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[Hiruma Kai]

I'm curious about how close to broke are most people running their fleets?  I feel like for myself, I make far more in credits than I spend in terms of supplies/fuel.  On the other hand, I've played a number of iron man spacer starts, so when I play a normal run, I feel rich with that 15,000 credit stipend.  I'm presuming the typical game is not a spacer start.

Have people analyzed what % of their monthly income they spend on supplies?  Generally when fighting fleets, I deploy just enough ships, so I generally make a net profit on the supplies, and only salvage an enemy ship occasionally, so the credits I spend monthly on supplies is usually just the monthly running cost.

For example, in the early game, against starting bounties, where you get 30-50,000 credits, a ~20 maintenance destroyer is completely reasonable, as its only an extra ~1,250 credits a month over a pristine destroyer.  Compared against a 60-100,000 bounty credit income in a month.

I feel like supply cost is generally a small fraction of income, and if someone doubled supply running costs on me, it wouldn't be a big deal, although perhaps I should take some notes the next time I do a run to get a better feel for mid-game.

Certainly if I look at my last game that went to the later stages, I was making so many credits I didn't know what do with them (had piled up something like 11 million and didn't really need new ships, given I had a whole pile of capitals stored at my planets I wasn't using).  End game fleet for that game was like 2 Odysseys, 2 Conquests, 1 Doom, 5 Herons, 5 Apogees, 2 Phaetons.  I guess thats 401 supplies per month, at a cost of ~40,000.  Doubling that to 80,000 wouldn't have put much of a dent in my 700,000 credits per month just from my 3 colonies, let alone bounties or exploration missions.  That was a combat focused character, with basically all pristine fleet boosting skills plus 8 maxed personal combat skills, 1 more than the highest level officer, so I don't know if that makes a big difference.  No Industry or colony skills (Alpha cores for the win).

[intrinsic_parity]

Supply consumption is mostly just annoying because it is sometimes the limiting factor on exploration for me, but yeah I don't have trouble making enough money to cover supply consumption.

For me the issue is more that nothing in the game demands me to make my fleet stronger immediately. I can always grind/wait a bit longer to get ships that will more valuable later, and the fleet cap ensures that d-mod ships are always less valuable later. I do use d-mod ships but only when I feel like adding a few ships will have a significant impact on combat performance. Adding a d-mod ship when I already have enough ships to win the fights I need to is a waste, particularly once I have enough ships to hit deployment limits. Then the only concern is chain battling which is an endgame problem that I can solve with colony income.

The time I actually consider adding d-mod ships are early game because fleet power scales with numerical advantage at the beginning fairly linearly. I will take some d-moded destroyers and my first cruiser because those represent significant increases in combat performance, but my experience is that I am able to buy ships more than fast enough to match all the scaling in the game. For me, it's about what the game requires now and what I want eventually, and d-mod ships are neither of this things.

[Lucky33]

I'm curious about how close to broke are most people running their fleets?
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Have people analyzed what % of their monthly income they spend on supplies?
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Apart from the very start, I tend to get surplus even when running a full battlegroup.