The Klingons explicitly have a shipbuilding style that makes hulls much tougher physically than ours, at the cost of ???. Even the K'tinga, which is puny compared to an Excelsior, has superior Hull values to an Excelsior.
I suspect that Oneiros may be trying to back up a bit from the extremely high stats he gave some very low-tonnage Klingon and Romulan ships early in the game in favor of more proportionate figures. If so, this battleship MIGHT hit Hull 10, MAYBE, but not much above it in my opinion.
He is. Last I know of this nerfing is this:
I've definitely been considering nerfing them. I think the D7 is about right, but the BoP should be nowhere near that durability in hindsight. I'd probably actually be more savage in my cuts on that, although I'll compensate Rommie fleet numbers a little to go with it. The K'tinga's durability does need to drop, though just how far is the question. Minimum -1 H+L.
Furthermore, the Cardassians had numerous Jalduns and Kaldars in service when we met them around 2305, and we haven't seen a single solitary specimen of whatever cruiser class they had before the Jaldun. This strongly suggests that the class(es) has been in service since the early 2390s or even longer.
Small correction: We weren't even aware of the Kaldar when we first met the Cardassians. We don't know when the Kaldar entered service. The most we know is that they were in production in 2308:
There is another heavy asset that we have discovered during the last year, however. The USS T'Mir has intercepted footage of a modified Jaldun, which has had an additional combat module added to it, and larger nacelles, a heavier-hitting, faster ship known as a Kaldar. We are distributing an advisory to the fleet that the Kaldar is to be avoided by all ships below an Excelsior.
I'm not sure that the expected number of failures integrated over the 2-3 years it takes a crew to hit Blooded is actually greater than the expected number of failures integrated over the 5-7 (?) years it seems to take for a crew to hit Veteran, or the 10 (?) years it seems to take for a crew to hit Elite. That's especially true for the Excelsior-As, which already have +1 in most of their relevant stats.
I'm not so sure on those numbers - would need to check.
But even so, it would be naive to simply integrate total event failures over the expected span of blooded/veteran/elite time, because a higher rate of earlier successes is more important than a higher and longer rate of later ones. This is particularly true of pp rewards and avoiding diplomatic failures (*cough* Sydraxians and Licori *cough*).
By a similar argument the endlessly growing pool of regular fleet crew is silly. We know that the model of crew in the game is oversimplified because we've been explicitly told that we can get more crew by having better medical rehabilitation and retention rates. A 'unit' of crew is continuously gaining and losing people, and the Academy's rate of graduating new Starfleet recruits is obviously a good deal higher than the naive number you'd get by adding up all the crew units added to our pool that year and multiplying by 50.
Okay, keep in mind this in the context of ship caps. If there's an EC ship cap, as advocated by some, then we're likely going to hit that cap faster than we hit a cap for non-EC ships.
Say, if the cap is 12 concurrent FYMs (for 4 FYM logs per month), then we're projected to hit that by 2321.
In contrast, our effective combat cap is 350+100 (350 base, 10*10 from available militarization) and is expected to grow another 60 by 2321 due to all the member ratifications, for a total of 410+100. We're not projected to hit that until about a decade from now.
Personally, I'd understand it if Oneiros caps the # FYMs just to be able to write event briefs on all them, but I also understand that it would make in-game sense to keep expanding the Explorer Corps at the current rate. It's basically an OOC vs IC trade-off here.
I do think we need
some sort of mechanism to deal with insane crew surpluses in any pool, as we're already starting to see in our tech crew.
Basically, because academy expansions have to be paid for far in advance of the time when you need "MORE CREW NOWWW!" it's kind of a big deal to get them rolling as soon as possible. Berths are a bit less pressing though they still have lead time associated with them. And quite frankly, since the Cardassians are fairly likely to attack us some time in the next 5-6 years, we're going to need a lot of repair space, especially since with all those new cruiser berths it's fairly clear that THEY have ample space to repair damaged ships.
We technically do have ways to buy crew for pp via the EC recruitment drive, although it: a) costs pp, and b) requires launching a FYM in lieu of a garrison Excelsior to "free up" standard crew in a roundabout way.
We also know that there are emergency options to rapidly recruit during a crisis. See the Arcadian Crisis options:
- Starfleet Reserve Personnel (20pt from Starfleet, +20 O/E/T for duration of SoE only, one-time)
- Starfleet Recruiting Campaign - +2 O / +2 E / +2 T in 1 Qtr
But otherwise, I agree that's still important not to neglect academy expansions. Just in this particular case, with Chen's bonus going extinct soon, more berths is a bit more important. Fortunately, we should be able to afford both.
My own view is that we should build a mix of Renaissances and either Miranda-As (if crew is very tight or war is expected within 1-2 years) or Constellation-As (if special resources are very tight and the enlisted crew pool looks solid). Centaur-As are good substitutes for Miranda-As if our resource income is solid enough to permit it.
Once Keplers become available for mass production there will be no further reason to build Constellation-As and little further reason to build Centaur-As... but that's a pretty distant planning horizon for us, in that we have time to build at least two complete waves of escort/cruiser hulls between then and now.
It still bothers me that Centaurs are barely in consideration. I don't think ANY Centaurs are being constructed now, or are even planned to be constructed across the whole Federation. That's pretty bad for a ~2297-designed ship* that was originally intended to supersede the Miranda, before being repurposed to have the two frigate classes fit in moderately different niches.
It's been exactly a decade since the Centaur-A refit project was started (2306) and a dozen years since the refit project was available as an option (2304). I really really hope we get a Centaur-B refit project, if anything to keep the same stats yet drop the SR costs - it's badly needed for the Centaur to remain relevant. I know it seems weird to request to a Centaur-B before a Miranda-B, but we did get the Miranda-A later than the Centaur-A and the Miranda-A a still a very relevant design.
* Did you know that the
Centaur prototype was also a pair build alongside the
Yukikaze? That's the only way it could work for there only to have 2 Centaurs in the whole fleet, and both finish at the same time by 2302.
