[modhat on]
Dark Hellion wrote:I would think that if I could produce 500 Destroyer Escorts at $25 in a bit under two months...
That's the thing. You can't. Not on my watch, anyway.
See, suppose you use a swarm of 30 25-pt Destroyer Escorts (DEs) to take on a single 500-pt enemy battleship. You'll lose a ton of DEs, destroy the battleship... and
theoretically, you could replace the twenty or so DEs you'd lost in the battle within two months, while the battleship would take years to replace. Do that often enough and you'd win the war by default, just because you can replace heavy naval casualties faster than your enemy can.
Which is, obviously, a huge balance issue. Every time this has been discussed (including conversations between me and Steve
before game start, as I recall), the consensus was that if you try this kind of thing, mod-imposed realism constraints will kick in. You know, sort of like the penalties I smacked CN with for his retarded 'upgrade' scheme?
For most nations, high casualty rates cause morale issues. Also decline in crew quality, because too many of the veteran ship crews get killed in action and have to be replaced by newbies on the new construction, with not enough experienced trainers to go around. For nations where 'morale' and 'training' are
supposedly not an issue because each warship is an identical robot produced on an assembly line, other factors must and will be brought into play.
Now, this is not to say your nation can't make a practice of swarming large ships with small ones. That's totally legitimate. But you cannot do this to gain a mechanical advantage over someone who prefers to build large ships by exploiting the construction timetables- if you try, the mods will step in to keep the advantage thus gained from becoming decisive.
So if you commission a massive production run of 200 25-point ships, you should not (and, with modhat on, I say 'will not') receive them all at once in two months' time, when a fleet of battleships of equal cost would take years to build. You will receive the ships spaced out over a longer period of time, to reflect that no plausible industrial system would choose to build the 200 ships
in parallel.
The individual ships may only take two months to finish; that just means you'll get them spaced out in several waves over the next year or two.
By the same token, if you commission 200 25-point land superbattleships, you will not get them all at once in two years' time; you will get them spaced out at reasonable intervals over the entire period of construction. As a preliminary, I'd say that when you build superelite ground units, you get none at all for the first several months, because you need a minimum time to build the long-lead items and do systems integration on the first ones to roll off the assembly line. Once those first several months have passed, you can start turning out new units at a fairly steady pace, just as a real-life tank or aircraft factory would.
I just feel that if anything the production rules should favor ground forces just because past experiences with STGODs have shown that naval dickwaving is bad for story progression. Currently, $1 of army is more precious that $100 of space ship, which is silly all things considered.
Well, 1$ of army is a damn sight cheaper, but takes longer to replace.
I don't think there's a problem with handwaving rapid replacement of
light casualties: lose 5$ of ground troops out of a 10000$ army, and you'll be able to make up the difference just by tacking up a few more recruitment posters and having a few factory workers do overtime. But casualties in a ground engagement the size of a large planetary battle, those should take a while to replace- just as it took time to reequip historical armies in situations where they lost large amounts of manpower or equipment (like Dunkirk, for instance).
