Aurora 4x
C# Aurora => C# Suggestions => Topic started by: shatterstar on September 04, 2024, 08:52:11 AM
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Feature Suggestion: Mothball Fleet Order
What:- A feature that will allow players to suspend maintenance of a set of ships with the prospect of reactivating them at a later date. This will emulate the real world naval practice of "mothballing" ships, leaving the hulls in the water but removing parts that require active maintenance.
Who: - Players with the maintenance feature turned on.
When: - Fleets are only eligible for mothballing when undamaged.
Where:
This can work a number of different ways depending on how you choose to implement with respect to balance and feel, but I imagine it can only happen at
- A world with at least one maintenance facility AND refuelling station
- Any location where there is an available tanker/refuelling hub and maintenance ship/refuelling hub which have capacity to absorb all remaining fuel and MSP from the fleet.
Why: - Even when orbiting a maintenance facility, ships can suffer breakdowns if they exceed maintenance capacity. Players may see a temporarily reduced need for certain specialized ships but not want to go to the trouble of scrapping and rebuilding them.
- Players may also want to roleplay a race or nation that is too cheap or paranoid or gets attatched to certain ships and does not want to destroy them.
- Players may want to create a strategic reserve of old ships that needs to be protected (in a similar way that IRL nations keep a strategic stockpile of tanks and IFVs).
- Players may want to create a ship graveyard that can be salvaged by themselves or others (or used for target practice!).
How: An order "Mothball Fleet" from the fleet movement order list that is available when a colony or fleet has the requisite installations or components, and a corresponding order "Reactivate Mothballed Fleet"
Mothball Fleet Order
I envision this process as follows:
- Each ship is emptied of fuel at a rate commensurate with local fuel transfer, which goes to the planet or deactivating fleet's fuel stocks. If there is not enough capacity, the process is cancelled.
- Each ship is emptied of MSP at a rate commensurate with local MSP transfer, which goes to the planet or deactivating fleet's MSP stocks. If there is not enough capacity, the process is cancelled.
- Officers are removed from each ship.
- An additional length of time passes that scales with the BP of each ship in the fleet.
- The fleet is now mothballed, which could be indicated with an [M] symbol similar to the [OV] overhaul designation.
Mothballed Fleet Mechanics
- Suffers either a zero or vastly reduced maintenance requirement.
- Cannot be assigned crew.
- Cannot be given orders except for "Reactivate Mothballed Fleet" (and only that if orbiting a planet capable of restoring Fuel and MSP).
- Can be attacked and destroyed as normal
- Has a near-zero thermal and EM signature
- Can be salvaged.
Reactivate Mothballed Fleet Order
This order can be given to a fleet that is stationed at a planet which is capable of restoring Fuel and MSP OR a fleet which is capable of restoring BOTH fuel and MSP that is collocated with a mothballed fleet. I envision this process as follows:
- An additional length of time passes that scales with the BP of each ship in the fleet, at a rate that is at least one and a half times slower than the Mothballing process. This is to reflect the general entropy involved in having spent significant time unmoving, but could also scale with the time spent mothballed.
- Each ship is resupplied wtih MSP at a rate commensurate with local MSP transfer, which comes from the planet or reactivating fleet's MSP stocks. If there is not enough capacity, the process is cancelled.
- Each ship is refuelled at a rate commensurate with local fuel transfer, which comes from the planet or reactivating fleet's fuel stocks. If there is not enough capacity, the process is cancelled.
- The fleet is no longer mothballed, with any indicators removed. It begins using MSP again as normal.
Alternate ideas and suggestions:
- Mothballing could also be a temporary status like overhauling that just lasts for a certain period of time, if that's easier to implement.
- Ships could take periodic damage (from micrometeorites and so on) during mothball that has to be repaired afterward.
I hope you liked the format of this suggestion!
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Feature Suggestion: Mothball Fleet Order
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I love it. And I love the format.
I would offer one very minor refinement:
Restoring a ship from mothballed status should not require refueling or resupplying the ship.
Reasoning:
1) I often have military designs with a larger fuel and/or MSP capacity than is needed for the ship to be operational. Carriers and tankers, for example.
2) I might prefer to keep mothballed ships at a colony that does not have refuel/resupply capability.
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This has been proposed numerous times and the problem is that it basically creates a way for the player to ignore the balancing act between economy, logistics and military power. Because you can build ships endlessly straight to mothballing, and then activate them when you need them.
Just turn maintenance off and the only limit to your military might is wealth and shipyards.
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This has been proposed numerous times and the problem is that it basically creates a way for the player to ignore the balancing act between economy, logistics and military power. Because you can build ships endlessly straight to mothballing, and then activate them when you need them.
Just turn maintenance off and the only limit to your military might is wealth and shipyards.
Please listen to this man so I don't have to effortpost in this thread.
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This has been proposed numerous times and the problem is that it basically creates a way for the player to ignore the balancing act between economy, logistics and military power. Because you can build ships endlessly straight to mothballing, and then activate them when you need them.
Just turn maintenance off and the only limit to your military might is wealth and shipyards.
Please listen to this man so I don't have to effortpost in this thread.
You should just turn it into a copy-pasta like the navy seals one and paste it everytime the topic of mothballs comes up.
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This has been proposed numerous times and the problem is that it basically creates a way for the player to ignore the balancing act between economy, logistics and military power. Because you can build ships endlessly straight to mothballing, and then activate them when you need them.
Mothballing can be implemented in a way that gives the player an additional option for long-term fleet management without eliminating strategic planning.
You can charge a (reduced) maintenance cost for mothballed ships, and you can impose performance penalties for a period of time after activation.
"Activate them when you need them" is not a tactical option if the activation process requires time roughly commensurate with build time.
To constrain ramp-up speed, you could require a shipyard for activation.
Activation would then exist as part of the balancing act, alongside ship construction.
