

That's when it hit me, why not do it whenever building will take a long time; dreadnoughts, starbases in nebulas, etc.

On some level this is an exploit, subverting the balance that long build times provide. But I dunno, you see half built starships in sci-fi all the time, seems kinda appropriate.

It kinda returns us the the multiple spaceyard queues of SE3, where you could see your partially built hull filling with components, and move it around according to your new priorities.

[EDIT]
Gandalf Parker beat me to that Last point, that'll teach me to get a snack mid-typing. Oh well, it's his thread anyway.

[geoschmo]

This strategy works agaisnt humans too. As long as you don't build all your shell ships as the same class. Keep varying the class names and the other guy will never know until he attacks the strength of the fleet. Scanners will tell him, but you can counter that by putting scatterign armor on your shell ships.

The two biggest problems with this are the cost and the micromanagment headaches. Cost though is always easy to remedy in SE4. More planets.

Geoschmo

[PvK]

Yep, it's a valid strategy, but one with trade-offs. It tends to cost more to do this, and it tends to reduce your fleet strength, but it can pay off if all goes well.

I would be careful though about placement and timing. If you find yourself thinking it's a great advantage to be "only losing shells", then I think your security is lacking, unless you are getting a great trade-off in terms of increased expansion.

PvK

[Gandalf Parker]

OK this has GOT to be wrong. Repair can happen on a mothballed ship? Please tell me that fleet training cant happen on a mothballed ship also.

[Fyron]

Mothballing a ship clears any experience levels.

[Captain Kwok]

Imperator Fyron said:
Mothballing a ship clears any experience levels.

Thanks for the tip - I wouldn't have assumed that for some reason, even though it makes perfect sense.

[spoon]

PvK said:
...it tends to reduce your fleet strength...

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

[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

[Alneyan]

I tend to merely use a single retrofit step myself, mainly because of the reasons PvK had underlined (and because I am quite lazy as well). A single retrofit is usually enough to cut down the construction delay by one turn, and the vessel will then remain in orbit for repairs, which should be completed in one turn if you have a decent repair ability (82% with the Berserker culture). It is somewhat expensive, although nowhere as costly as the full retroseries way, but can be helpful if you do not have as many SYs as you should.

In the later game, the full retroseries way is probably much more appealing, when your basic income is a seven-figure number. *Coughs* Roanon's Collective. *Coughs* But when you are that wealthy, the galaxy will fall under your dominion no matter how you build your ships.

[Aiken]

Alneyan said:
But when you are that wealthy, the galaxy will fall under your dominion no matter how you build your ships.

You forgot about that hostile empire in the other side of quadrant with 2 x "your seven-figure number" income.