ørret wrote:
Yes of course. But due to the ongoing discussion to implemet repair/retrofit with industry it should still be possible to "buy" that production with dust when time is critical.

Heh, I'm not talking about removing the current ability to retrofit with Dust. I'd like to supplement it though. Personally, I feel that being able to buyout the remaining industrial cost, while neat and lore friendly, would somewhat lessen the tactical drawbacks of repairing this way that are necessary for balance. I believe this system should have serious tactical drawbacks when used - one of which being that your fleet is out of commission until the job is done.



On the other hand, if there was some other penalty... say, you had to pay the entire retrofit cost (the same amount you would have paid in the first place), thus causing you to waste all the industry spent so far in the retrofit, that might be viable. Your idea makes sense, but I think there needs to be some sort of serious drawback involved - otherwise people would just start to retrofit on the front lines, and then buyout as soon as a hostile fleet shows up in order to save dust.

Veneke wrote:
This is a great suggestion. It'd even be good if putting ships back in the hangar achieved a flat repair/retrofit capability/bonus, though obviously if it were linked to industry and potentially an improvement as well that would be better.

Yep, I think both are great. I'd summarize what's in my mind like this:



1) Repair - Dock your ships in the Hanger gives a bonus to repair time. Improvement can increase this speed (i.e. the Orbital Shipyard). Additional improvement (say a Starbase) could allow another repair speed boost and industry to speed up repair even more.



2) Retrofit - Can retrofit via dust when in system as today. Dock ships in the Hanger after you've built the needed improvement you can use industry to retrofit.



Improvements:



Orbital Shipyard - Give increase repair speed

Starbase (upgraded Shipyard) - Another repair speed boost and ability to use industry to retrofit and speed repair even more.



** Now if game mechanics don't allow for industry to be converted in this way then at the least the repair speed boost in the hanger and via improvements are certainly possible. For retrofit maybe with the improvement and in the hanger then maybe the retrofit cost is reduced by x%.



With all this we need a notification to let us know when ships have been repaired to 100% and thus ready to go.

Voted for 1-it makes sense both logically in the fact that instead of building ships the planet's workers could be set to work on currently owned ships. Also we need a way to repair fleets in the first place other and finding low ship battles, where there is no chance of loss, and spamming the engineering nano-repair.

shibby191 wrote:
Yep, I think both are great. I'd summarize what's in my mind like this:



1) Repair - Dock your ships in the Hanger gives a bonus to repair time. Improvement can increase this speed (i.e. the Orbital Shipyard). Additional improvement (say a Starbase) could allow another repair speed boost and industry to speed up repair even more.



2) Retrofit - Can retrofit via dust when in system as today. Dock ships in the Hanger after you've built the needed improvement you can use industry to retrofit.



Improvements:



Orbital Shipyard - Give increase repair speed

Starbase (upgraded Shipyard) - Another repair speed boost and ability to use industry to retrofit and speed repair even more.



** Now if game mechanics don't allow for industry to be converted in this way then at the least the repair speed boost in the hanger and via improvements are certainly possible. For retrofit maybe with the improvement and in the hanger then maybe the retrofit cost is reduced by x%.



With all this we need a notification to let us know when ships have been repaired to 100% and thus ready to go.

Hmmm... I'm not a big fan of 'this does X' and the next version is 'this does X+X'. How about you spread the boosts around? The way I see it there are three stages and two modifiers: Hangar, Shipyard, Starbase and flat HP/turn and % increase to this HP/turn (based on Industry?).



1. Hangar = Provides small flat HP/turn. Available in all systems.

2. Orbital shipyard = Provides % boost to repair rate, ideally based on industry. Available around Cruisers?

3. Starbase = Provides large flat HP/turn. Small % discount (dust) to retrofits, needed to perform Industry-only retrofits. Very expensive to build and maintain. Available around Battleships?



I think if you're going to reduce the retrofit cost by any significant margin it should be the very last improvement slot and rather expensive. The way I see it what you want is in the early game to be able to heal your Frigates and Destroyers just about anywhere for minimal cost (I'm talking about the improvement cost and upkeep here), you'll have a few Orbital Shipyards because they're not too expensive and a repair boost is a repair boost but you'll only a few Starbases spread out amongst your major production/fleet hubs but they'll be rather impressive.



I completely agree on the notification.



Oh and it'd be very nice if we could see these in the system view, but that might be a little much to ask...

SomeoneStrange wrote:
otherwise people would just start to retrofit on the front lines, and then buyout as soon as a hostile fleet shows up in order to save dust.

Thats exactly how it is done rigth now. Invade a weak 1-Planet system and than quickly buy the complete fleet retrofit with dust. Whe the possibility of retrofit with industry is implemented most people will rather be retrofitting the ships with "free" industry in their forge systems saving the dust for...for what then? I think emergency repair and retrofit with dust should remain possible however i agree that this should be very expensive to prevent this from beeing all days business.



Uhm and i dont understand the problem with fleet repair. I rarely have severe damaged ships at all. Usually they get either completely destroyed or barely scratched and the self-repair modules are able to repair damaged ships within a few rounds (if you have some of the lv2 modules in a fleet).

Part of the problem with the current repair mechanics is that most of the repair modules (especially the higher-tech ones) use flat HP bonuses or fleet bonuses for much of their effect, both inordinately favoring large fleets of 1CP ships - which tend not to survive all that well to be repaired in the first place. Large ships which should be more survivable are left out in the cold.



In addition to being able to repair with dust/industry (perhaps incurring a turn or two of downtime in either case), it would help greatly to re-work the repair modules, e.g.:

1) Remove flat HP amounts in favor of percentages, or make those amounts per-CP

2) Remove fleet bonuses, or make those per-CP as well

3) Increase the overall effect (and size, cost) of higher-level repair modules so that they're worth using on larger ships, but not necessarily on destroyers