Military Construction Rules: Long Form
Military Construction
Ships take a certain amount of time and effort to create. Things like shield generators, hyperdrives, suicidal smart-missiles, and beam weapons that run on the power of peanut butter and the outrage of honest politicians don’t come cheap.
Some of this comes out of the ongoing operating budget, which is basically abstracted away in this game. New soldiers are constantly recruited to replace retirees. You can safely assume continuous production of spacegoing small craft (fighters and gunboats), sufficient to replace routine breakdowns, training accidents, and simple obsolescence. The same goes for ground combat hardware like artillery pieces and atmospheric fighter jets. Ammunition, spare parts, and so on, all these things are being made by your nation all the time, assuming you need them.
You don’t have to keep track of this. Seriously, it’s fine.
Therefore, small-scale losses compared to the overall strength of your military are not a big deal. If one little patrol frigate out of 400 of the things gets blown up, no one’s really going to notice, and you can probably pull an old one out of mothballs or something without too much trouble. If a few dozen battle tanks of your empire’s thousands are destroyed, you just get the guys on the assembly line to work overtime, problem solved. If someone massacres an infantry division from the Grimdark Empire, with its draftee army of billions, they can just conscript a few more oppressed peasants and continue merrily on their tyrannical way.
But when your losses become noticeable, you really ought to pay for them somehow. It’s only fair. Likewise if you want to expand that military. In-game, I’d like a mechanism to keep people from just pulling new legions and fleets out of a hat whenever they suffer a defeat in battle. So if you want to build new additions to your space-going forces, or replace significant losses to those forces, you should pay for it out of your construction budget.
Limits to Construction Rates
The limit of your construction budget is defined as a percentage of your GDP- this is the other reason why GDP is the main measure of national strength. The EXACT percentage you spend on military expansion and replacements is up to you, within reason.
To define ‘within reason,’ bear in mind that most of your money needs to be spent on other parts of your economy- not to mention the upkeep costs we’re totally abstracting out! So if you allocate too much GDP to military construction, you will experience undesired events. Your military-industrial complex may start to break down under the strain. Your civilian economy will be increasingly stressed by the huge proportion of your resources going to building and maintaining the military, and your people may not like it. The sheer size of the war machine can lead to severe corruption and waste.
In other words, there will be mod-enacted penalties for excessive construction, because it’s poor form to force a
ridiculous arms race on the neighbors. As a rule, nations in a relatively peaceful and secure state of affairs (i.e. little chance of a major war breaking out) would likely have military construction budgets of 5% or less of GDP. Nations which have unusually state-controlled economies or which are highly militarized might go as high as 10% of GDP for construction, as might ordinary nations which have special reasons to arm themselves- and I expect that given the sort of game this will be, most countries will have such reasons.
As a general rule, consider 10% of GDP to be an upper bound on allowable peacetime construction budgets, unless you have an
extremely good reason.
Wartime construction rates will of course be higher; a country in the grip of total war mobilization might be able to sustain military construction of up to 20% of GDP, if its citizenry is willing to organize and sacrifice for the sake of the war effort. Of course, this construction boom will be offset by wartime casualties.
Naval Construction
Because of the expected time-scale of the game, very long construction times would be bad for play. While these construction rates may appear unreasonably rapid, do bear in mind that this is THE FUTURE (TM), and they offer the average player a much more realistic hope of getting capital-class ships into commission before the game ends. A brief period of ‘teething’ after construction is finished, for things like commissioning trials, is advisable, especially for new types of ship. But it is not demanded, within reason, and I expect that usually the ‘teething/commissioning time’ issue won’t be relevant to the game.
So here’s a tentative table of ship construction times, where X is the point cost of the ship...
3 < X ≤ 240: 1 month per 20 points of unit cost, rounded up
240 < X ≤ 250: 12 months
250 < X: 12 months, plus 3 months per 50 points of unit cost, rounded up
Thus, a 120-point ship takes six months. A 170-point ship takes (170/20 rounded up) nine months. A 300-point ship takes 15 months, a 400-point ship takes 21 months, a 750-point ship takes 42 months, and a 1000-point ship takes 57 months- they’re hard to replace.
Please don’t do anything silly like having all your ships cost X-1 points, where X would be just enough to tip you into the next construction time class. We all know what you’re doing, and it makes us sad inside.
If you want to argue that a ship which falls ‘in the middle’ of two categories (such as a 375-point ship) takes X-and-a-half months to build, that’s fine, I’m not going to split hairs.
You should also pay out of your budget for any massive-scale small craft losses (fair is fair; I can lose a 100 point ship shooting down 100 points of fighters, so it should cost you to replace the fighters, as it cost me to replace the ship). The losses should be replaced at a reasonable pace, rather than all materializing at once the day after the battle. Exactly what a reasonable rate
is will depend on details.
