User blog comment:Tribaldragon1/On the matter of Flying Ships/@comment-11254679-20140611060407/@comment-11135771-20140611184602

Actually, I don't want to limit the capabilities of flying ships. I just don't want building Gen. 5 ships to be the absolute best option available to make your navy more powerful. I think that either large ships or small ships should be equally viable options, and the issue for me is that right now that just isn't the case. Hence, I think the idea of an economic system would help remove that disparity and basically make the decision something along the lines of many small ships/smaller number of huge ships/somewhere in the middle/a combination of the above. That way, giant flying ships stay viable, but everything else doesn't get walked over quite so easily.

Sure, a Gen. 5 flying ship will still sink a little destroyer like it's nothing in a one on one battle, but if the Gen. 5 now costs a thousand times the amount the destroyer does to produce, there wouldn't be as many of them as the number of destroyers (note that this is just an example, it would still be pretty dumb to send 1000 destroyers to engage a Gen. 5 and there are much more efficient ways to counter large ships). Big expensive ships would still have their place and still be extremely powerful assets, but they would have to be carefully used and losing one would be a significant cost. I would essentially want to make giant ships kind of like the aircraft carriers of today (although not quite that few in number, there would still be quite a few of them); capable of dealing tremendous damage and being very powerful, but also being expensive to produce and replace, and difficult but important targets for enemies.

Also, I should mention that with an economy system, there's no reason you couldn't have as many giant ships as you like. As long as you keep your losses to a minimum, you could accumulate as large a fleet as you want given enough time.