Emiricol wrote:Very good points. And some good ideas that might be useful for Galaxies. I see how what I'm going for isn't really in line with what is needed from a core rulebook, though.
I ended up pushing my Variants off to the optional rules for the same reason; too many options. It's kind of like the three tech rules that I had highlighted in the rules (tech trading, operating alien units, and reverse engineering) -- they are rules that I'd probably always use, and that I included in the 2E book, but that are probably overboard for what new players would want to deal with. I'm fine with moving those to another location and keeping them optional.
It ends up being a painful balancing act trying to figure out what is a "core" rule and what isn't, so the constant back and forth and reorganization battles that you've been privy to!
So, I wanted a system with a lot of refits. But occasionally you get a class that is just the perfect workhorse. You don't want to pay escalating maintenance costs by abandoning its upgrade program, nor do you want to replace a good design. Time for a Fleet Overhaul, bringing the manufacturing plant up to modern standards so you can keep building the design, just better than it would be with a simple Refit.
From a game play perspective, I think that escalating maintenance costs for older designs would end up actually
penalizing tech advancement to the point that players would just not invest at all to prevent them their older units from being hit with a maintenance penalty. It creates a negative feedback loop that is almost as bad as some situations where players ignore tech advancement because they can just prototype whatever units they want at any time.
That's where my idea came from for a cumulative penalty of some sort for old designs unless you refit each era; refits are a stopgap measure as you bring out newer ship designs; and old workhorses can be refit and built new with now-current technology.
The thing is, these older units already have a penalty of sorts in that they are not as efficient as newer units, while still occupying the same "space" in a task force or army. That qualitative advancement is enough to reflect that they are not as good as their modern equivalents.
Now, the second hand of that equation is I think the crux of the discussion, and that is allowing you to upgrade the workhorse classes and keep them relevant. Let's say we have a light cruiser called the Ascension (Era 0, Cost 6, Maint 2/4, DV 4, AS 4, AF 3, CV 1, CR 4, CC 2). We are starting the game in Era I, but with no units unlocked (default rule). At this point, after a tech advancement trigger we would be able refit/upgrade the Ascension to Era I. This new ship would gain +2 CP, probably going 1 each into DV and CR. Then comes the economic penalty. If we have a +2 Cost per refit/upgrade, based on the unit's CC, that would increase the Ascension-II to Cost 8. With this construction cost it would cost 4 EP to refit an existing Ascension-I into an Ascension-II.
The ship is now 33% more expensive than normal. This makes it cost more to repair and refit. It also requires more construction capacity, a consequence of the growing inefficiencies of the class.
Continuing this example, in Era II this empire decides to "overhaul" the class and has a new unit class called the Providence take its place. This new ship still only costs 6 points, and is a much better CL to boot. Rather than upgrade the Ascension-II again (at an additional +2 Cost penalty), they instead decide to refit the remaining Ascensions into Providence cruisers. The Providence has a cost of 6, so it costs 3 EP each to refit the ships.
Now, instead of the +CC Cost modifier, we could have done a +1 Maint. This might still be cleaner, except that it would make the upgrades of questionable value. Gaining +2 CP for a one time +2 Cost is something you might choose to do, but paying +1/4 EP per turn for a +2 CP is not really cost effective and outside of emergency situations I don't think too many players would do it. The Cost modifier has the other positive side effect that this is more about refitting the existing ships to the new standard rather than producing large numbers of the aging class. You're just trying to get another few years of useful life out of the hulls after all.
But, I am seeing more and more that a lot of this belongs as a house rule, not core rules. Hopefully there's some useful ideas in all that for the Galaxies CG, though
House rules are by nature optional rules, and there is always a strong intersection between what players want to do in the rules. I'm just being obnoxiously stubborn and debating around in circles because I think this is a point that SHOULD be addressed in some way, as you're definitely not going to be the only person that's going to want to do that. The conundrum for me is then figuring out how we can achieve that in such a way that players would choose to do so. The cost-to-effect issue becomes key there.
I need to work through the logic again, but if this was tied to getting that second tech advancement each year (or as a separate cost equal to your tech advancement requirement), it would limit the number of upgrades that you could do, preventing you from upgrading absolutely everything.
BTW, I am using the term "upgrade" more here because we already have Refit rules for changing one class into another that exist for situations where you have two units of the same type (CT, DD, etc.) and you want to convert one into the other. That way we prevent some confusion on the mechanical terminology.
On the flipside of all this, the higher construction costs and cost to refit would make free availability of upgrades not a serious issue in a lot of cases. So it might be fine to make them freely available, too. Or tie them to the first tech advance instead of the second each year. It is something that would really need to be tested, but I can see it being a good stop-gap as you said for those situations where you need to get a better ship out fast and you can't wait for your tech to catch up.
I guess once concern if they were freely available is that on the first turn of the game you'd be able to insta-upgrade all of your classes to Era I, which doesn't feel right. At that point gating it behind some tech advancement is probably the right answer.