SE 4 Gold

[Fyron]

You can certainly scrap and replace facilities to your heart's content.

=0=

I'm not sure what you mean by an "open" ship. Having no hull whatsoever? Just a bunch of components loosely cabled together, like a modern day space probe or satellite? Why would anyone build warships like that, rather than having an armored, protective hull? To me, it sounds like a bad idea to make such a spindly ship and have no protective armoring at all, taking only one hit to blow the whole thing up (or at least, in half, making useless wrecks)... Why do you assume that the presence of an armored hull is wasting material? It is making your ship capable of sustaining damage, thus making the ship worthwhile to build. I'd rather have 50 ships that can take more than half a hit from weapons fire without blowing up than 200 ships that fall apart at the first hint of weapons fire.

[Suicide Junkie]

As for your system, you're forgetting about maintenance.
Having a 2.5% advantage means that you can maintain only 2.5% more ships. You can replace losses slightly faster too, but those values are insignificant compared to tactics and strategies and terrain.

If you spend resources building BSYs, then you'll have less available to build and maintain ships. Bases cost maintenance too.
In some mods, BSYs are important. But you still have to balance your Yard investments with expansion and defense.

You will learn these lessons if you play against the experts.

***c_of_red said:
One battle does not a war make.***
In that particular case, I'd say one battle doth a war break.
With half our respective navies now crippled, neither of us could scrape together enough ships to breach the other's warppoint fortifications. At least not for a year or two, and without leaving other areas of the empire dangerously unprotected. Once we've had time to regroup, things may heat up again.




PS:
It sounds like you might want to write yourself up a super-gritty-tech mod, in which armor and shields are absurdly expensive, and naked ships are the norm.

However, such a mod would make strategy and tactics even MORE important, since the first shot wins.