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Yet in twenty years nobody has figured out a method that would convince Steve. I'm not against such a mechanic because it has been done IRL, though not as much as some people commonly believe, and it is a plot point in at least a few sci-fi stories. But again, Aurora has been around for at least twenty years at this point, this has been suggested too many times to count, yet Steve has not implemented it or anything like it. Just trying to manage the expectations of newer players.
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Yet in twenty years nobody has figured out a method that would convince Steve. I'm not against such a mechanic because it has been done IRL, though not as much as some people commonly believe, and it is a plot point in at least a few sci-fi stories. But again, Aurora has been around for at least twenty years at this point, this has been suggested too many times to count, yet Steve has not implemented it or anything like it. Just trying to manage the expectations of newer players.
We used to have an mothball feature in this game...
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Yet in twenty years nobody has figured out a method that would convince Steve. I'm not against such a mechanic because it has been done IRL, though not as much as some people commonly believe, and it is a plot point in at least a few sci-fi stories. But again, Aurora has been around for at least twenty years at this point, this has been suggested too many times to count, yet Steve has not implemented it or anything like it. Just trying to manage the expectations of newer players.
We used to have an mothball feature in this game...
In a very early version which was more or less a Starfire clone, and it got taken out pretty quickly, IIRC.
All exaggerated whining on my part aside, the best idea I've seen for mothballing is to make it require a slipway for each mothballed ship. This still doesn't solve the build-directly-into-mothballs problem, but it at least somewhat balances the economic aspects.
IRL, the reason we don't build directly into mothballs is because the politicians control the shipbuilding budget, and they insist on only paying for ships they will actually use, even if for low-intensity missions purely to keep up morale, soft power, and crew training standards. In Aurora, we have no such constraints.
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I mean, prebuilding components really isn't that far off if you think about it. I know some people just disassemble and reassemble some specialty ships on an as needed basis. I suppose you could add a component for a ship representing the chassis, and if one is available further reduce build time that way to represent mothballing.
I do like the idea of being able to stash a large fleet for times of need rather than having to devote a gigantic amount of facility and manpower resources to keeping everything at action stations constantly. Even if it was something like taking say, half the maintenance capacity of being active and costing time to pull from mothballs would be an improvement.
I don't really see how building to mothballs is a problem, as long as the reactivation process takes enough time that balancing having active units against reactivation time is an actual concern. Say it takes, I dunno, half the build time, with a minimum based on size of ship, possibly modified by shipbuilding tech. If your ship takes 3 years to build, then it would take 1.5 years to pull from mothballs, all told you've spent 4.5 years with the ship in various forms of under construction, to say nothing of any incidental costs mothballing might take. It ain't gonna save you if the Spoilers are in Sol, or prevent losses in the immediate term, it only means you get to respond to some threats faster, and only if your mothballed fleet is even competitive to do so.
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For mothballing to be an effective game mechanic, there have to be situations where it turns out to be a bad idea, either economically or strategically.
Currently, to maintain a ship costs you 1/4 of the build points in MSP each year, or 1/16th of the ship cost in wealth and key minerals (40% Duranium, 40% Gallicite and 20% Uridium). You need to use construction factories to build maintenance facilities, which in turn provide maintenance capacity for the ships and production capacity for the MSP, or you can use shipyards or construction factories to build ships/stations with maintenance modules. You also need to provide workers for the industry and the maintenance facilities. On top of all that, you need to provide the necessary fuel and MSP for the ships themselves, plus any ordnance they carry. In my current campaign, I had to postpone military campaigns for a couple of years due to fuel shortage. Finally, most people tend to keep ships relatively up to date, so you also spend wealth and resources on multiple refits, which increases the total cost of the ships even more.
Devoting all that to maintaining and refitting your fleet is preventing you doing something else with the resources and industrial capacity, which means creating a fleet that balances military need with economic considerations is a major ongoing challenge, with numerous factors involved. I haven't built any new ships for a while, partly because I had a fleet that allowed me to meet my military commitments but also due to a severe shortage of Gallicite. In fact, I have had to turn off maintenance production for several months at a time to try to balance that need for MSP with producing the freighters and colony ships required to build up new mining colonies, to provide the minerals I need to keep the economy going. Suddenly due to 'events', I find myself with many different demands on the fleet and not enough ships to meet them. To complicate things further, I have recently started a refit program, so finding the capacity and resources to build new ships at the same time is a challenge. This isn't a 'Right Now' problem. I am just over-stretched and that is likely to be the case for several years until I can correct the strategic imbalance.
I use my battleships and carriers mainly for offensive operations. When deployed defensively, I rarely commit many of them together. Apart from recently, I have had sufficient light forces and surface batteries to protect colonies in most situations and Earth in almost all reasonable situations. Known space is 270 systems and I have an extensive buoy network, so trouble on the frontier, while locally annoying, is usually years away from becoming an existential threat. Even though I am currently facing ten active NPRs and spoilers, five of which are hostile, most of my major warships still spend a lot of time in Earth orbit before being deployed for a specific purpose.
If some form of mothballing was available, many of those challenges and decisions would not exist. I could have created a mothball fleet for most of the battleships and carriers and spent the 'fleet maintenance and refit' resources on improving my economy, or building additional commercial vessels, or building 2-3x more ships in storage than I would have had otherwise. My Gallicite shortage would very likely not have happened, along with all the associated consequences, and my strategic imbalance would be solved relatively easily. I would not fear a major threat with my large mothball fleet available when needed, so creating a large active military available to respond to threats, with all the planning that entails, would not be needed.
Mothballing will also limit strategic choices in fleet design. If you want to create a mothball fleet that can be reactivated years later and still be effective, you would design the ships on that basis. Therefore, you would build carriers and missile combatants, because those can be made much more effective by adding modern fighters and ordnance. It would not make strategic sense to build beam ships that would be completely outclassed without a major refit that would likely cost the same as a new ship anyway. So mothballing will drive you down specific research and fleet doctrine routes.
