As I look at the cost to build a fighter or missle, I keep coming up with two problems. One is the cost of the ordinance in comparison to the ship. The second is the relative build rate of factories as compared to the cost of the product.
A typical missle over multiple levels of technology takes between 20% and 50% of the production of a factory. This means that 50,000 people can only make 2-5 missles per year. To me this is a bit on the slow side. With fighters, it appears that one factory makes maybe 1/2 of a fighter per year. Here again this is very slow.
For the ships I have been designing with around one magazine per launcher, the cost of the missles tends to come out somewhere near 75% to 80% of the cost of the ship. This seams to be a bit high to me. (Does anyone know the relative cost of missles to ship for current Aegis ships?)
My first thought is that missles and fighters are to overpriced and should be reduced. The only problem there is that makes missle combat much more attractive, and I know that is one aspect that Steve is deliberately toning down from starfire. A good balance might be to make the magazine's, launchers and hanger bays cost more. This would both serve to make missle ships and carriers more expensive, and reduce the ratio of cost between the ordanince vs the ships.
The slow build rate for fighters and missiles is because the overall build rate is low for everything. In reality (if there can be such a thing in a game like Aurora
), a planet could produce vastly more ships and weapons than in the game. I am keeping the numbers down to make the game more playable. As I found with Starfire, having 100 ships per side is not really much more fun than 10 ships per side but it is a lot more work.
However, I do take your point about the relative cost of fighters and missiles in comparison to the cost of the ships and I appreciate the analysis work. Therefore I am going to halve all fighter and missile costs for v2.5. I think there are enough anti-missile defence strategies, especially using formations, for this not to be a problem. If it does become an issue we can look at it again.
Steve
