reserve fleet idea

[Jorgen_CAB]

I think being able to mothball new ships directly, only to have to pay in terms of time and possibly MSP later would be something not exactly uncommon.  It's not super uncommon for nations to practice what is essentially total defense, where while the active military isn't super big, the wartime military can quickly ramp up to meet actual wartime needs.  There would indeed need to be a sufficiently long time penalty so that you would generally need to have some fleet presence for dealing with the occasional precursor and whatnot, as well as executing defense in depth for any initial attacks. 

Potential mechanics may include not contributing to PPV, reducing maintenance cost to 1/3 to 1/10th, same with the tonnage maintenance (this way you still have an upper maintenance tonnage limit, but you aren't paying as much for ships you won't be needing in the near to medium term future), but also possibly requiring twice the normal overhaul MSP and maintenance capacity when reactivating, or requiring reactivation through shipyards, and requiring two to three times the normal overhaul length one would otherwise require.  Possibly even a fixed time, meaning you can't simply reactivate your fleets every time you encounter a small precursor base then go smash with three hundred ships and then put them back to sleep.  The cost of reactivation can easily be scaled so that it would cost more to actually reactivate any given ship an x number of time over a certain number of years than simply keeping it working.  It allows for a wartime stockpile, like both superpowers have (or had), with hundreds of tanks, and thousands of military vehicles sitting, waiting for the day they are either needed or scrapped. 

People should not forget that even mothballed ships and vessels still receive regular maintenance, albeit more rarely, and of the more preventative kind.  You can't simply park a car and expect it to run with regular maintenance after ten years.

I would agree... mothballing should basically just reduce the maintenance cost (and ship size for maintenance purposes) at the cost of no crew or fleet training and whatever training they had would degrade until at lowest values. For this you would just pay perhaps 1/5 the cost of normal maintenance (including size for maintenance facility purposes).

You could then just use the normal overhaul rules if you want to activate them with some default penalties until fully commissioned again.

I don't think this is an important mechanic to add, but it would be relatively realistic.

This might make it decently valuable to keep older ships in mothball too if and when you might need them reactivated.

[Demetrious]

Yeah, mothballing has never been as prevalent or as useful as romantics make it seem.

That's exactly why it would make a workable mechanic if introduced into the game; because it would be difficult, time-consuming and have serious strategic trade-offs. If it was easy, simple, and cheap, all it would do is effectively balloon the number of ships an empire of X size could muster; and NPRs would do the same, leading to effectively no difference except more tonnage.

The real hurdle is that even realistic mothball rules - where it takes a month or more of intensive work at a dockyard to return a ship to service - has not nearly as much strategic trade-off as it does in real life due to how Aurora's FTL mechanics work - warp point blockades make your own borders very, very defendable. The attacker would have an advantage when he un-mothballs his entire fleet and the opponent hasn't unmothballed theirs until they're attacked, so even assuming NPR AI is improved to be more aggressive and calculated when waging war, there will just be a strong first-mover advantage to contend with.

It's not that the mechanic can't be implemented - in a sensible way, even. It's just that fundamental design choices of Aurora would render it mostly moot.

There are RP reasons to want this mechanic, but that's what we have SpaceMaster for. Gift yourself requisite MSP (or minerals for such) to maintain the # of ships you want (or turn maintenance on and off in the options as needed) then make your "mothballed" ships enter overhaul then immediately abandon it to get penalties simulating the unmothballing process, is one suggestion.

A lot of feature requests are actually enhanced SpaceMaster option requests in disguise, I feel.

[nuclearslurpee]

The real hurdle is that even realistic mothball rules -

Frankly, the real hurdle is that there is no realistic mothball rule, short of placing a completely arbitrary age limit on it, that prevents building brand-new ships into mothballs to make a killing on maintenance savings, within the current set of game mechanics. At the very least, you would need to have a mechanic in Aurora which increases maintenance failure rate as a ship gets older (separate from the overhaul clock), which I think will never be added as it does not play nicely with many roleplay settings, nor the fact that a 20-year-old ship (for instance) at NPE tech is very different from a 20-year old ship at antimatter tech because successive tech levels take progressively longer to play through.