Even if we had mothballing, finding the right balance is extremely difficult. It has to be a decision that can turn out to be incorrect in certain situations. That 'situation' cannot be simply 'what if aliens attack Earth at short notice', because is it very unlikely an attack of sufficient force to overwhelm reasonable defences would happen without significant warning. No one is going to mothball everything. In economic terms, it's also difficult to create an economic or time-based penalty that is sufficient to make mothballing a real decision without also making it more expensive than simply pre-stockpiling components and building new ships when needed.
In summary, while mothballing does have some mechanics issues, it is really a 'removing challenges and limiting choices' problem.
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If some form of mothballing was available, many of those challenges and decisions would not exist. I could have created a mothball fleet for most of the battleships and carriers and spent the 'fleet maintenance and refit' resources on improving my economy, or building additional commercial vessels, or building 2-3x more ships in storage than I would have had otherwise. My Gallicite shortage would very likely not have happened, along with all the associated consequences, and my strategic imbalance would be solved relatively easily. I would not fear a major threat with my large mothball fleet available when needed, so creating a large active military available to respond to threats, with all the planning that entails, would not be needed.
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You say that as if mothballing could not possibly take a form that would not obviate those challenges.
If mothballing saves you 100% of the upkeep cost and if reactivation requires only a strategically trivial amount of time, then yes, mothballing does not represent an interesting decision.
But what if mothballing (and reactivating) takes a lot of time and resources?
In particular, what if mothballing and reactivating both require a shipyard?
What if the slipway remains in use while the ship is mothballed, until the ship is reactivated?
What if each process takes twice as long as building the ship from scratch?
What if each process requires Gallicite equal to the BP of the ship?
Under those requirements, "building for mothball" would hardly be an attractive way of establishing strategic long-term security.
Instead, mothballing a portion of an existing fleet would be an option worth considering after using a very large fleet to secure victory in a major war and no longer facing extensive near-or-midterm threats.
Mothballing will also limit strategic choices in fleet design. If you want to create a mothball fleet that can be reactivated years later and still be effective, you would design the ships on that basis. Therefore, you would build carriers and missile combatants, because those can be made much more effective by adding modern fighters and ordnance. It would not make strategic sense to build beam ships that would be completely outclassed without a major refit that would likely cost the same as a new ship anyway. So mothballing will drive you down specific research and fleet doctrine routes.
The long-term design viability of missile ships and carriers vs beam ships is already a strategic consideration.
But the longer a given game goes on, the longer the time gap between significant tech upgrades.
As that time gap increases, the strategic relevance of long-term viability concerns for different ship types decreases.
Mothballing, if expensive, won't significantly change that dynamic.
In the early game, mothballing might be a more attractive option for some ship types than others.
But if mothballing is expensive up front (with, say, a breakeven time in the neighborhood of five years vs constant ship maintenance) it won't be an attractive option in the early game for any ship type.
Once you've climbed up the tech curve a little ways, the decades-long gaps between tech upgrades makes economics the major factor in the mothballing decision. Ship-type longevity won't matter as much.
Even if we had mothballing, finding the right balance is extremely difficult. It has to be a decision that can turn out to be incorrect in certain situations. That 'situation' cannot be simply 'what if aliens attack Earth at short notice', because is it very unlikely an attack of sufficient force to overwhelm reasonable defences would happen without significant warning. No one is going to mothball everything. In economic terms, it's also difficult to create an economic or time-based penalty that is sufficient to make mothballing a real decision without also making it more expensive than simply pre-stockpiling components and building new ships when needed.
In summary, while mothballing does have some mechanics issues, it is really a 'removing challenges and limiting choices' problem.
It's hard to argue with you here.
Stockpiling components (via scrapping or via building new) can be seen as providing, at least partially, the same functionality as mothballing.
You get a shortened lead time for creation of a future fleet in exchange for some build cost now and no upkeep cost.
Maybe we just haven't formulated a complete picture of what a "good" implementation of mothballing might look like.
What if we think of stockpiling as the poor man's mothballing?
That implies a version of mothballing that is "better" than stockpiling components, but is harder/more expensive to achieve.
Perhaps it requires some tech or infrastructure investment and some ongoing costs.
But what could it provide in return?
It seems like it can only reduce up front costs or reduce the lead time for ships becoming available.
I don't know, maybe there's some other strategic or logistical flexibility that mothballing could provide to differentiate it from component stockpiling, but I'm out of brain for today.
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If some form of mothballing was available, many of those challenges and decisions would not exist. I could have created a mothball fleet for most of the battleships and carriers and spent the 'fleet maintenance and refit' resources on improving my economy, or building additional commercial vessels, or building 2-3x more ships in storage than I would have had otherwise. My Gallicite shortage would very likely not have happened, along with all the associated consequences, and my strategic imbalance would be solved relatively easily. I would not fear a major threat with my large mothball fleet available when needed, so creating a large active military available to respond to threats, with all the planning that entails, would not be needed.
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You say that as if mothballing could not possibly take a form that would not obviate those challenges.
If mothballing saves you 100% of the upkeep cost and if reactivation requires only a strategically trivial amount of time, then yes, mothballing does not represent an interesting decision.
But what if mothballing (and reactivating) takes a lot of time and resources?
In particular, what if mothballing and reactivating both require a shipyard?
What if the slipway remains in use while the ship is mothballed, until the ship is reactivated?
What if each process takes twice as long as building the ship from scratch?
What if each process requires Gallicite equal to the BP of the ship?
Under those requirements, "building for mothball" would hardly be an attractive way of establishing strategic long-term security.
Instead, mothballing a portion of an existing fleet would be an option worth considering after using a very large fleet to secure victory in a major war and no longer facing extensive near-or-midterm threats.