Related Question: Hybrid Ships
To reiterate, construction TIME for a ship that has some combination of X points of direct-combat-utility, Y points of small craft capacity, and Z points of troop capacity, is the same as for a normal ship with point cost (X+Y+Z). However, you pay for the small craft and the troops separately. Thus, if I wish to build a ship with 40 points of direct combat utility, which carries 20 points of gunboats and 20 points of ground troops...
I pay 40$ for the ship, 20$ for the gunboats, and 20$ for the troops. The ship will be ready in four months’ time.
Related Question: Naval Repairs
On a related note, a warship might well be damaged, but not destroyed, in a battle. I can’t be bothered to estimate monetary costs for fixing reparable damage to a ship, so as far as I’m concerned, you can do so without spending money from the construction budget. However, the repairs should take a decent amount of time, commensurate with the size, expense, and complexity of your ships. The ship should not be good to go the next day, unless the damage was light enough to be repaired entirely using spackle, space tape, and elbow grease.
Related Question: Upgrades
This came up in SDNW4 several times and we never agreed on an answer. Upgrades to a ship that increase its point value take either:
A) The same time it would take to build a ship of point value equal to the upgrade from scratch,
or
B) 25% of the time it would take to build the original ship from scratch,
whichever is longer.
Ground Force Construction
Recruitment of ground troops in SDNW4 was handled in a somewhat awkward way that discouraged people from doing much ground troop purchasing during the game. I want to avoid this.
First of all, we look at each ‘force’ within your overall ground army separately. Accounting for the Peopleitarian Militia is handled separately from that for the Kaboom Commandos, since each organization will need its own training and logistics establishment, appropriate to its manpower and equipment needs.
It is safe to assume that if your army already has some category of ground troops, there is a continuous ‘pipeline’ of equipment and/or killbots in production. And that new soldiers, bioforms, or whatever are continuously being inducted into the force to replace those lost to age, retirement, wear and tear, or routine peacetime losses.
So to make up for small losses to your armed forces (say, fifty thousand troops out of an army of hundreds of millions), no real change in policy needs to be made- as noted earlier, stop-loss orders and a few extra recruitment programs can solve your problem. Even relatively serious losses- a few percent of the total size of the force- are nothing really out of the ordinary. Up to a limit, recruitment is very simple.
You’ll have to allocate money from the construction budget to pay for raising and equipping the new troops, but that’s it. The extra ground forces are integrated into your army at a reasonable, moderate rate (a roughly equal number per month, spread over a year, or possibly more or less depending on your own assessment of the circumstances).
For Elite troops, this limit is 5% of the current size of a force per year. For Guard and Regular troops, it is 10% of the current size of the force, for Conscripts, 20%, and for Screaming Hordes, 50%.
Thus, if the billion-strong Peopleitarian Militia (a 200k/$ conscript force with x1 equipment modifiers) suffers a paltry eighty million casualties in the pacification of the minor planet Limonady, then you can simply pay the price (400 points) and get replacement troops trickling into your forces at some reasonable pace. Likewise if the elite Kaboom Commandos take 20 points of losses out of their overall 500-point force: 20 points is less than 5% of 500, so they can simply replace this by slightly upping the ante of their normal recruitment process.
But sometimes, maybe you’ll want a LOT of troops. I mean, a really big number. Suddenly you need twice as many Imperial Marines. Now what?
If you wish to undertake a major expansion of the armed forces, or begin assembling an entirely new category of troops (say, a new mass-numbers army recruited by conscription during wartime), then things take a little longer. Training and/or production facilities have to be set up, to create a faster-flowing pipeline. In that case, you can continue recruitment at the usual (slow) expansion rate described above, but to begin recruitment of the
really large extra army, you need to wait for them to start coming out of the pipeline.
The first troops trained under the accelerated program start appearing some months after the initial investment. TYPICAL but nonbinding numbers, for human-ish troops that have to be trained in order to fight effectively, might be:
Screaming Horde: 1 month
Conscript: 3 months
Regular: 4 months
Guards: 8 months
Elites: 12 months
Thus, if I want to double the number of Kaboom Commandos, I could proceed with low-rate recruitment for this year, and get an extra trickle of men. But if I start paying for accelerated recruitment to fill out the vastly expanded force structure, I would make myself wait 12 months for the extras to show up. It's not fair that I can spam new commandoes right away.
(
Note: if you see a war coming ahead of time, you may want to start your ground troop production pipelines ahead of time. The mod(s) will be friendly to further scaling-up of recruitment
within a large pipeline that’s already running, even if it’s in a hurry- once you’ve started drastically expanding your recruitment infrastructure, it’s pretty easy to
keep expanding it.)
Related Question: Superheavy Ground Unit Construction
Superheavy ground units (ones worth a meaningful fraction of a point in their own right) are a thorny question when it comes to build rules. The best I can come up with is to default to a “no rules rule:” If you have them, build them at a reasonable rate, consistent with some concept of ‘production lines’ and prototyping. Don’t just pull tons of stuff out of a hat in an instant as soon as you decide to spend the money on it, and everything should be fine.
