Ship Maintence on ships with no weapons

This was a deliberate change in beta 4.

And hopefully after the next beta it will be changed back.

It's not THAT bad. The economy needs some tweaks, but the excess "LOL MONEY FOR EVERYONE" approach you used to be able to do, running 100% spending at 5% taxes, was asinine.

Tourism for starters needs to be up, and maintenance should be dropped a hair.

I'd think that "civilian" vessels should remain maintainence free, though, to be honest, it's not an issue except early in the game since they're usually so cheap. It does force you to scrap constructors and freighters you weren't planning on using, though. Not necessarily a bad thing.

On one hand, I kinda like the new maintainence scheme. It makes your fleet construction have an upper limit outside of mere build times. However, it does seem a little excessive at times.

The solution that I like best (someone else suggested it) is that you maintain the current maintainence while a ship is moving around, yet bring it back to previous levels when that ship is in planetary orbit. This is easily justified as simulating the cost of the supply lines (and, heck, you could also scale maintainence with distance from the nearest friendly planet or starbase if you wanted to go nuts with it). This adds another strategic element to your war planning... having your entire fleet on the field at once is prohibitively expensive, and having ships sitting idle in space is not particularily economical. Extra strategy is a good thing.

Yep, and this idea would mesh nicely with what the AI already tends to do: keep ships in orbit


Same here, the maintenance costs could be reduced just a tad (or maybe more if the above suggestion isn't implemented... which I really hope it is), though. Whatever they do, I really hope they don't remove Ship Maintenance for non-war ships, though.

The Freighter maintenance would need to be dropped significantly. If you're not making money on Freighters, there's no point to making them. In DA, Freighters have 0 maintenance. That makes every trade route pure profit. If Freighters have significant maintenance, the trade route return would be need to be massive to offset the production and maintenance costs.

I saw the reduced maintainance for ships in orbit suggestion on another thread, and I liked it. I dont recall the distance from a star/planet/starbase on the other thread, but is a good idea.

Another add on to this could be a "fleet discount" modifier. Ships in fleets are relativly close together, theoretically it would require less resources to supply them all than if they were seperate ships.

As an example, I like to believe that there are invivsible "supply ships" than cannot be seen or controlled, but are covered in a ship's maintainance cost. They go to and from a ship giving it everything it needs from food and water, to specialized parts should a computer consol fail or something. Theoreticaly, for fleets, you would need less supply ships to maintain that fleet because they could probably carry enough materials for more than one warship. However for lone ships in space, the supply vessels would probably need extra fuel to travel between single ships and it may be a more lengthy process to do such. Thus the extra costs.

Excellent idea. How about a fleet maintenance module that reduces maintenance costs? Have them in several levels like warp bubbles. Ooohhhhhh, I like it.

maintance during a war would also go up. since in peace you usually only need to supply food and fuel and replacement personnel.


In war you need the above. Plus replacement parts and ammo.

I think Freighters should have maintenance, but Mini-Freighters(operating on established trade routes) should not have maintenance. That means the longer you keep freighters hanging around, the longer your break-even time will be once they begin trading.

Similarly, unarmed Constructors, Surveyors and Miners should have a negligible, very slight maintenance(capped at 10bc). Warships(ships with weapons, defenses, troop modules, fleet modules) in space should pay maintenance as it is, but get the cost cut to 33% when in orbit.

Definitely needs some tweeking. It is managable but it requires too much game tweeking to maximize income. It is difficult to play around with abilities, politics and some of the races because of income concerns. Economy is obviously less a problem for the Terrans in the early game when it is easy to get in deep financial do-do

Ships like freighters and constructors should not have maintenance because they are probably privately owned. Colonizers would also conceivably be private enterprise. I can understand the upkeep on military ships including the flagship but while in orbit that cost should be reduced. This could be tied to free enterprise politics for any race that researches governments. It would also make sense to discounts some maintenace for any race using slave labor.

I'm not sure about increasing tourism. You already get a big jolt from turn one which is hard for me to figure when you haven't met anyone. It might make more sense to just go back to the 5000bc start up money. It would also help to have a better idea what controls tourism income. I know that influence has a huge effect early but tourism can tank even when influence is increasing later on in the game. I can't see that ethical allignment has a lot to do with it but your popularity with the other races plays a part so I guess that diplomacy is also a key.