This phenomenon of building directly to mothballs was a problem in Starfire, and I believe was a reason why mothballing was removed very early in VB6 development. If there was some reasonable and effective mechanism in place to prevent that, any one of the numerous suggestions made to date would work perfectly fine.

[xenoscepter]

 --- I mean, has anyone tried doing what I do? Design some warships during peace time, then build some components of those designs and use the "Use Components" option to build them quickly in the event of war?

[Jorgen_CAB]

--- I mean, has anyone tried doing what I do? Design some warships during peace time, then build some components of those designs and use the "Use Components" option to build them quickly in the event of war?

That is exactly what I often do... I even dismantle ships I don't expect to need for a long time and store the components so they can be rebuilt if truly necessary. It is almost like storing older equipment that you then need to refurbish before you can reuse them, which happens in real life.

[Golem666]

The real hurdle is that even realistic mothball rules -

Frankly, the real hurdle is that there is no realistic mothball rule, short of placing a completely arbitrary age limit on it, that prevents building brand-new ships into mothballs to make a killing on maintenance savings, within the current set of game mechanics. At the very least, you would need to have a mechanic in Aurora which increases maintenance failure rate as a ship gets older (separate from the overhaul clock), which I think will never be added as it does not play nicely with many roleplay settings, nor the fact that a 20-year-old ship (for instance) at NPE tech is very different from a 20-year old ship at antimatter tech because successive tech levels take progressively longer to play through.

This phenomenon of building directly to mothballs was a problem in Starfire, and I believe was a reason why mothballing was removed very early in VB6 development. If there was some reasonable and effective mechanism in place to prevent that, any one of the numerous suggestions made to date would work perfectly fine.

What about not having age limit but tech one, lets say you can only mothball ships that don't have the most recent weapon, armour and engine, possibly shield/sensor, tech?

[nuclearslurpee]

What about not having age limit but tech one, lets say you can only mothball ships that don't have the most recent weapon, armour and engine, possibly shield/sensor, tech?

As this is a completely arbitrary restriction I don't see Steve ever going for such a thing.

[Golem666]

As this is a completely arbitrary restriction I don't see Steve ever going for such a thing.

Well, what about cost scaling to the mothball procedures depending on the tech level? It would be ridiculously pricy on the new tech as you have not had an opportunity to develop procedures to long-term store such technology, which would fall down to cheap around 2 tech levels behind what you currently have and then just stay there or rise, I guess to simulate you no longer have people who specialize in that tech so its pricier to find qualified workers for it.

[nuclearslurpee]

Well, what about cost scaling to the mothball procedures depending on the tech level? It would be ridiculously pricy on the new tech as you have not had an opportunity to develop procedures to long-term store such technology, which would fall down to cheap around 2 tech levels behind what you currently have and then just stay there or rise, I guess to simulate you no longer have people who specialize in that tech so its pricier to find qualified workers for it.

This is inconsistent with the rest of the game mechanics, because by the same token we should argue that a new-tech ship should cost more to maintain (beyond the natural increase because the components are more expensive) and/or should break down at a higher rate when new. Not to mention that "tech levels" are not a game mechanic, they are purely a construction we use as players to rationalize the game. How should a ship with, say, Ion Drives and Ceramic Composite Armour but only 12cm railguns and 12-strength sensors be handled, to give a fairly reasonable example that happens in many conventional start games?

[kilo]

It would be fine, if the mothballing would come with significant disadvantages and not arbitrary limitations. Mothballing is used to reduce the cost of the navy during times of peace and it could be used as such. Activating these ships on the other hand should lead to significantly increased costs and extra requirement of maintenance capacity or even naval yards during the process.

How would I implement it?

