Actually I was thinking the same thing, you should be able to scale it back down. But, so people can't just due it willy nilly strap on some costs and make it so that it has 'de-research' for a fairly long time, making it so that the player still has to pay the upkeep for a bit AND the added cost for 'de-grading' the system.

Add a slider in addition to the tech. You can research the tech to unlock larger fleet sizes. Then you have a slider below it. You can move the slider up and down, the minimum being 0 upkeep but no tech enhancements and the top being maxed out with 70% upkeep (75?). You set a point on the slider that you want. The point you want does not represent where things actually are. Instead there is a secondary value shown behind it (Like a media player on youtube, there is a slide for what is loaded and where you want to be) that slowly creeps up and down until it hits where you want it to be.

So lets say I had all the fleet upgrades and my entire fleet just got whompped in a 8 way FFA. Well then I slide the slider down to 0% upkeep and start building ships. However I still keep paying large amounts of upkeep until it creeps back down over a couple minutes.

The slider should allow you to set a point less than what you currently have (Say you are using 500 fleet points but you only want 400) but it won't move under 500 until ships are scuttled or blown up.

Windexglow, I think that is a cop out to avoid discussion of if it is broken, if it is good desirable behavior and how to fix it if the answer is yes.

Mixed bunch of replies I see!

What I'd like is the ability to "scuttle" the fleet upfleet cost. Even if you get no money when scuttling and have to research them again at a later date that would be fine.

As it stands, I was 2 hours into the game. We had a huge battle and an enemy slipped down the side of the map and wiped out all my resources. My ally had a fleet at home so battled them off whilst I fought the main battle which I ultimately lost. By the time my ships were dead my ally was at the front and the enemy retreated.

Now in any normal game (as lets remember its a game not real life!) you could spend time rebuilding your empire whilst the enemies are fighting you back again. Would have taken me a while but it may have been possible if my ally could hold out.

However what happened is I was unable to build anything at all. I had two planets left with a negative amount of credits so was stuck on zero. My ally was doing his best to help me out but everytime I received money it went to zero pretty quickly.

After an hour of only being able to build a few frigates I just quit the game as it was pointless. So then my ally shortly quit too as it was 2v1.

For all those saying that the fleet upfleet cost is realistic however - think about it. I'd lost all my structures so what is there to upkeep! I had no buildings!! We managed to hold off the final attack against my homeworld but what was the point if I couldnt do anythng afterwards anyway!

I'd have to agree to some limited scaling back of upkeep costs when you lose a fleet, with a fairly slow decay and a cap on how low it can go. For example, let's say you have a maxed out fleet at the highest supply level- which will take the full 75% upkeep. Later, you fight a massive fleet battle, which costs you your entire fleet. At this point, I would be for having the supply costs begin slowly falling to around 50% upkeep. While you still should pay a hefty premium for the potential fleet capacity of 2000, you shouldn't be paying 75% of your entire economy for an actual fleet of around 200. I'm also opposed to immediate decay, because you should be punished for losing a fleet- just not as much as the game currently does.

I would also support the idea of no decay occurring until your fleet (plus queued ships) falls two supply brackets below your actual level. This way, if you only have a few losses, you don't benefit from the reduced supply costs. To put it in the supply line model, this would simulate the supply lines only scaling back for a serious reduction in the size of the fleet. I also wouldn't mind seeing this scaling back as an expensive, high-level tech along the lines of "Adaptable Supply Doctrine".

LOL... yes, the player should be punished for sacrificing his/her fleet. The point is that if you *know* you're going to lose your fleet, you have to retreat BEFORE that happens.

In war, unlike most RTS games, knowing when to retreat is as important as knowing how to win. "Live to fight another day," as the old saying goes!

The fleet upkeep is a bit annoying, but I tend not to max it out until I am know it's the big, final push. Keep it a couple notches less, so even if the opponent has a bigger fleet, you have the economy to replenish your fleet more quickly.

Hey, it's only been 3 weeks... it takes time to adjust and learn Sin's deeper game play.

And sometimes you suffer crushing blows trying to defend a strategic and *important* location.

Then the rest of the army goes "REMEMBER THE (insert place of crushing defeat) to rally and inspire the rest of the army that wasn't at that place.

The simple fact is, your empire should not be crushed because your army got hit in the arm with a sledgehammer. There should be viable methods of recovering from a crushing defeat, since not all defeats come at the hands of idiots wantonly throwing ships about.

