Are they fixing the fleet upkeep cost problem in 1.03?

This isn't something that needs to be "fixed". You have put together all the infrastructure, officer corps, supply fleets, etc. necessary to maintain a fleet of that size. Just because you had a bunch of your ships blown up doesn't mean that all goes away.

I'm glad they leave the #s the way they are. Makes it an important decision to upgrade your fleet capacities. If it automatically adjusted based on how many ships you actually had in service, there'd be no reason not to max it out asap.

Yeah this is intentional!

The problem with this logic is, you're assuming you can't scale back logistics.

Though the argument is valid (if I don't have the fleet, I still have to pay for the back end) you still have to deal with the fact that, if I am not using the fuel trucks, why am I paying to have them maintained?

My tanks don't exist, they don't need to be maintained, they don't need to be refueled, I don't need to refuel or maintain maintenance trucks aside from keeping them at the ready. That is a lot of money being saved.

The upkeep cost shouldn't be a one to one "I have X of Y fleet, so I should pay a percentage of the max upkeep"

However, the upkeep does need to scale back as I lose more and more ships. My entire army may be lost, and my back end logistics may still be alive, but dammit it costs significantly less to maintain "nothing" and the backend for the max fleet cap than it does to maintain the max fleet cap with the logistics.

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.

What they need to do is have a option to scale back the fleet resources. This would be a downgrade that would cost money(half the upgrade cost maybe?). This would allow for a more dynamic fleet size/cost. People demilitarize all the time. In times of war/peace it would make sense to have this scalable at a cost.

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.

However, that is also at modern day standards, where we don't have space ships or cars that can whip across planets in fractions of the time that it takes people currently.

Though there is truth to this, after everything is halted, it would start to fall downwards to meet the current demands, which is a definite viability and is much more feasible when things can get done in a fraction of the time it takes currently.

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'm glad they have it this way; other whys games would last even longer, and adds some strategy to thinking ahead.

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.

I agree with a decaying fleet logistic cost(but each upgrade should have a base cost as well- (a minimum payment to support the infra-structure). This makes the most sense IMHO.

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

No it must remain this way. Any change is not acceptable. If all you do is spam ships and trow them into the fire, you deserve to lose.

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).

While it makes sense to be able to scale down infrastructure, should one be able to scale it back up for free again? One possible solution is for one to be able to de-tech the fleet logistic upgrades for little to no cost (but no refund either). That way one can stand a reasonable chance of rebuilding after a big loss... but they will need to rebuild all the infrastructure too.

Choosing to remove infrastructure should be a hard decision... the military isn't going to arbitrarily delete the rank of "Sergeant" in times of peace, then re-instate it in times of war... things don't work like that.

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

Disagree completely with OP for two reasons.

A) Games would go on longer than they already do. Losing your fleet has to mean something. Without these upkeep costs you could crank out an entire replacement army in a matter of minutes.
It forces you to make a tough decision in upgrading your fleet size.

Upkeep is good as is.

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.

Why can't you just "scuttle" fleet upgrades and recover some costs.

Then when you want to expand your fleet again, you have to pay the usual fees/time to do so.

That makes sense to me.

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

Look at all the ships the US keeps mothballed, all those plane airframes out in Arizona and the gear stored in armories. They cost money to maintain but a fraction of what a operating unit does. They don't need fuel, armaments, crew or anything. Just a routine check on a set schedule to make sure it's not sinking, rusting or dusty. I'd prefer a upkeep where there is a minimum you have to pay for this logistic capacity, and the rest of the cost depends on your actual Operational units in the field.

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.

I definately don't think that you shouldn't pay a penalty for having massive fleet supply but no fleet, but I also don't think you should pay full price for something not getting used. A flat rate for total supply + a percentage or multiplier for used supply would be nice like I've seen in some posts here.

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.

I'm in agreement that a change should be made here for several reasons.

1) It's utterly unrealistic as-is for the reasons mentioned above. Disabling unused supply chains costs money, yes, but certainly is possible.

2) Late game, it's just stupid for a massive empire to be crippled by a single large battle loss (or even a victory with heavy losses!). Unrealistic again, but even worse than that, at endgame anything less than total victory is essentially a crushing loss of irreplaceable harware. The game might last a bit longer if a change was made, yes, but as it stands, after a big loss people often just quit. And why not? At huge upkeep levels and with half your fleet left, it's essentially a foregone conclusion that you are dead on your feet. There would be tons more room to strategize, even as the underdog, if this silliness were corrected. And this room to strategize and rebuild is necessary if we want the game to remain dynamic after just a few big battles.