Earlier someone mentioned that larger ships aren't less durable, however I'm not sure you're taking into account shock damage, I've run tests against ships with 100 armour layers that were cut short after only a few volleys due to internal ammo explosions, the obvious solution is size 1 magazines with maximum armour which is rather gamey but was suitable for my damage tests.
Oh, interesting. I was never attacked so strongly that this would do something serious, because the shields always overpowered everything. The only times they got depleted was against intensive amm spam, in which case shock damage again was not the issue, and the armor would last forever.
Shields are really good against big caliber cannons, but if you would make planned attacks and drain them first with small fire, then bring in a "finisher" with large guns for the shock, then it might be as you say. I must test that later too.
Is a very special situation though, and wouldn't really appear in play praxis.(haven't encountered it ever despite only playing like this - in contrast to constant amm and low-mid caliber threats, which you face on every corner)
I think part of the problem is the time it takes to get shipyards sufficiently large enough to be able to handle massive ships aside from going into SM mode and making the modifications or having a ton of single-slip yards that are beefed up. I'm open to hearing thoughts on ways to do it, of course...
Uff, this has been debunked often enough too. What is with the SM mode accusations by the way?
"SO big. Must be cheating!"
I can proudly say that I have never cheated in either resources or installation or shipyards, tech, whatever in any of my games. That beats the point of the game for me. I take what I get and make the best of it.
So, getting big shipyards is no problem at all, which is easy to see if you tried it once. This is not about the super early era of ships, but when you are about 40-50 years into a standard game or so, where it is absolutely possible and viable to have a 100k military yard. Instead of doing multiple slip ways, which cost a lot of time and resource (you essentially double size at start for example), you just raise one 1 slipway yard up to that level.
Even later it gets even easier of course. Once you have some well producing extrasolar mining sites, you will see your empire treasury counting into the millions and tens of millions. What can you do with this kind of resource. You could of course raise maybe another 20 8-slipway yards of the small ~7-15kt designs (actually many many more), but you will either never want that many ships, or really be bothered by the serious micromanagement that comes with such a fractionated fleet. ..Or you could invest the resource into some really big yards and maintain the relative ship count and management while still increasing fire power.
I see others with a third option instead who chose to split up their resources and build new shipyards on distant colonies at this point, but that is even more management, and too much for me personally. Can be done though.
What I can tell from playing all my games for a long time and each at least over year 100, is that large shipyards are not only just possible, but rather actually easy to get, as at some later game stage (year 70-100) you end up with so much resource that building a megaton military yard barely cuts into your pocket money. The only way I found to really drain my building potential at this later stage is building equivalently oversized civil ships, which is for example ~20mt civil freighters (with exactly 1000 holds). I had to come up with 150 megaton civil ships to really figure out the maximum though.
Civil designs cost a lot if you prefer doing freighting by hand like me. Military in comparison is barely worth mentioning.
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I came up with some numbers from my recent game to show something at least. The year of that game is 223, but keep in mind that I started custom here with a random resource home planet, meaning I didn't have all the resources available at start (only around 5k stockpiles I think that I edited in before starting), and those I had turned out to have mostly poor acc. . I think I needed around 100 years only to reach ion technology and have freighters finally be able to cruise through the whole system (severe fuel shortage with that though). Only at around year 170 could I afford to build my first military explorer and go into other star systems, so this is not at all a standard game, but one with extreme artificial scarcity as a challenge.
Here are my current stockpiles:
..They are still pretty low because my empire barely counts 3000 auto-mines, which is because I wasted many many years of production time on building large "research stations" as habitats who could each support and freight 5 research labs without needing anything else on the planet.(and then also planetary hangars...) In other games I had 10k auto mines in systems directly adjacent to Sol at around year 70-80 already, giving me the multi-millions I spoke about. At that point you have to get imaginative to find something to spend it on.
Now the point though, the costs of a current ship-of-the-line kind of cruiser (300kt design):
..Not even counting further mineral production, you can see that it would be possible to afford around a hundred of those by building. Of course maintaining them is another chapter, so maybe it is more towards 20-40 or so, but it isn't at all a cost issue obviously.
Then, 10k military shipyard cost 720 neutronium and duranium here, which means the corresponding yard costs barely 22k in both. Even a megaton yard would only cost 72k, which is not nothing, but then again also not exactly bleeding you out.
The stockpiles above I consider "low on resource", and it is still easy to do. So it is not a cost problem at all. Only the time to build your first yard(/s) up hinders you in the very beginning. Once that stage is past, shipyard size is not an issue unless you do civil monstrous designs.
Here the current shipyards in that game by the way. (remember:
no cheating, and built up by hand, though I reduced the yards with SM after they passed the mark to make the numbers more round - tiny OCD)
