Initially, building new ships was described as a rare and significant undertaking, such that the Hegemony building new Falcons was worthy of note, and capital ships were all-but-irreplaceable. The presence of XIV ships bearing the original Domain colors was a constant reminder that the Hegemony was burning through the enormous but finite stockpiles of a galactic superpower that was no longer present to restock them. The implication was that the constant warring was gradually destroying material that could not be rebuilt, and civilization would gradually regress to a planet-bound state. Over time, the grimdark aspects of the setting have been dialed down, and the Persean Sector has been portrayed as more self-sustaining - the Sindrian Diktat, far from the largest or most industrially successful faction, mass-produces its own custom capital ships as a matter of course. Likewise, the Luddic Church is churning out early Domain - era supercapitals from blueprints, and, in fact, tends to bias its doctrine in the direction of having quite a lot of them.
- Are XIV blueprints a gameplay abstraction, or is the Hegemony generating new Onslaughts on the daily and painting some of them orange? Likewise, for the other factions, how much of their fleets are being built new, versus how many are lingering Domain reserves being appropriated by their new owners?
- I've heard it mentioned that the fleet sizes in campaign are there for gameplay reasons. That said, the menu missions, in which a single Onslaught's loss is worthy of note, are quite old, and may bear implications that are no longer canon. What kinds of fleet sizes do the factions 'really' have, at any given time? I remember looking at the League blockade and the Hegemony AI inspections, doing some napkin math, and concluding that they sent about the equivalent of a U.S. Navy carrier group's worth of personnel at me each - implying that, if you model them as having a similar budgeting setup to the U.S., (which is by no means certain) they're sending around a tenth of their collective militaries to exploit a closing window of significant opportunity or deal with a non-immediate but existential perceived threat to the sector respectively, which sounds about right - any less would seem disproportionately small given the task's importance, and any more would leave their more immediate adversaries at an insurmountable advantage if things go poorly.
- The big question is how easy it is to replace destroyed ships. The Hegemony going out of its way to restore a destroyed Onslaught (and the player's ability to do the same) suggest that printing off battleships isn't something that's done without exploring alternatives. Can Chicomoztoc make a new Onslaught every day? Every week, month, year? Are the manufacturing rates of player nanoforges meant to accurately portray how much a faction can produce? Just the player's allotted share of forge time under the colonial constitution? A complete gameplay abstraction accelerating new ship construction by an order of magnitude for QoL's sake?