Lets say mothballing reduces the maintenance cost in minerals and maintenance facility capacity of the ship by 75%. On top of that, the crew or most of it is discharged except for a skeleton crew. This leads to 90% loss of acquired crew skill. Activating the ship takes a year, maybe even two during which the ship has four times the maintenance footprint, while the ships are basically unable to defend themselves when being ambushed.

If mothballing comes without significant disadvantages, it is simply a method to grow your navy to a size that cannot be supported by your economy

[QuakeIV]

Could just say if you put it in mothballs it accrues maintenance clock at 1/10th the usual rate and has no crew (and thus no crew experience), and depending on how long it has been mothballed this may leave it in a kindof unusable state before overhaul.  Its already going to be obsolescent to obsolete if it was mothballed in the first place.

[Velociranga]

None of the downsides mentioned though come close to making it an even decision. The amount of MSP and supply size you'd save would pretty much always be worth it in game. The only reason not to would be for RP reasons.

You would have to introduce entirely new games systems for their to be enough of a disadvantage for it to be a choice.

For example everyone here is talking about how realistic you could make mothballing but haven't mentioned any of the real downsides.

1. Not everything that gets mothballed is able to be re-entered into service, whether due to being too old and useless or from suffering too much wear after sitting unused for years. If you wanted to make it actually realistic every mothballed ship would requite shipyard work dependant on how long it has been mothballed. Ships can't just re-activate themselves after years of inactivity.
2. Corruption, you better hope everyone you appoint to watch over all those super expensive warships is actually doing their jobs. Or before you know it they will be shells with everything worth anything stripped to sell for money.
3. Accidents having a bunch of inactive warships hanging in orbit of a world is dangerous. Even without weapons accidents will happen, mothballing would seem like less of a good idea when a giant battleship ends deorbiting onto your capital world after some old thrusters malfunctioned.

These would all require entirely new game systems and I'm not sure how much fun they would be as a player. It would be difficult to balance the system so that players felt like they were in charge of the mothballing and that they could influence it while still giving it enough downsides to be a choice and realistic. Kind of like when your playing a sports game and one of your players falls over for no reason causing you to lose, happens all the time in real life, but it feels really smegty as a player because it feels like the game just decided you should lose.

I think the solution is instead to change the costs in upgrading vessels. Being able to update designs with newer weapons without it costing almost as much as a new ship would lead to older ships having longer lives. This would at least allow you to keep older less combat viable ships defending lower value worlds with their lower maintenance costs with the knowledge that you can at least make them somewhat useful if their required.

[QuakeIV]

The shipyard work would basically amount to an overhaul from an equivalent game perspective.  Mothballing a ship would greatly slow its deterioration compared to active use, but obviously not completely stop it.  For instance it seems implied that a mothballed ship cannot avail itself of maintenance facilities to stop its maintenance clock as it is not crewed.  So it costs nothing, but cannot be stopped from deteriorating while in that state.

Thats likely not massively consequential from a game perspective.  Indeed there is 'no reason not to', and in fact this is true to life.  However it is relatively rare to reactivate reserve ships that have long sat in the reserve due to their obsolescence, as well as their deterioration.  Generally they are eventually scrapped.  It seems like if anything ships tend to become obsolete far faster in the game than in real life.

[Velociranga]

So if mothballed ships are unlikely to ever be reactivated what's the point of adding them?

It's only going to be useful for gaming maintenance costs

Your also not taking onto account all the resources required to actually mothball equipment, look after it and gaurd it.

You say it would grealy slow deterioration but please explain where your keeping your mothballed fleet of ships that supports that theory. Earth's orbit is already filled with satellites and space debris, the orbit of a world with orbital infrastructure is going to be a million times worse. It would be like sticking a mothballed fleet in the middle of the Suez canal hahaha.

Don't get me wrong I like the idea but I just don't think it works in Aurora

[QuakeIV]

Use case is if you take unexpected losses, reactivating recently deactivated previous-generation ships can be a much faster stopgap than constructing new replacements.  The reason not to do that on brand-new ships is crew training and running up the maintenance clock.  It would take time to make them ready in any case.