Extended Construction Times

[Tyrel Lohr]

How many players use the 1E Extended Construction Time rules that were made standard in 2E? I know Jay and I always seemed to use at least some version of them. I did the Construction Cost / 2, and he often used the straight Construction Cost = # of turns to build (especially in his Wing Commander games).

The original 1E rules just assumed that you built everything immediately for the sake of ease of play. But reading through some of the old drafts made me wonder what preference other players had.

[wadewan]

Probably alone on this but my construction times are comparable to today's current naval build times of 1-3 years depending on vessel size in my campaign.

[murtalianconfederacy]

(neo-Luddite here )

I always went without construction times for two main reasons:

1) Sometimes I had a break of a couple of days between turns, and a ship building sometimes got lost. There were plenty of times in my campaigns that I lost ships (or had more ships than there should be) without construction times, and construction times would have made this worse.

2) I never really got when the ships were completed (a curious blindspot but it was there). Let's use an example 8EP CA with orders to build on 2500.12, with build time of 4 turns:

2500.12: ship ordered
2501.01: 1/4
2501.02: 2/4
2501.03: 3/4
2501.04: 4/4

Now here's the confusion. Some of the campaign diaries I read (typically yours, Tyrel ) had the ship the next turn just say "Example CA (c)", and then the next turn it was moved into a fleet. So, carrying from the previous example, it would say:

2501.05: (c)
2501.06: ship moved to Home Fleet

Does this mean the ship is ready to move/fight, etc., in 2501.05, or 2501.06?

[Tyrel Lohr]

It looks like the Luddites are winning, so I wouldn't be too concerned

As for the example there, murtalian, the construction advancement occurs during the Construction Phase each turn, so it should go something like this:

2500.12: ship ordered, 1/4
2501.01: 2/4
2501.02: 3/4
2501.03: 4/4, completed during Construction Phase and ready for orders next turn

But I could definitely see pushing construction times back to the optional rules if not enough players really used them, or if they just found them confusing.

[aelius]

I like construction times and typically use the extended.
It makes large ships more valuable. After all, you not only have to invest resources but shipyard time as well. Makes those capital ships something you don't want to lose.
If its just money then losing them becomes much less painful.