The balance debate between Destroyers and Battleships continue. So far people have been using power, cost, and module balance to try and strike a new balance between the ship classes.



One option that has not been explored is time.



Right now, production overflow is "same turn". For example, lets say I have enough production to build 4 destroyers in one turn. With same turn overflow, I get all 4 units on the next turn. This means that time-wise there is no difference between building 4 units, or 1 unit at 4x the cost.



However, many 4x games use "next turn" overflow. In this scenario, the first destroyer would finish, and the extra hammers would go into the build queue to work on the next destroyer. However, no matter how many extra hammers I had, the second destroyer would not get built until the 2nd turn. The extra hammers are never lost, they keep accruing in the build queue. But time-wise 4 destroyers would always take a minimum 4 turns to build.



What this does is provide a time benefit to the big ships in conjunction with large industry systems. Even if 4 destroyers beat a battleship at 4x the cost, I can produce those battleships quicker with my big systems.



In the game, what this does is as time goes on and certain systems become industry specialized, there is an incentive to build the bigger ship classes. But smaller ships are still useful to build at less industry systems...or by spending credits.





I think this change could introduce a new balancing element without a lot of changes across the board.

Interesting idea! Late game is really the bigger the better atm. Though I like to use small ships to defend, I build them with only weapons to destroy the big ships or weaken enemy fleets. I let them be produced on small capacity systems as you mentioned, even if its time consuming. But in very late game, there is no sense to get the small ones.

That's an interesting idea, I cant say I approve as I do like to rush by UE fleets in the late game.



I still feel like the whole HP system needs a buff and the battles extended in order to allow battleships to win their right of dominance by out slugging the overall less HP destroyers.

I would extend this idea to ride along the back of the Command Point technologies or perhaps more fitting in the Applied Sciences tree.



Initially your able to build up to two command points of ship at any system per turn, overflow would be treated as above allowing for the speedier construction of the next ship. With a few well placed technologies that provide new system structures we could bump this up by two a couple of times, perhaps permitting as many as dozen command points of construction to be completed simultaneously. After all, would not a very heavily industrialized planet have multiple ship yards? (or slips in the many ship yards capacity is rated in slips).