Okay, I’ve been thinking about things in my campaign, and I have some questions for people that are interested.
Anyone who has run a campaign with multiple races for any length of time probably recognizes my problem, which is to ensure that my different races remain different, instead of merging into mirror images of each other. My experience is that if I don’t watch this very carefully, my races will start becoming more and more alike in their ship designs and strategies, which perhaps makes sense given that the same person is playing all of them. The remedy is to develop different but viable (hopefully) strategies for each race and then try to stick to those strategies, modifying for experience and various internal pressures. Still, in the pressure of actually moving the game forward, it becomes too easy to lose focus and with the loss of focus comes a drifting of strategies towards one theoretical ideal.
One of the areas I had hoped to differentiate my governments was refit strategies. Aurora allows for several different strategies, IMO, and I had hoped to explore some of these. I have noticed, though, that it is very easy to go overboard on refits, and unless you are careful you can easily spend more than the ship originally cost on a single refit. Additionally, a series of refits can easily add up to far more than the ship originally cost, or the cost of a newer ship, without any one refit exceeding that cost.
What got me thinking about this was the fact that as the fleets in the 6 Powers Campaign have grown over time they seem to reach an equilibrium state periodically, because of the need for a series of refits to keep up with advancing technology. These refits take up more and more of the nation’s slipways, and until the # of slipways is expanded, or the efficiency is improved, no new ships can be produced because the yards are busy with constant refits. I realized that a power that either didn’t do refits, or one which did only limited and occasional refits, would be able to build a lot of ships, albeit most of those ships would be outdated.
Over time all of my nations have fallen into the same basic refit strategy, which is as follows: New technology judged to be critical, such as engine speed improvements, will necessitate fleet-wide refits to include the new tech, while tech of lesser importance or higher cost might be reserved for new builds only. This strategy results in several different versions of the same basic design being active at once, which doesn’t seem to be a problem as long as fleet speeds are maintained and salvo timing capabilities remain the same.
This strategy has led to a situation that I think is reflected somewhat in real life. The bigger nations have continuously upgraded their ships with more modern technology, although the upgrades have been somewhat selective and not all ships got the newest technology. However, as time has passed the shipyard capacity of the major powers has increased, the technology has increased, and the requirements for their ships has increased, which has led to a lot of pressure to increase the size of the ships. Refits can only do so much, so there is a trend to design newer, larger ships that incorporate all of the latest tech, so that capabilities that just can’t be included in the smaller ships can be realized in the larger ships.
The thing is, as I said above, this strategy has led to all nations performing a series of refits to remain current, with the total cost of the refits in shipyard time and resources costing far more than the original cost of the ship, or its replacement by a newer version, in spite of the fact that no one refit exceeded that cost. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, and I am not advocating for a change here. I am just wondering what strategy other people use. What refit cost do you think is within reason? Has anyone tried a “no refit” strategy of building a large fleet without upgrading and scrapping the oldest ships? Is this strategy even viable within Aurora, where slower ships are punished grievously?
Kurt