If ship mothballied, it consume less MSP (x0.1 for example) and cannot move, shoot, use sensors/shields/hangars. You still need Maintenance Facilities to maintain this ship. All the fuel, MSP, ammo, cargo, troops, crew, officers and parasites also unloaded from the ship.
Ship’s Shields, Thermal signature, Deploy and crew Grade and Training is set to 0. Ship’s Maint increases by 2.0 (or more, maybe 10.0). This means that you are not going to use the ship for at least 2 (10) years, so maintenance MSP savings exceeds the cost of overhaul.
Mothballing is only possible at shipyards, It costs only Wealth, as resources (MSP) will be consumed on overhaul. You can only activate or scrap mothballied ship.
Summary:
The ship consumes much less MSP on maintenance;
The ship cannot perform any actions at all;
You need at least 1 Construction Cycle (5 Days) to activate/deactivate 1 ship;
Multiple activates/deactivates required slipways;
After conservation you’ll need to spend time on overhaul and crew training;
The ship will probably become obsolete by the time it is activated and will need to be upgraded.
We’ve talked circles around various mothballing suggestions for years, but I do like the idea of requiring shipyard time to activate/deactivate a ship, so that you can’t just do a whole fleet at once. I would go even farther and make the cost of activating a mothballed ship in a shipyard equal to 5 or 10 percent of its cost and take a matching amount of time.
Mothballing isn’t really in modern parlance anymore, and space is much worse than a mothball harbour. IF anything, it should be a installation which can be built, and then needs to be have its max tonnage and max ships number increased. So like a shipyard, just different. Mothballing a ship is a “job” that takes a “slip” of so much tonnage. Total tonnage and number of slips determined manpower crewing of facility.
The major roadblock that the pro-mothballing community keeps hitting their heads against has been a mechanic which makes it infeasible to mothball new-build vessels while making it useful to mothball old vessels. This was a serious problem in Starfire, which Aurora was developed from/inspired by, and is a primary reason we no longer have mothball mechanics in Aurora.
In the real world, we have various pressures beyond the military situation that govern this. If the USN built a shiny new supercarrier and immediately sent it to mothballs for a rainy day, the U.S. Congress would be quite upset and probably would reduce the naval budget for the next FY. Well, maybe not the current bunch, but in general … The point is, real naval powers build warships to be used for something, not to sit in a dockyard somewhere gathering dust.
In Aurora, we have neither the political pressures to discourage mothballing of new ships nor do we have mechanics for most of the peacetime (or “peacetime”) missions that modern navies undertake. We have “anti-piracy patrols” in the form of colony garrisons to fight off Raiders but that is about it. No showing the flag, no strategic SSBM patrols, even the training mechanic is more difficulty than it’s worth.
Because of this, any solution to the roadblock has been, in practice, arbitrary and mechanically contrived in ways that make them unsuitable for all but a narrow window of roleplay settings (e.g., “ships must be older than X years” or “ships must be Y tech levels below the current one”).
For what it’s worth, while I am not pro-mothballs I personally like those ideas which require using shipyard slipways the best of any I’ve seen so far. However, even these ideas have not solved the problem stated above.
I think the passive training rate is fine as it is. It means long-serving ships and crews matter, and for ships not fully trained the effects of fire delays are … present? Non-zero? Honestly, I think there should be larger effects but I understand why many players would not prefer that.
FWIW, what turns me off from the training mechanic is not the management (which is a bit annoying but manageable), but rather the costs. Training a couple of decent-size fleets will eat all of your fuel and MSP within a couple of years.
I’m in favour of removing active training, I do use it but it has alot of cost and it is easy to forget about the ships for a bit and then start taking damage, so I often only use it for my main fleets.
I quite like the mothball proposals here, it would be quite useful for slow games with reduced research rates where you end up with generations of ships for longer and therefore the ships are more useful and mothballing some that aren’t needed as much to reduce upkeep would be nice. I like the thought of having a facility a bit like when Steve added the repair yard, could be a similar vein with either you need to get it up to size to maintain ships and it can be unlimited parallel or you don’t add size and have to add “slipways” for each mothballed ships. I think these should be cheaper than normal shipyard size/slipway.
One option for mothballing might be an SY task (including Repair Yards) to ‘mothball’ the ship. It then becomes inactive (can’t move, can’t fight). The maintenance clock still increases, but at half rate and you don’t suffer maintenance failures. To reactivate requires a new SY task equivalent to overhauling it back to zero maintenance clock.
So if you store a ship for four years, the maintenance clock is two years and it will take about six months to reactivate it. If you store for ten years, it will take fifteen months to reactivate.
That would be more similar to a real world situation where you put the ship mothballs with the expectation you won’t need it, but it is there for emergencies. Even then, it will be a strategic reactivation in terms of time involved, not a tactical one. See ChatGPT response below. BTW, this option still doesn’t solve the ‘build into mothballs’ exploit.
