quote:
Originally posted by wingte:
Well,, the game balance should be maintained since a transport with a lot of weapons should have prohibitively high maintanance costs.
I don't know about you, but I don't pay much attention to maintenance costs. At least so far, I don't usually have much trouble getting enough resources to pay for my fleet. (Sometimes, my problem is to use them all up because I don't have room to store the excess!) Nowadays I avoid this by turning all but the best (140-150%) mineral planets into research stations and the like.
At any rate, if there were no component restrictions, a heavily-armed transport would still be cheaper to maintain than warship of equal tonnage and armament, because the transport hull is cheaper. Admittedly, the transport is a tad slower than a warship. However, as I said, in the early game when you otherwise wouldn't be able to build a ship that big, being able to make a transport that's armed to the teeth would make it hardly worth the effort to build escorts.