Yeah this is intentional!

I dunno if I totally agree with the way the upkeep cost is done, but it does make sure that a player should *never ever* sacrifice his/her fleet.

In most RTSes, units are essentially disposable. In Sins, you better retreat (to a well defended planet) because to rebuild a fleet from scratch late game will be really hard.

If anyone has played Total War series, where you effectively have no reinforcements, then Sins upkeep is actually not too hard to manage.

Unfortunately, Sins is during war time and there is no peace time, so trying to scale back war resources would be really hard.

In fact, during war time, supplies that sit idle sometimes can cost more than being deployed, as the supply chain can't be halted at a moment's notice. Many supplies are ordered months in advance.

So if upkeep was to be "fixed", allowing a player to scale back should incur a significant penalty. Which probably makes it not too worthwhile.

Seems like maint would be a combo of your logistics capacity + actual fleet. So if your fleet was decimated, your maint would decrease a bit due to the lack of actual ships, but there'd still be maint, because you're still paying for the "back end".

The fact that you are so heavily committed to supporting nonexistent fleet does make it hard to rebuild if you get hit hard, and that's not entirely realistic since it's not very flexible. If your empire was gonna get wiped, you'd surely make more of an effort to fight back instead of just paying techs and supply officers to do nothing!

I think it should scale back if you lose your fleet, but only slowly, and not fully. As in if you lose half your fleet, then your supply drops by 50%, and it takes time to do so.

at most, it should not decay beyond 30% of max fleet upkeep after, say, 5-10 minutes...maybe 15.

Astax I do not think you understand what we are saying.. no one is saying they throw ships in a spam fashion.. the argument is once you have lost your fleet or a couple planets it is difficult to recover even if you manage to fight off one enemy(esp in a muti-player FFA). So instead of responding with absolutes try to defend your position with comments that address the post's concerns. I think a creative solution can be found that wont dmg the play of the game(to simply say no is counter productive and close-minded).

Idiot. Why didn't you research metal/crystal mining efficiency?

And here is the post of someone who hasn't bothered to read any of the posts.



Well, it still would. However, if I take a substantial loss (lets say 1000 fleet worth of ships get hit by advent who have rank 3 malice...yeah, that ability is beyond crap if the fleet is cluttered...anyways) and wipes out my fleet really fast, regardless of anything I can do (With malice active, you can lose a clustered fleet within 30 seconds, and a slightly spread out one in only a slightly larger amount of time) my fleet is crippled. Theoretically, I still have another 1000 fleet cap worth of ships somewhere else to help hold off the enemy, but what happens is that I still have a 75% upkeep cost with only 36.5% of the fleet cap being used.

If this happens, though the fleet upkeep should NOT jump down to 36.5, (nor should it instantly adjust in any fashion) it should, however, start to slowly trickle down to something else, such as going from 75% to 45% over the course of a few minutes.

In real life, though the logistical supply lines may not stop instantly, they still would be ramped back if they were no longer necessary. Regardless of if the military can support a larger amount, they don't need it, so they spend less, and as such produce less.

Now, what can be done is, as it goes down to 45% (again, it would never be one to one, some units would ALWAYS be left over, regardless of logistical necessity), it can also reduce maximum fleet cap, until it is, say, within 200 of what you currently have (so you can still build).

Then, as you build more, the supply lines are slowly re-engaged, upkeep slowly scales up, and available fleet cap slowly increases.


This way, if you suffer a massive defeat (regardless of if you were being an idiot or not, and regardless of your economic prowess), the upkeep will slowly scale back, and when you start to rebuild, it will slowly open back up. This way, nothing is instant, and it takes *time* for it to take effect, but it is still significantly less punishing than having 75% upkeep with only 30% actual worth of fleet remaining.

Sure, it should be a choice to get that tech, and the tech should not be un-researchable. It should still somewhat punish you if you take it when you aren't ready. However, if you take it when you are, and are just crushed because you got outplayed (or got hit by the insanity that is Malice, which really is overpowered, try it yourself) and maybe had some infrastructure destroyed in the process, you should not have a choice you made that was viable absolutely and completely crush any chance you have of future success.

I understand and like the way Sins upkeep system works
I also understand and like the WarCraft III style of scaling back on the upkeep
I also understand and like the Starcraft style of no upkeep
They change the game in different ways, just like I play different games when I am different moods.
So I propose a peaceful solution that should make everybody happy, and will keep me coming back to Sins every time instead of playing those other games I mentioned.

Upkeep Preferences (choose 1)
* Upkeep based on maximum fleet capacity
* Upkeep based on current fleet supply
* No upkeep

50% should be your infrastructure cost of the upkeep of having in theory all the fuel and supplies for that size of a fleet. he other 50% should be some formula made to figure out x amount for 1 supply.

Maybe another idea is to change the planet infrastructure to add in half the logistics supply cost as research and make the classic other 50% towards ship maintance being hardcoded.

There needs to be a way to "unresearch" the fleet caps. Of course, you'd have to build the fleet caps up again (and pay through the nose again) in order to field a huge fleet, but that's life.