When I started designing the campaign, I put in code for repairs to ships, where you could repair individual pieces of damage. An attack on a ship might damage a module, doing 25% damage to it. You could repair just that specific piece of damage, if you so chose.
The idea was that rather than just clicking ‘repair this ship, 1,240 CR’ you could spend less, if funds were tight, and just repair critical modules. I wrote a ton of code to generate slightly silly technobabble descriptions of each piece of damage. All of this is in the campaign and working.
In practice, when testing the campaign I find myself invariably repairing the whole ship, or if funds are tight, just leaving it to the next turn when funds are available. The fancy repair interface is a bit overdone and over-engineered. However, I see no good reason to remove it entirely, it’s kinda fun, and allows micro-managing for those who want to, so it’s staying in.
Something that did change today is the cost of repairs halved. Previously it was the same as construction. If a module cost 400CR and took 25% damage, it cost 100CR to fix. Now it’s 50CR. Why the change?
Well in practice, repairs are reasonably rare. It takes time for ships to retreat, especially cruisers, and in battle, by the time you realise your fleet is screwed, the chances of all of them managing to turn 180 degrees and warp out are quite low. You often lose half the fleet during the retreat, unless you make an instant judgement at the first sign of the enenmy, and call an instant withdrawal. Combined with this, there is is the issue of repair yards. Not every system has them, so the damaged ships need to make a few warp jumps back to the nearest connected repair yard, before they get fixed up. By the time you do this, you might as well build new ships.
So….. Repairs will be cheaper than new build. I think it balances out better this way, and it makes sense in gameplay terms anyway. The real frustration should be logistics, and having retreated and thus given up territory, rather than resenting the cost of repairs. I’m aiming for a ‘company of heroes’ style mechanic, where its sensible to retreat and fight another day, if outgunned.