Mothballing will also limit strategic choices in fleet design. If you want to create a mothball fleet that can be reactivated years later and still be effective, you would design the ships on that basis. Therefore, you would build carriers and missile combatants, because those can be made much more effective by adding modern fighters and ordnance. It would not make strategic sense to build beam ships that would be completely outclassed without a major refit that would likely cost the same as a new ship anyway. So mothballing will drive you down specific research and fleet doctrine routes.
The long-term design viability of missile ships and carriers vs beam ships is already a strategic consideration.
But the longer a given game goes on, the longer the time gap between significant tech upgrades.
As that time gap increases, the strategic relevance of long-term viability concerns for different ship types decreases.
Mothballing, if expensive, won't significantly change that dynamic.
In the early game, mothballing might be a more attractive option for some ship types than others.
But if mothballing is expensive up front (with, say, a breakeven time in the neighborhood of five years vs constant ship maintenance) it won't be an attractive option in the early game for any ship type.
Once you've climbed up the tech curve a little ways, the decades-long gaps between tech upgrades makes economics the major factor in the mothballing decision. Ship-type longevity won't matter as much.
Even if we had mothballing, finding the right balance is extremely difficult. It has to be a decision that can turn out to be incorrect in certain situations. That 'situation' cannot be simply 'what if aliens attack Earth at short notice', because is it very unlikely an attack of sufficient force to overwhelm reasonable defences would happen without significant warning. No one is going to mothball everything. In economic terms, it's also difficult to create an economic or time-based penalty that is sufficient to make mothballing a real decision without also making it more expensive than simply pre-stockpiling components and building new ships when needed.
In summary, while mothballing does have some mechanics issues, it is really a 'removing challenges and limiting choices' problem.
It's hard to argue with you here.
Stockpiling components (via scrapping or via building new) can be seen as providing, at least partially, the same functionality as mothballing.
You get a shortened lead time for creation of a future fleet in exchange for some build cost now and no upkeep cost.
Maybe we just haven't formulated a complete picture of what a "good" implementation of mothballing might look like.
What if we think of stockpiling as the poor man's mothballing?
That implies a version of mothballing that is "better" than stockpiling components, but is harder/more expensive to achieve.
Perhaps it requires some tech or infrastructure investment and some ongoing costs.
But what could it provide in return?
It seems like it can only reduce up front costs or reduce the lead time for ships becoming available.
I don't know, maybe there's some other strategic or logistical flexibility that mothballing could provide to differentiate it from component stockpiling, but I'm out of brain for today.
With regard to your first point, I address it at the end. I don't see how you establish an economic consideration that makes mothballing a real decision, while still making it cheaper than just stockpiling components.
On the second point, there is a major difference in design considerations between building a ship you expect to use now, and one you plan to put in reserve for 20-30 years.
It sounds like you are looking at mothballing as something that would happen in a WW2 situation, where a major war has been fought, for which you built a lot of ships you no longer need, so you want to store them just in-case. However, whatever rules are created for that situation also allows people to build straight into mothballs, avoiding most of the economic considerations for building a fleet. While there are a few examples of a country reactivating mothballed ships - the US battleships for example - there are no examples of nations building major fleets straight into mothballs to save money on maintenance.
To convince me that mothballing mechanics would make the game better (additional interesting decisions), it needs to allow the former (real mothballing of ships built for a real purpose), while avoiding the latter (building straight into mothballs to save money), while making it a real economic and strategic decision (it could turn out badly) while also somehow making it more effective than stockpiling components (building them or scrapping existing ships) and subsequently fast-building a new ship when needed. That solution cannot include arbitrary rules like 'ships built less than 5 years ago cannot go into mothballs'.
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"That solution cannot include arbitrary rules like 'ships built less than 5 years ago cannot go into mothballs"
Actually, perhaps it could? Just as you have the realistic commander promotions setting during game creation, there could be a "realistic mothball setting" to represent the political difficulties inherent in building to mothballs?
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To convince me that mothballing mechanics would make the game better (additional interesting decisions), it needs to allow the former (real mothballing of ships built for a real purpose), while avoiding the latter (building straight into mothballs to save money), while making it a real economic and strategic decision (it could turn out badly) while also somehow making it more effective than stockpiling components (building them or scrapping existing ships) and subsequently fast-building a new ship when needed. That solution cannot include arbitrary rules like 'ships built less than 5 years ago cannot go into mothballs'.
And if a formulation of mechanics meets these criteria, it must also not be overly complex to implement and test, and must not add significantly to turn generation times.
From the hip, then:
A ship may only be mothballed if it has no damaged armor or components and it has a maintenance clock of zero.
Mothballing a ship requires a slipway in a yard that can build that ship.
The base time for mothballing is twice the build time for the design. (Reduced same as shipbuilding time by tech and governor/sector Shipbuilding bonus.)
Mothballing has a mineral cost and BP cost. (Perhaps 12.5% of the ship's BP, and the same amount in Gallicite.)
When a ship begins mothballing:
all officers are unassigned
all crew are returned to the pool
all fuel, msp, ordnance, cargo, and parasites are returned to the colony
crew and fleet training are reset to minimum values
Cancelling the mothball process provides fresh crew from the pool, and incurs performance penalties the same as abandoning overhaul.
While a ship is mothballed:
the ship does not require maintenance capacity, does not consume MSP, and does not suffer maintenance failures
the slipway remains in use.
it cannot be used for new construction or to perform a task on any ship other than the mothballed ship.
if the colony's manufacturing efficiency modifier is ever below 100%, the ship has a chance to suffer maintenance failures--perhaps equivalent to an IFR of (100% - manufacturing efficiency)
the ship cannot move (by itself or via tractor beam)
the shipyard cannot move (i.e. cannot be engaged by a tractor beam)
the shipyard may only be retooled to a design to which the mothballed ship may be refit
if the shipyard is destroyed, the ship is destroyed
the ship may be refit. (following normal refit rules, and the ship remains mothballed during and after.)
the ship may be scrapped. (following normal scrapping rules).
the ship may be activated.
only the engaged slipway may perform the above tasks.
