Hi



I just got ES and after playing around a bit with it I must say I like it. I only have one major gripe so far...



The ships feel to "cheap". I want more expensive fleets. So if someone blows up one of my fleets, I don't go "so what" but I want to go "ouch" (Actually I want to go "Yay" upon blowing up his fleet... ). So I think it would be great to increase the price for the ships and weapons by a lot.



I know you can later crank out your huge ships in a single turn from your best systems, but that's still way to cheap. Why should I care about leveling up a fleet, if I can rebuild it in a single turn?



This would also reduce the hassle you get later on with very many fleets, since you can just crank them out non stop.



In MOO2 you cringed once you lost a doom star or titan

I kinda agree and disagree for various reasons.



A possible idea is to is to slightly curb industrial improvements.

But this is why the game gets good in its late period. Every surviving faction is able to produce lots of powerfull ships quickly, so the strategy is more valorized.

I've often seen people complain that ship tech is too good and beats earlier tech too easily. This could be seen as a problem (even though absolutely every 4x game has been like this), but in reality, the problem is that this later tech is far too cheap. Industry scales up far more than all module and ship hull costs, and an absolute end-game dreadnought will only cost 4-5x more per CP than a turn 30 destroyer, while end-game system industrial output will be upwards of 10-20x those turn 30 amounts.



Make higher tech modules far more expensive. Make larger ships comparatively much more expensive than smaller ships, but also more survivable. This maintains the advantages of higher ship tech, while adding the drawback of lower comparative production and costlier retrofits-- which definitely requires your industry and economic research to be up to snuff.

I feel the first ships are too long to build and the later ones too fast.

Small ships have a base cost of 25 industry, were as large ones have a base cost of 400.

Ship hull costs are not really the issue, because total combat ship cost (especially for late-game destroyers) comes mostly from the modules. Even still, a late game dreadnought will barely break 3k industry cost, while ideal forge systems can produce over 4-5k even before terraforming and dust virtualization, both of which can multiply this number by three.



If you simply increase hull costs (something that should still happen for at least destroyers and battleships), then you hurt the early game ship count without even making a dent in late game ship count. The bulk of any cost increase has to be in the modules.

I agree. It is possible to churn out fleets continuously at the moment. Building a useable fleet should be a tactical decision, suspending all Empire development shortly while they focus on the war effort.



I think module cost should increase but hull stay the same.

while i think it should be quicker to build even newer tech ships the more advanced you get i dont think it should be scaled so that fleets still take just as long as they did in early game. take the current industrial model for car manufacture. the cars we build today are far more advanced than anything that was built 100years ago. and yet because of industrial improvements we are also capable of building those more advanced cars more quickly. in this regard i dont think ES is too far off the mark.

Realism is hardly a reason to maintain a feature/design decision that is detrimental to gameplay, even in a game that touts itself as a pure simulator (something ES is definitely, absolutely not).



If ES' battle system cleanly handled any reasonable amount of ships at once, and sheer numbers did not always confer such a massive advantage, then perhaps 'realism' (however that relates to a space science fiction game) could be more strongly considered in decisions about something as gameplay-critical as ship production speed.

Completely disagree with OP - unless you're using some truly wacky designs the only ships that are even mildly inexpensive are the the extremely early game ones, such as my resource abundance Titanium-70 missile corvettes (~65 industry). Everything else has a cost comparable to improvements. I don't see how they are then ships you simply can throw away.

What about upgrade costs? For me I made some ships and creatively called them Giga, Giga 1, Giga 2 etc up to Giga 5. (Sophon Giga hull ship)



They were all upgraded as I got enough new technology that it made a difference.



But when retrofitting it was the same cost upgrading from '1 to 5' as '4 to 5' even tho the first example is a much bigger jump.



As I see it, this is relevant to the question being discussed because it affect how easy or fast it is to get a modern fleet.

Should it be possible to retrofit using production instead of money? (like in moo2?)



Sorry if this has been discussed before I have not read all the posts.

Siderius wrote:


But when retrofitting it was the same cost upgrading from '1 to 5' as '4 to 5' even tho the first example is a much bigger jump.

Should it be possible to retrofit using production instead of money? (like in moo2?)

I'm shocked the upgrade has the same cost when uprading from any technologie point ! If it's true, I hope it's a bug.

When I upgrade my fleet I've always see a price bigger and bigger as I progress in techology.

Maybe it's because I use a lot weight exension to add more weapons and defenses ? But I think the price of individual weapon and defense increase with the technology level.



Away, I agree to use production instead cash only.

But if you do not use money at all you kill a part of the game. So we could just increase the production ratio to 1 to 3 (or more ?) depending of the money you use ? So the result could be the same ??

When I say that I mean you can retrofit and mabe repair your fleet only throw production lines.



The result could be to slow down the "pay an entire modern fleet in one turn" the IA use often.

Apheirox wrote:
Completely disagree with OP - unless you're using some truly wacky designs the only ships that are even mildly inexpensive are the the extremely early game ones, such as my resource abundance Titanium-70 missile corvettes (~65 industry). Everything else has a cost comparable to improvements. I don't see how they are then ships you simply can throw away.

Er, what kind of forge systems are you running? If you're not pumping out at least 1500 industry in one system with an admin hero by mid-game, then I can see how you'd think this, but that kind of thing is usually easy to come by without any real min/maxing.



Last game I played, I ended up with a 6-planet system with 2 jungle and a few tundra that was throwing out 2000 industry by turn 75, while my most expensive ship design was an 800 industry battleship-- with a mod that doubled battleship hull cost and increased weapon costs by 30-100%, and did not touch industry at all. This same ship would have only cost about ~400 industry in vanilla ES, and I would have been able to produce 5 of them per turn at just this one system. With the -ship cost trait, this would have been even worse. How is that not completely disposable?

Mikey wrote:
Er, what kind of forge systems are you running? If you're not pumping out at least 1500 industry in one system with an admin hero by mid-game, then I can see how you'd think this, but that kind of thing is usually easy to come by without any real min/maxing.



Last game I played, I ended up with a 6-planet system with 2 jungle and a few tundra that was throwing out 2000 industry by turn 75, while my most expensive ship design was an 800 industry battleship-- with a mod that doubled battleship hull cost and increased weapon costs by 30-100%, and did not touch industry at all. This same ship would have only cost about ~400 industry in vanilla ES, and I would have been able to produce 5 of them per turn at just this one system. With the -ship cost trait, this would have been even worse. How is that not completely disposable?

I can't say I ever get that high industry in a single system even by turn 100 (Due to my systems being quite balanced in their ouput.) however i do tend to get a large enough empire that the spread out industry (and dust for rush buying) is about the same.



However i would not say they are disposable, as the idea of throwing ships away is ludicrousness when you can upgrade them or simply decommission them, and even then they make great shields for newer but less experienced ships.

I have to disagree again; actual, functional retrofitting is heavily discouraged by the flat cost mechanic. Even if retrofit were properly implemented, that wouldn't make the ship quantity to fleet size ratio any less ridiculous. When one planet at turn 75-100 can fill an max-CP fleet in 3 turns, something is wrong. The game's fleet/combat mechanics, UI, and simultaneous turn systems make handling dozens of fleets awkward and unrewarding. Battles between capital ships late-game shouldn't be meatgrinding affairs where multiple entire fleets are annihilated and rebuilt every turn.



Bigger fleets, more expensive high-end tech, better armor upgrades, less missile damage: better combat. Without even any core system changes. But, this can all be done by mods, so I'd prefer to see them improve actual combat/logistics systems, or diplomacy, or something along those lines that requires engine changes.