Fleet upkeep/research

I feel there is a problem with the fleet upkeep system. Once you research to increase your fleet size, you can never lower your upkeep. I think that at each descrete level of ships there should be a separate upkeep amount. If you get in a battle and lose all your ships it doesnt make any sense for you to be paying an upkeep. It not only makes sense but will help people recover when they lose battles. I dont know if I posted this in the right section, but hopefully this can be included in the next patch.

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This has been discussed quite a few times, and there are several different ways it could have been changed. But Sins' authors elected to make it so an upkeep was permanent, and that's probably for the best. If upkeep cost went down every time you lost a sizeable chunk of your fleet, players with a lot of construction facilities would be able to spam replacement ships extremely quickly, and games would last a LOT longer. Instead, the design choice was to make the upkeep process a permanent decision so you'd have to be really wise about it (unless you were playing Returning Armada strategy from Vasari, which kind of breaks it...)

-- Retro

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Perhaps, in the future, other 4X features will be added (things to spend money on 'besides' combat, that is) that will reduce the runaway economy players tend to wind up with late in the game.

I also dislike the upkeep system the way it is. I just don't feel that permanent, unchangable economic killers make sense. A real empire would simply mothball these sorts of mainanence facilities if they no longer had the funds to support them.

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It's actually a little closer to reality than one might think. As an empire grows and the number of bureaucrats increases, the negative-economy aspects of graft, corruption, porkbarreling, double-booking, and other facets that remove cash as it goes from one place to another continue to increase. When you have a huge fleet that's chewing up huge amounts of financing and it spans an entire solar system, suddenly mothballing that fleet and the facilities that support it doesn't instantly free up all of that cash. A big chunk would go toward the planetary governor's new limo, or the procurement officer's off-planet bank account.

I realize that not all of the funding is going to disappear into a black hole, but *some* of it would. And given interplanetary distances, I'd bet a big fraction might eventually find its way into someone's pocket, although certainly not 100% of it like in Sins.

-- Retro

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