The base time for activation is the same as for mothballing. (Reduced in same way.)
Activation has a mineral cost and BP cost. (Perhaps same cost as mothballing?)
If the activation process is cancelled, the ship remains mothballed.
This formulation provides strategic pros and cons vs stockpiling (can refit mothballed ships to keep up with tech change, but requires a slipway and takes more lead time to bring ships online), and makes building-to-mothball strictly worse than waiting to build as needed.
Seems like it would be an option to weigh vs scrapping when your fleet size is in excess of your immediate needs.
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"That solution cannot include arbitrary rules like 'ships built less than 5 years ago cannot go into mothballs"
Actually, perhaps it could? Just as you have the realistic commander promotions setting during game creation, there could be a "realistic mothball setting" to represent the political difficulties inherent in building to mothballs?
Realistic promotions mean that better qualified commanders are promoted and they are only promoted because jobs are available. There is a rationale behind the mechanics. I really want to avoid rules that have no underlying logic, or internal consistency within the game.
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For mothballing to be an effective game mechanic, there have to be situations where it turns out to be a bad idea, either economically or strategically.
Currently, to maintain a ship costs you 1/4 of the build points in MSP each year, or 1/16th of the ship cost in wealth and key minerals (40% Duranium, 40% Gallicite and 20% Uridium). You need to use construction factories to build maintenance facilities, which in turn provide maintenance capacity for the ships and production capacity for the MSP, or you can use shipyards or construction factories to build ships/stations with maintenance modules. You also need to provide workers for the industry and the maintenance facilities. On top of all that, you need to provide the necessary fuel and MSP for the ships themselves, plus any ordnance they carry. In my current campaign, I had to postpone military campaigns for a couple of years due to fuel shortage. Finally, most people tend to keep ships relatively up to date, so you also spend wealth and resources on multiple refits, which increases the total cost of the ships even more.
Devoting all that to maintaining and refitting your fleet is preventing you doing something else with the resources and industrial capacity, which means creating a fleet that balances military need with economic considerations is a major ongoing challenge, with numerous factors involved. I haven't built any new ships for a while, partly because I had a fleet that allowed me to meet my military commitments but also due to a severe shortage of Gallicite. In fact, I have had to turn off maintenance production for several months at a time to try to balance that need for MSP with producing the freighters and colony ships required to build up new mining colonies, to provide the minerals I need to keep the economy going. Suddenly due to 'events', I find myself with many different demands on the fleet and not enough ships to meet them. To complicate things further, I have recently started a refit program, so finding the capacity and resources to build new ships at the same time is a challenge. This isn't a 'Right Now' problem. I am just over-stretched and that is likely to be the case for several years until I can correct the strategic imbalance.
I use my battleships and carriers mainly for offensive operations. When deployed defensively, I rarely commit many of them together. Apart from recently, I have had sufficient light forces and surface batteries to protect colonies in most situations and Earth in almost all reasonable situations. Known space is 270 systems and I have an extensive buoy network, so trouble on the frontier, while locally annoying, is usually years away from becoming an existential threat. Even though I am currently facing ten active NPRs and spoilers, five of which are hostile, most of my major warships still spend a lot of time in Earth orbit before being deployed for a specific purpose.
If some form of mothballing was available, many of those challenges and decisions would not exist. I could have created a mothball fleet for most of the battleships and carriers and spent the 'fleet maintenance and refit' resources on improving my economy, or building additional commercial vessels, or building 2-3x more ships in storage than I would have had otherwise. My Gallicite shortage would very likely not have happened, along with all the associated consequences, and my strategic imbalance would be solved relatively easily. I would not fear a major threat with my large mothball fleet available when needed, so creating a large active military available to respond to threats, with all the planning that entails, would not be needed.
Mothballing will also limit strategic choices in fleet design. If you want to create a mothball fleet that can be reactivated years later and still be effective, you would design the ships on that basis. Therefore, you would build carriers and missile combatants, because those can be made much more effective by adding modern fighters and ordnance. It would not make strategic sense to build beam ships that would be completely outclassed without a major refit that would likely cost the same as a new ship anyway. So mothballing will drive you down specific research and fleet doctrine routes.
Even if we had mothballing, finding the right balance is extremely difficult. It has to be a decision that can turn out to be incorrect in certain situations. That 'situation' cannot be simply 'what if aliens attack Earth at short notice', because is it very unlikely an attack of sufficient force to overwhelm reasonable defences would happen without significant warning. No one is going to mothball everything. In economic terms, it's also difficult to create an economic or time-based penalty that is sufficient to make mothballing a real decision without also making it more expensive than simply pre-stockpiling components and building new ships when needed.
In summary, while mothballing does have some mechanics issues, it is really a 'removing challenges and limiting choices' problem.
Thanks for your reply. I probably wouldn't play that way, but I understand you are making a game you like. Personally I make choices as a player that aren't optimal for me all the time, such as not using spacemaster to correct my mistakes, keeping maintenance turned on even though it causes me a huge headache and often results in some rather heartbreaking situations, etc. With your perspective in mind, it's interesting that the game is supposed to be a story generator as much as anything yet so much thought is being put into the "optimal" way to do things, what paths the game encourages the player to take. As someone interested in game design it's just interesting to me to learn how you decide to make those tradeoffs and where you decide to draw the line.