Well, if it was like a loss at Pearl Harbour, then I hope your cap ships survived. But I do agree that the actual fleet size should factor (partially) into the upkeep equation.

I've been mulling over a few possibilities, and the one I favour is right-clicking to back-track on upkeep upgrades. Having to repay the price and upgrade time should be enough of a penalty, IMHO. Not that my opinion matters anyway.

I would like to see the fleet supply upgrages happen automatically. You could build more ships and pay more for your fleet, or lose a couple ships and slip back down to the next lowest level.

Those only go so far when the majority of the TEC's massive income is absolutely decimated by the massive upkeep levels you incur. Likewise, if a vasari player has RA, they don't care about upkeep, so they stop using the black market and start upgrading their fleet to max, since they can produce free ships (except, no siege frigates ). In this scenario, if both armies are at max fleet, the vasari will have the advantage just due to the absolutely massive advantage RA has over any other economy imaginable (what with getting 50 free fleet worth in ships (potentially) every 6 minutes per gate built). Not even TEC's ability to produce ships at a lightning pace can keep up with the vasari once they get RA ramped up to full.

That said, PE also scales best when more players are in the game, which causes the vasari advantage to be best in 1v1 games against TEC, whereas TEC get better and better as more players are present.



Perhaps, instead of just being an either/or thing, they make it so fleet starts to slowly bleed off upkeep if the cost is dramatically lower, with the ability to unlearn the fleet upgrade for a dramatically faster change if you so need it?



This would also be somewhat acceptable, though would work best if the max allowed fleet upgrade was somewhat tied into another research ability. Such as, you cannot get rank 8 upkeep unless you have a rank 8 research in one of the other things learned, or if you have 14+ capitol ships built. Capitol ships should also benefit from this change (auto-scaling)

The only problem with this method, however, is the game was designed around needing to research increasing the upkeep cost, which is why I prefer an "auto-scaling" method most.

My recommendation is to keep the current tech structure but have the tax fluctuate down one step if your fleet size is less then what the current step provided in fleet logistics value in the current step.

For example, If I am at level 6 in my supply which gives me say 800 points and the difference between step 5 and 6 is 200 additional supply points. If I have more than 200 supply points available (which means that I have lost ships since the upgrade), I would pay the step 5 upkeep cost instead of step 6's. Once my logistics supply went below 200 (which would mean that I am now in step 6 supply step) I would start paying the upkeep cost for step 6.

Since you can only go down one step max regardless of unused supply points, there isn't any "cheating" especially in the end game the lowest you would be supporting is ~53% then when you rebuild your fleet the upkeep goes back to your max level.

If it were up to me, I would split the difference between upkeep and actual ships fielded.

Right now, when you research the first fleet cap upgrade, it costs you 9% of your economy. I would make 3% a constant effect from the research itself to represent general overhead. I would then balance out the remaining 6% to come from the 270 points of ships themselves, each ship having a small cost per second applied to your overall economy.

This would allow another method for balancing ships and races. I would make 50 points of cap ships cost a little less per second than 50 points of cruisers, which would cost a little less than 50 points of frigates. This would encourge people to invest in cap ship crews so they can field cheaper fleets, and discourage early frigate spams because they would delay getting to the mid game. I wouldn't want this to be so major as to nerf frigates, just enough to tip the scales a little in favor of cap ships, and away from frigate spam. It seems logical that a bunch of little ships would require more logistical support that one big one anyway.

Then, you would always have to pay the 3% per tech level, but if you took major losses in a big battle, your economy wouldn't be so bogged down that you can't ever recover. This could also help re-tune the Vasari's Dark Fleet so they're not entirely 'free' (they'd have to take over the upkeep per second on the arrived ships), and TEC's huge economy advantage and fast build times which lets them prevail in a war of attrition all other things being equal.

Sounds like a lot of complexity in all these solutions! Which decreases the chance of any changes coming...

Like most of these things, people will always prefer different options, so I would suggest a simple checkbox option in the game start screen, called "Proportional Upkeep"

Checked means researching the higher upkeep allows your MAXIMUM fleet to get to that higher level, but the REAL upkeep is based on actual fleet size.

Unchecked means upkeep works as it does now.


If the above is too hard, the other option is that the research just 'unlocks' that level of upkeep, but you can select any of the lower levels of upkeep at any time. Some may say that's too simplistic, but for any chance of fighting back if you lose most of your ships, you need that cash to get back on foot.

Cheers guys