User blog comment:Tribaldragon1/On the matter of Flying Ships/@comment-13235970-20140610230350/@comment-11135771-20140610233428

AJN, the issue I have with your idea of putting hard caps on the number of ships in each class is not due to it being too complicated (in fact, I'm pretty sure it would be simpler than my suggestion), but rather that it would incentivize building only large super warships. For example, if you can have a maximum of five ships per class, why would you make five destroyers when you could instead have five Generation 5 flying ships? You could argue that it takes longer to build large ships, but although that is true, one can't deny the fact that making a giant brick of armor with some 204cm guns and calling it a ship will still be more combat effective than a small, well-built ship.

There are ways around this of course, such as classifying each ship within a certain "tier" and having a different cap for each tier of ship, but then this is where it starts to get as complicated or more so than adding an economy, and still makes less sense in realistic terms.

Even considering that though, the other issue is that this would encourage people to spend less time on each ship, and instead just "mass produce" by spamming tons of different classes of ugly and poorly built ships in order to create a fleet with overall higher numbers. Conversely, those who actually spend time building good ships will be abysmally weak by comparison. All you would end up with is a whole bunch of floating bricks with guns.

Regarding what you said about the economy system, it would require a certain amount of trust within the wiki to make sure that everyone is building within their economic limits. However, if someone were to go drastically over said limits, it should be easy enough for someone else to spot that (e.g. if 999999 Generation 5 ships suddenly appear), whereupon it would be pointed out and the person who exceeded their funding would have to edit their ship numbers accordingly.

The part about "finding a planet of gold" wouldn't be an issue as far as I can tell, because doing that would be just as blatant godmodding as giant flying biomechanical invisible space krakens, and the wiki would react accordingly. This is the same reason you can't currently say "we find a planet with an ancient superweapon that instantly kills all our enemies". Just as with anything else, if there is a problem, someone will notice it and object. If nobody does, chances are it wasn't that big of a problem in the first place. As long as people try to be at least a little realistic with their income, I don't see the problem.