ship limits and surrender

[Puke]

so i was pondering the pros and cons of low-ship-limit games. i was thinking, hmm, sometimes good, sometimes bad.

but the interesting thing is this. say you have an alliance. in a low ship limit game, its better to have two empires fighting together than it is to have one empire twice the size. because with two empires, you can field twice as many ships (assuming you are producing enough to quickly hit the ship limit).

now, what happens when the game winds on? say an empire with 90 planets is allied with an empire with 10, and the ship limit is something like 100 ships. well, it would sure as heck benefit both empires for the bigger one to fork over 40 planets so they can both produce ships quickly and keep a joint navy of 200 ships, and replace them as soon as they are destroyed.

now, what happens when an empire with 100 ships surrenders to one with 100 ships, and the ship limit is 100? do half the ships go poof? do the new ships not get transfered with the surrender? or does the empire get to have 200 ships until some are destroyed, and he just cant build any more until some are destroyed or scrapped?

i guess this would be pretty easy to test, but im pretending to work at the moment, and it would be sort of hard to start a game. anyone know how this works, or have any ideas about it?

oh, and as a disclaimer, i would never advocate using surrender to bypass ship limits in a multiplayer game. i advocate using alliances to get arround it, but not surrender. if it is possible to get arround it that way, its an exploit that needs to be fixed.

[Baron Grazic]

I haven't tested it, but I think that it gives you all the ships even if it takes you over the limit.
I remeber that happening once to myself using the 'Allegiance Subverter' and I was forced to scrap the captured ships ever round to ensure my new ships were built. That was 1.49 however.

[Puke]

no wonder two of the players in a recent low ship count game took psychic! as long as you can upgrade ships instead of building new ones, you should be sitting fat and happy.

not a bad plan, to bad they didnt have enough success to take full advantage of it. i think the disadvantage of not being able to build new ships (and the difficulty of capturing them) outweighs the benefit of being able to caputure more.

[Suicide Junkie]

I would expect it to be best for the bigger player to just keep gifting replacement ships to the smaller player.

If you give your little friend all the ships you are producing, he would not have to worry about not being able to produce more on his own due to the limit...
After a while, you could have a combined force of 1000's of ships.

Personally, I see no reason why you should be limited to 100 ships unless your economy simply can't afford to support that many.
However, in a game that was started with the limit set low, the players have obviously agreed on that before hand and the limit should be enforced.

[Puke]

yeah, the gifting thing sound a bit too much like cheating. im okay with giving production capacity via planets, or capturing, but *giving* them is a bit out of line.

I was actually contemplating starting a game with P&N mod, or something similar, and setting a very low ship limit. that way the few ships that are built would be upgraded over time with premium components, nanotubes, and other such stuff. the game would be forced to focus more on ship design and tactics rather than industrial might.

[Pax]

Originally posted by Puke:
yeah, the gifting thing sound a bit too much like cheating. im okay with giving production capacity via planets, or capturing, but *giving* them is a bit out of line.

Agreements to teh sort of "I'll give you my two colonies in system X, if you give me your two colonies isn system Y ... then we'll each own ALL of the system we're left with" sounds reasonable, IMO.

[Suicide Junkie]

I was actually contemplating starting a game with P&N mod, or something similar, and setting a very low ship limit. that way the few ships that are built would be upgraded over time with premium components, nanotubes, and other such stuff. the game would be forced to focus more on ship design and tactics rather than industrial might.

I'm afraid that your players would just build Battlemoons, and industrial power would remain a key element.

OTOH, you could easily outlaw them, or just disable Battlemoons with a mod tweak.

Without Battlemoons, I can see the endgame being jammed full of 1000-component ships
Even Fleet-on-Fleet slugging matches that drag out for months or years at a time.

[Jmenschenfresser]

First off, 100 ships isn't actually a "low" limit. 100 dreadnoughts even in the unmodded game take a good number of planets to support them. I'm not even sure why we have a limit that goes up to something like 20000. I have to wonder that if you had 255 systems each with every sector containing a huge mineral rich planet could you build that many. (I'm not going to do the math on that one.) I would say in a decent sized galaxy with 10 players, only the top half could reach that number and most likely only the top couple. Given that they are building top o the line ships.

That being said, I contemplated this sort of game a while back. My reason was a little different. Played in a large galaxy, a limited number of ships couldn't be everywhere at all times...forcing a bit of strategy on the player were his empire to grow beyond the limit. I had the feeling though that it would phase out any smaller designs, as you wouldn't want to waste that slot for something other than the best...as SJ stated.

[Pax]

Um.

Crystalline Technology and 120% Maintenance Aptitude. With the Crystalline Restructuring Facility III ... you're paying about 3.5% net maintenance in your home systems. 5% elsewhere.

I'd expect you could support a quite fair-sized fleet, if you weren't also building LOTS of other stuff, at those rates.

[capnq]

I have never hit a ship or unit limit in all the games of SE IV I've ever played.