There should also be a tax bonus for keeping production high. Tax income is tied to population but government income should go up with lower taxes in a high production economy. This is simulated with the banking centers, stock exchanges, etc but imo there should be also be some economy bonus for keeping the military/social sliders high vs research.

I don't have any problem with ship maintainance, it's the colony maintainance that kills me things like adv. market centres now cost bc to run

Hi!

UGH!!! Again I'm glad I don't have to bother with the TA beta.

However I have a question for you TA owners: has anyone checked if the tax revenue has been changed? Since so many cost in the TA have gone up significantly, the game should be mostly unplayable, but that doesn't seem to be from players' reports.

BR, Iztok

How about a replicator module that supplies the crew with food and clothing (not weapon ammo for wars), which lowers maintenance, but increases building price pretty high up?

I'm not too sure how you would know for sure whether the tax revenue has been adjusted or not, but I've never noticed any world making more money than I thought they should have been making.

To me, the weaker economic races such as the Yor or Iconians are pretty unplayable at this point, although someone with more skill might be able to pull it off. Races that were pretty easy in the past are now alot harder because of the economic crush, most notably the Terrans who used to be the easiest race to play previous to this beta.

The race that has least financial difficulty in the beginning though are the Korath, which have cheaper improvements and good morale bonuses (the Dregnin also fall in the category as well, but I prefer the Korath for late game flexibility). Even with the Korath though I need to drop my production down to 20% for a short while and run it on 50% for quite a bit after that usually. This is better than other races that would force you to drop your production to 0% and wait out the economic crash while hoping for creativity to kick in. This is all using abundant anomalies and with economic and morale bonuses added as well I might add.

To a certain extent your right about unplayability, but if you adjust your strategy at the beginning and be very careful what you spend your money on, you can somewhat mitigate the effects of the economic crash. It's certainly not easy to pull off though.

Hi!

UGH!!! again. I'm glad TA is still beta. I really don't like to go back to GC-1 style of play (spending at 100% only when player was able to get his econ and morale ability up to ~100%).

BR, Iztok

I think full maintenance for ALL ships is an excellent idea. Minifreighters are already exempted (unless it's displayed wrongly in the leases/maintenance tab), and it prevents the player from hoarding transports or constructors like there's no tomorrow. Something like half maintenance for ships in planetary orbit that didn't move in the previous turn should be considered, but I really don't see why you should be able to operate a ship a a freebie simply because it has no weapons built on it

Please leave the maintenance, and rather help the economically weak races out some

I agree. Having this maintenance as is also helps control certain player exploits of the AI involving massing previously cheap constructors and transports for a rush attack that the AI simply cannot respond to. The costs of doing that are now so high that this tactic becomes less of a factor, although still not impossible to carry out. There may need to be a tweak or two, but the new economic system is a generally good one. The previous system was just ridiculous with how easy it was to generate huge amounts of cash. I would often be able to reduce taxes to 0% and still be generating thousands of credits per turn. That just shouldn't be in my opinion.

you still need raw material. even if that is only energy. remember Voyager had replicators but they still had to go on rations not enough energy.

Solar panels perhaps? C'mon, we have undiluted solar radiation we can pick up on to refuel our ships.

Oh... you beat me to it.

To expand on the Freighter idea, it makes perfect sense. As I understand the backstory, the government (you) builds the ship, but once it 'mini-freighter-izes', completes the trade route, it's turned over to the private sector.

When I have extra colony ships (after sending a stream of them to a single colony, for example) I really don't like having to murder one million of my citizens just to take the colony ship out of orbit to make it eligible for destruction (so that I no longer have to pay maintenance for it).

You can get rid of it from the same window that you change your tax rates and production. The leases and maintainence tab lets you keep good track of your ships and maintainence, and lets you scrap them at will.

Alternately, give the colony ship to someone else and burden THEM with the maintainence cost.

As far as I can tell, mini-freighters already don't have maintenance. I think I even still have the save game where I tested it. I had two ships and established a trade route. One ship (flagship) had maintenance 8 and the miner had 6 maintenance. My Domestic report said I had ship maintenance 14 bc.

Minifreighters have no maintenance. Where people got this stupid idea is beyond me. Before you start running your mouths about what you probably think the game might be doing, test it first. Once you establish the trade route, the freighter doesn't even really exist any more. No more maintenance.