Suggestion: Mothball Fleet

[Steve Walmsley]

"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.

[shatterstar (OP)]

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.

[Steve Walmsley]

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.

[shatterstar (OP)]

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.

[Panopticon]

"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.

[Coleslaw]

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?

[nakorkren]

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.

[Jorgen_CAB]

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.

[alex_brunius]

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.

[BwenGun]

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.

[alex_brunius]

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.

[Louella]

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.

[shatterstar (OP)]

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.

[alex_brunius]

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.

[Louella]

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.