If you would like to tone down your enmity and misrepresentations about what I have written, that would be great.
If that's all you have to say to me, then you could have saved time by writing "too long, didn't read." You're trying to tell a lot of people they're wrong, in a tone little or no less strident than my own.
Seriously, you are proposing to spend hundreds of political will on things like militarization buydowns and building up industrial nodes for shipyards we very probably won't need for ten years, while objecting very strongly to the 'waste' of spending 20pp on a given diplomatic push or tech team. This
very strongly suggests a case of tunnel-vision focus on a single project (in this case, "we need infrastructure,") followed by "therefore, spend literally everything we can imagine spending on it, ignoring other priorities."
Given that the bulk of the quest has been striving to balance several priorities against each other, this is a somewhat less than helpful approach. And it leads to inconsistencies, like spending hundreds of pp on things we don't urgently need
in that form, while spending nothing on things we arguably need much sooner.
There is also this option alongside the 28pp 3mt/1mt that is incredible value. Combined with the imminent tech bonus they could service 2.4mt ships.
[ ] Request Cruiser berth at Utopia Planitia, 11pp (2mt berth)
We're going to be much luckier than we deserve if subsequent cruiser berth builds don't get more expensive.
You are missing my point. 3 shipyards with HIP and 4 shipyards without have approximately the same production capacity, but with HIP the three shipyards can get us 3 Renaissances just 2.25 years after spending resources on them, while we don't anything at all from the 4 shipyards for 3 full years. The shipyards with HIP can also put the first wave of a new design into service significantly faster. Basically it's like measuring pregnancies in uterus-months, it doesn't give the full picture.
You're not wrong to say this, but on the other hand w
Except for Explorer Corps ships (which are guaranteed to get an event every quarter), we often derive little or no direct benefit from having a ship versus NOT having a ship in any given quarter or even year, except in wartime. Especially since in peacetime we usually respond successfully to most events, so the marginal benefit of one more ship NOT in a war zone is diminished.
In the long run having ships earlier helps quite a bit overall, but in the long run it's entirely correct to do the analysis in berth-years anyway.
Sort of like how measuring pregnancies in uterus-months is an inaccurate way to picture population growth over the timescale of a year; three women can't have four babies in one year by using the extra nine uterus-months at the end). But over longer timescales it becomes a less-incorrect model, or at least it would if women had back-to-back continual pregnancies which they don't in real life.
It's a micro/macro thing, and the problem is that the micro benefits of having ships in a hurry is really only relevant if the ships actually do anything in the first few quarters of their existence, and insofar as they do something that would otherwise not have happened. Once that time expires, the "we get the ship faster" benefits fold right back into the "it takes fewer quarters" benefits. Because three berths churning out ships in 2.25 years each and four berths churning out identical ships in three years each really
are functionally indistinguishable, when you look at it from the perspective of nine years down the road. Either way, you've just gotten a twelve-ship fleet.
Now, the advantage is that you have three extra quarters of activity per ship, so that's an extra thirty-six ship-quarters, which means your ships have probably been available for some events or battles they might otherwise have missed. But
going forward it's still twelve ships in service, and even looking back, the advantage of having 36 ship-quarters is being added to the, um... 4*4*3 + 4*4*6 = 144 ship-quarters your fleet of twelve has enjoyed since construction under the "four berths three years" plan. The benefit of 36 extra ship-quarters of time isn't trivial, but it isn't
huge; it's equivalent to having built one extra ship nine years ago, that magically disappears as soon as the twelve-ship task force is completed at the end of the nine year build cycle. The twelve ships you have going forward will rack up another 144 ship-quarters of time in a mere three years, anyway, and nine years AFTER the twelve-ship fleet is completed, the total number of ship-quarters of time you have from the "three berths, 2.25 years each" scheme is only 612 ship-quarters, compared to 576 for the "four berths, three years each" scheme.
So in the long run the "berth-year" analysis becomes more useful. It's less relevant if you really DO have a special reason to need those ships right the hell now, or if you
just happen to fight a huge battle right in one of the narrow windows of time when having an extra tranche of ships that would otherwise be unavailable turns the tide of the battle.