Mothballing is a popular practice in Space Empires IV. I use it only when I don’t have the minerals to keep ships active. I’ve never seen it as a useful technique for fleet management.
In Aurora, I’m not sure if I would ever use it. There are too many other important game features I’m trying to come to grips with.
To be honest, I wouldn’t worry too much about the “exploit”, it is SP and anyone can simply turn on SM mode at anytime and “create” a new ship anyway. IF that is somebody’s version of “fun” not much anyone else can do about it…
Yeah, I never use active training anymore either, it’s just not worth the hassle. And mothballing is unnecessary as I’ve said before. Just increase your maintenance capacity. If you can’t, then stop building new ships until you can.
Since ships in Military Hangar do not consume MSP ( Message #543 by Eretic_KB – #Quick Questions ), technically, it is possible to carry out something like mothballing by building stations consisting of only hangars.
But my idea was to reduce MSP consumption even more (hangars require MSP) for ships that you WON’T be using. For example, for old survey ships, the first warships, and so on. This is more important for RP than for actual gameplay.
If you want to use this to create a huge fleet of battleships with minimal resource consumption for maintenance or something similar, you could simply disable maintenance in game settings or use SM mode.
“Mothballing” with hangars requires knowing that it’s possible, so maybe I’ve just given someone the idea of abusing this mechanic. Sorry about that.
Mothballing comes up pretty freuquently. Generally the feedback is: how do you build this feature in such a way that it isn’t always the best thing to do (eg there are costs and consequences) and it enhances gameplay.
I don’t think we, as a community, have cracked the code for this one yet. I think the closest we got was maybe requiring an overhaul to unmothball them or something like that.
Despite sometimes struggling with MSP production, I’m generally not in favor of mothball mechanics.
Ships in overhaul consume more MSP than normal, but if the overhaul was made slow enough (with unrest penalties or insufficient maintenance facilities), it might end up using less MSP than normal. That’s the closest I can think of to mothballing in the current game.
I guess you could also transfer them to a second player race who has a gigantic MSP stockpile, so the ship still uses MSP, just not yours.
I personally dont think a mothball mechanic is needed at all. In the real world, brand new vessels require a significant shake-down period coming before entering active service. It’s not just crew training, its a long series of checks and tests to verify things are working the way the blueprint says it should. Brand new equipment needs break-in time, then certification that its working properly and in the hands of people that are using it correctly.
A huge part of the benefit of mothballing is the assumption that most of that is already done. The goal of mothballing is to make re-activation faster and cheaper than the shake-down period of a brand new vessel.
Aurora doesn’t have that problem. You can send a ship straight from the yard directly into battle the same day, crew training aside.
To me, the pressures that led to the very concept of mothball fleets simply don’t exist in the aurora universe beyond “I want a really cheap fleet available for the next NPR I find”.
I was looking through MAJCOM command divisions and I think a good compromise with mothballing might be a new Admin Command for Reserve. Vessels in the Reserve Command could be limited to speeds of 100 km/s (so redeployment is still technically possible for slow in system transfers) but add 1.00 of the Engineering bonus only just as Training Command adds 1.00 of Fleet Training.
This gives benefits reduced maintenance needs your commander but still has a penalty that you don’t want to just shove your newest best ships right into reserve.
A more programming intensive (I assume) but perhaps better solution than the 100 km/s speed limit would be to restrict the speed and orders available to vessels within the Reserve command, say to only be able to move in system between colonies with population.
I’m trying to ask this in a way that doesn’t sound fussy, so forgive me if I miss the mark. I think the question is: what problem are you trying to solve?
A lot of people want a way to keep a big fleet at low cost so when trouble shows up they have a fleet ready to go. From a game mechanic standpoint there would be no real bad side and so Steve is unlikely to implement something without a compelling game design and reason behind it. MSP and maintenance are part of the design - and you can opt out easily at any time. You can also use SM to just add a bunch of MSP at a designated “mothball” planet (you could fire up a nice maintenance station to handle the load without a population requirement). And then you can use your own internal headcanon about what constraints you might have on using those ships again.
So. There is a way to do this for RP reasons that’s quite straightforward. And for non RP reasons it’s not clear what problem one solves other than to reduce the impact of a key game constraint.
Remember. The real enemy in Aurora is logistics, not NPRs.
In Aurora, the player is always seeking to expand his or her empire. The powerful, modern ships would be out on the borders, seeking out new life and new resources. Obsolete ships would still have some duties behind the borders, escorting harvesters or patrolling the inner systems. I can’t see a situation where old ships would simply be placed on a shelf. Maybe if the entire galaxy has been conquered and all potential threats eliminated, but how many of us ever find ourselves in a galaxy at peace?
