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.