I suppose one of the key differences in the game versus in real life, mothballing doesn't necessarily imply the kind of future proofing that you suggest because of how ships are built in real life and vehicles are built in real life versus in the game. In real life a boat has a hull that is made of solid steel that can fit so many components, so large of an engine, so heavy of a load without sinking etc. When a ship is mothballed IRL, all the non-structural parts are taken out of it. This would be like if anytime someone moved out of a house, they took not just their bed and the TV and the forks and knives and family pictures but also the water boiler, all the wiring, the plumbing, and maybe even the windows. The reason that this is not a cheat code for shipbuilding in real life probably has to do with the cost vs time of fitting more modern parts into an older volume. To represent this in game, you'd have to make sure that every part was unique to the ship it's built for. Conceivably, the US Navy could outfit all our World War 2 battleships with missiles and modern artillery; but the reasons not to do that aren't just tactical but logistical, why not just build a new ship for new times instead? We don't even need 12+ inch thick steel hulls anymore.
In Auroa, a ship is not limited by its hull; rather the hull is an arbitrary player designation (in my case usually limited by jump engine capacity tiers because my RP are too valuable to spend thousands on a 13462 ton drive and then a 127504 ton drive and then a 15990 ton drive etc etc etc). The ships are a lego of components, with the armor distributed across them by the game in a very abstract way. The idea of hollowing out a hull of everything valuable and letting the hull rust a bit while time moves on, just doesn't really translate well to Aurora's shipbuilding system. Of course, that's not a fault of the system, but rather a fault of my thinking when writing the OP.
I see that there are optimization and user-experience reasons, but ultimately when I look deeply into your answers I see that the underlying cause for those reasons to be legitimate is the core mechanics of how ships are built in Aurora.
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I'm not trying to create an optimal way to play. I am trying to avoid creating an optimal way to play :)
The main problem with mothballing is that unless implemented correctly it would become the optimum from an economic perspective. Aurora used to have planetary bases, which didn't have maintenance, so players built bases with large hangars to store ships, so they wouldn't need maintenance. Now you could argue that it up to the player, but it invalidates a lot of the potential game experience. If a player reads about the game online, then he will no doubt see somewhere that planetary hangars are the most efficient and will go down that route without ever experiencing the challenges of running a navy in the way the game intends. So I removed them. I don't want mothballing to be the new 'planetary hangars'.
Many players, including me, will design 'terrible' ships for RP purposes (although some turn out to be surprisingly effective), or adopt RP strategies that will cause them difficulties. That is part of the game and it is why it is designed for story-telling. However, I want to avoid having options that are so obviously better than anything else regardless of RP or otherwise. Everything should be situational, so different designs, doctrines or strategy will work well in some situations and less well in others. Above all, there should not be a path that is always going to be the right one.
I am not trying to build a simulator, but a game. The rules have to be internally consistent, but they don't have to be realistic in a real world sense, beyond passing the 'giggle test'. Gameplay is always more important than 'realism'
BTW the US Navy did put Tomahawks, Harpoons and CIWS on its battleships, when they were brought out of mothballs in the 1980s.
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I'm not trying to create an optimal way to play. I am trying to avoid creating an optimal way to play :)
I suppose that's what I meant. Anyway I love the game and learning its systems and what it enables me to do gratifies me in a way I haven't felt in a long time.
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"That solution cannot include arbitrary rules like 'ships built less than 5 years ago cannot go into mothballs"
Actually, perhaps it could? Just as you have the realistic commander promotions setting during game creation, there could be a "realistic mothball setting" to represent the political difficulties inherent in building to mothballs?
Realistic promotions mean that better qualified commanders are promoted and they are only promoted because jobs are available. There is a rationale behind the mechanics. I really want to avoid rules that have no underlying logic, or internal consistency within the game.
Fair point I suppose.
I do feel like there is a balance that could be found with it, an if done right would add a good element to the game. But you also have to make choices about what you want to spend dev time on and if this isn't a priority then it's surely not going to stop me from playing. Thanks for engaging patiently with us on it Steve.
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I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced on the whole mothballing thing either, but what if mothballed ships still accrued time on their maintenance clock, but didn't suffer maintenance failures while in mothball status? Then, when you "remobilize" the ship, the maintenance clock "becomes active" again, and you find that your reactivated-from-mothball ship is now suffering severe maintenance failures and will be a huge maintenance supplies pit until you overhaul the ship?
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I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced on the whole mothballing thing either, but what if mothballed ships still accrued time on their maintenance clock, but didn't suffer maintenance failures while in mothball status? Then, when you "remobilize" the ship, the maintenance clock "becomes active" again, and you find that your reactivated-from-mothball ship is now suffering severe maintenance failures and will be a huge maintenance supplies pit until you overhaul the ship?
I think mothballing is a solution in search of a problem, and more trouble and drama (both in game and on forum) than it's worth. Yes, you occasionally have more ships than you need after a large war, either from building or capture. However, how big a problem really is that? Why wouldn't you just scrap them anyway, or if that feels unrealistic, scrap them and RP that you're selling them to allied nations or commercial/historical organizations.
HOWEVER, the above suggestion from Coleslaw is the least-bad yet as regards a mechanic for mothballing. The fact that the mothballed ships come out of mothball with a large overhaul debt to be repaid before you can use them foils the scheme of building straight to mothball and then unmothballing to create a larger fleet than you could normally sustain, because you HAVE to sustain them for the duration of the overhaul, which will be significant. It also puts a reasonable bound on how long it makes sense, economically or strategically, to mothball a ship. You could either accure time 1 for 1, or at a reduced rate if you want to tweak the balance.
Again, I'm not arguing for implementing mothballing, but if it was implemented, I think something like the above is a good way to represent it.
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One of the biggest reason why mothballing does not work in Aurora are becasue ships can practically be updated forever with new components. Unlike in reality where ships eventually will become completely outdated and not worth the maintenance and upgrade costs to modernize.
In Aurora we could very well just produce ships, place them into mothball and then reactive them when we need them for pretty cheap. Occasionally we can also upgrade them with new components and scrap the old ones to keep them updated and then just mothball them again.
These are things that really don't work in reality as at some point the cost of upgrade will be way more expensive than just build something new and better.
If there was a game mechanic that made upgrades more expensive over time so ships eventually have to be just completely replaced then mothballing could make sense as a mechanic. Currently we don't have such a model in the game. If, for eaxample... ships designs were stored with what starting technology the original first version of the ship was using and upgrade costs based on that in addition to the current upgrade costs. Then, at some point, the cost of further upgrading an old hull would become prohibitive just like in reality.
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If there was a game mechanic that made upgrades more expensive over time so ships eventually have to be just completely replaced then mothballing could make sense as a mechanic. Currently we don't have such a model in the game. If, for eaxample... ships designs were stored with what starting technology the original first version of the ship was using and upgrade costs based on that in addition to the current upgrade costs. Then, at some point, the cost of further upgrading an old hull would become prohibitive just like in reality.
To some degree this is modelled by the fact that refitting with more advanced components tend to be more expensive (due to higher component costs). But I agree that it would make sense if it significantly more complex & costly to upgrade a ship from Gen 4 to Gen 5 sensors if it was built originally with Gen 1 sensors and went through 3 previous refits already, compared to if it was made from scratch as Gen 4.
I think the bigger impact of extreme service lifes and mothballing should be not just refit costs, but realistically also maintenance cost/life should be scaling very unfavorably as age of a ship becomes extreme. So if the ship launched with 4 years maint. life after X years it might be down to just 2 (and consume 2x as much supplies just to keep docked at Maint. Facilities).
Doing this tweak to mainteance rules actually could be one way to solve the exploit of building fleets straight into mothballing, because maintaining brand new ships would be much cheaper so there would be very little point in mothballing them, but putting an old MSP hogging thing barely kept together would actually save you resources, and most of the time you would not need to pay the steep cost of reactivating it since the expected outcome of that old ship is to scrap it at some point later unless there is an emergency.
I am not trying to build a simulator, but a game. The rules have to be internally consistent, but they don't have to be realistic in a real world sense, beyond passing the 'giggle test'. Gameplay is always more important than 'realism'
I wouldn't call it simulator or "realism" but one of the main reasons I love Aurora is it's mechanics make sense and "feel right" because they are implemented in a reasonable and plausible way.
A game which mirrors realistic plausible mechanics will tend to be much better balanced simply by virtue of everything being a tradeoff by design (just like reality), so eliminating these exploits and making sure they don't re-appear is always a worthwile task IMO.
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I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced on the whole mothballing thing either, but what if mothballed ships still accrued time on their maintenance clock, but didn't suffer maintenance failures while in mothball status? Then, when you "remobilize" the ship, the maintenance clock "becomes active" again, and you find that your reactivated-from-mothball ship is now suffering severe maintenance failures and will be a huge maintenance supplies pit until you overhaul the ship?
Why wouldn't you just scrap them anyway, or if that feels unrealistic, scrap them and RP that you're selling them to allied nations or commercial/historical organizations.
It's worth considering that the only times Navies have actively mothballed ships, to my knowledge, is the US post WW1/2 and the UK/France/Spain in the 1700/1800s (kinda, and they really just dragged the ships out of the water to stop the hulls rotting or kept a skeleton crew aboard to carry out limited repairs and make sure they stayed seaworthy in between major conflicts with each other.) And they were only really doing that because they had way more ships than they needed during peacetime but also had the combination of both at least 1 rival Navy of peer, or close to peer, status, a constrained peace-time budget, and global commitments that meant that the fleet they kept active would always be distributed in different strategic theatres. Which is to say there was a strategic & economic reason those older ships weren't scrapped outright, because they thought there was at least some chance they might need the surfeit of ships they possessed but were unwilling to keep them in service at all times, and that replacing them with new construction in the event of another conflict would take time, especially as ship-building ramped up.
The thing is Aurora doesn't really do peace-time versus war-time economy/naval funding (in my experience at least, the economy is just the economy and you either spend resources on expanding colonies/infrastructure or on warships). Which means that players never have a reason to cut back fleet size after large wars, the budget never decreases, and therefore why wouldn't you keep all ships in service and just replace them as you build newer models, especially if you have a nearby rival with a peer navy.
If anyone has played Rule the Waves (And if not you really should as it's a wonderful little game that you can easily lose dozens of hours in without noticing) the player's funding is at the whims of a civilian government which means that outside of war you have to put ships in reserve/mothballs in order to be able to afford things like boosting research, expanding shipyard size, and building modern ships. It's also a lot stricter on how far you can upgrade ships based on how old they were/what techs you had when they were built. That means that sooner or later all ships end up heading to the breaker's yard, but whilst they're still moderately up to date, or can be refitted relatively cheaply, you actively want to keep them in reserve/mothballs because even an old ship is useful when war breaks out.
Now if Steve ever decided to add a split between civlian/military funding, or some mechanisms to make it easier to support larger navies/build more ships when the faction is at war, then I'd say mothballing ships or putting them in a reserve would be an interesting addition to allow players to balance out their military budgets as long as there were sufficient downsides (i.e. large payments of maintenance supplies to re-activate, and other things already suggested in the thread). But until that happens I'd say it's not worth the extra faff.
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The thing is Aurora doesn't really do peace-time versus war-time economy/naval funding (in my experience at least, the economy is just the economy and you either spend resources on expanding colonies/infrastructure or on warships). Which means that players never have a reason to cut back fleet size after large wars, the budget never decreases, and therefore why wouldn't you keep all ships in service and just replace them as you build newer models, especially if you have a nearby rival with a peer navy.
I disagree that there never is a reason to cut back on fleet size in Aurora.
The main 3 resources it costs to maintain your fleet is Wealth, Duranium and Gallicite. All of those are also key in expanding your civilian economy, so you always need to prioirtize long term economic growth vs building and maintaining a larger fleet.
Less warships to maintain = more factories, research facilities, commercial ships and everything else long term.
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Historically, a lot of "mothballed" ships were put into that status due to the war that they were ordered for ending. This happened with a lot of US Navy ships at the end of WW2 - lots of carriers were completed and did not enter normal service because the war they were ordered for had ended. This did give the USN a bunch of unused ships that could be used for research and experimentation (such as the trials with angled flight decks).
There's also the status of "in reserve" which can be considered - even during WW2 itself, some ships were in reserve, with reduced crews, because they weren't needed. Many of the UK's battleships were "in reserve" in 1944, with only the modern ships in active service, because the older ships just were not needed, and the crews were more usefully used on other ships.
Trained manpower was a constraint, that factored in to the decisions to mothball ships, as well as to keep others in reduced readiness in reserve.
Aurora doesn't have a reserve/reduced readiness mechanic, as well as not having a mothball mechanic.
I have a bunch of ships in my current game, that are largely idle at the moment, but... most of them are commercial ships so the maintenance isn't a factor.
Many of the constraints that Aurora has on fleet size, are fairly easily dealt with by the player. You can get more officers and crew by expanding academies, the wealth and maintenance requirements are also not greatly limiting (other than the gallicite question).
Officers, crew, MSP, wealth, are the limiting factors in Aurora for fleet size, and they're not usually that limiting.
Many of the other things that affected ship design and fleet size historically are less of an issue in Aurora. In the case of the UK, there were several "War Emergency Programme" designs for ships, that could be built rapidly, and some of the other wartime designs were not built to the same standard as peacetime constructions. One of the merchant ship designs was built to use older types of engines - the thinking behind that was that a middle-aged reservist who hadn't been to sea in 20 years should be able to recognise every piece of machinery from when they were an apprentice.
Aurora's ability for shipyards to build from components functions pretty well as a WEP equivalent, and there's no difference between ships built in peacetime and ships built in wartime.
So I'm really not sure of why there would need to be a "mothball", or "reserve" mechanic for Aurora.
Now then, for a mechanism, I think that a substantial amount of the mechanics (in terms of coding) already exist in Aurora - the crew training level, conscript crew, and the "exit overhaul" function.
My preference would be a "mothball" facility, similar to a maintenance facility - it costs wealth and population to run, and can only support X tonnage of ships.
Mothballed ships require no crew, no officers, and won't explode whilst in storage.
Getting the ship out of mothballs though...
it starts at 0% readiness (just like an early exit from overhaul) and takes time to run up to 100% readiness (affected by captain/chief engineer's skills).
And it starts with the lowest crew grade (crewed by ageing reservists, and people who aren't familiar with old technology).
During the time it takes to run up to 100% readiness, it suffers wear and maintenance issues similar to ships undergoing fleet drills (stress of reactivating machinery from cold etc).
So whilst it was mothballed, the ship wasn't costing you anything, but in the say 100 days to run up to full working order, it's going to consume a lot more MSP, and be in a fairly worn state (possibly requiring immediate overhaul) by the time it is ready for service, and would consume even more MSP to train the crew up to a higher standard.
So you have the investment in minerals & population to build mothball facilities, the wealth cost to operate them, which are all things that you could be using on other more productive planetary installations.
And bringing ships out of mothball is expensive, and you end up with a worn ship with a relatively untrained crew, that needs further overhaul and training, before it equals a ship of the same class that wasn't put into mothballs and remained active.
Which I think counters "build to mothballs" to at least some extent.
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My preference would be a "mothball" facility, similar to a maintenance facility - it costs wealth and population to run, and can only support X tonnage of ships.
Mothballed ships require no crew, no officers, and won't explode whilst in storage.
Getting the ship out of mothballs though...
it starts at 0% readiness (just like an early exit from overhaul) and takes time to run up to 100% readiness (affected by captain/chief engineer's skills).
And it starts with the lowest crew grade (crewed by ageing reservists, and people who aren't familiar with old technology).
During the time it takes to run up to 100% readiness, it suffers wear and maintenance issues similar to ships undergoing fleet drills (stress of reactivating machinery from cold etc).
So whilst it was mothballed, the ship wasn't costing you anything, but in the say 100 days to run up to full working order, it's going to consume a lot more MSP, and be in a fairly worn state (possibly requiring immediate overhaul) by the time it is ready for service, and would consume even more MSP to train the crew up to a higher standard.
So you have the investment in minerals & population to build mothball facilities, the wealth cost to operate them, which are all things that you could be using on other more productive planetary installations.
And bringing ships out of mothball is expensive, and you end up with a worn ship with a relatively untrained crew, that needs further overhaul and training, before it equals a ship of the same class that wasn't put into mothballs and remained active.
Which I think counters "build to mothballs" to at least some extent.
I like the thinking on this, and yeah my idea was for un-mothballing ships to be at least this onerous (and possibly even more so if you count the idea of them taking armo(u)r damage during mothball). Unfortunately I still think Steve won't go for it as the added cost of the building is kind of a one time thing and if you want to dump entire reserve fleets in there you could just build more.
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My preference would be a "mothball" facility, similar to a maintenance facility - it costs wealth and population to run, and can only support X tonnage of ships.
Mothballed ships require no crew, no officers, and won't explode whilst in storage.
Sounds like adding a new installation would just add extra complexity. Why not just have them use regular maintenance facilities at for example say a 10% tonnage impact (So a mothballed 25000 ton ship requires 2500 ton maintenance capacity). That way it scales with better technology and there is automatically a MSP upkeep cost (10% of full) as well.
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Sounds like adding a new installation would just add extra complexity. Why not just have them use regular maintenance facilities
To make it more of a commitment, and more of a conscious choice.
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As someone who regularly reads Manticore Ascendant series again and again id support mothballing feature to be a thing, even if its bit cheaty or "unbalanced".