Flagships

[Beck]

Making flagships very expensive to built and to maintain coupled with only one being effective in a fleet should be enough without tying it to some artificial milepost that allows you to built one. 50 ships, what kind of ships? I can build empty escorts with no engines to keep costs down and make them easy and fast to build to get around the ship limit. And what happens if as a result of a battle you drop below the threshhold of 50, do you lose the flagship? The point is, if they are expensive, you could never afford to let them alone, they would always have to have escorts which further drives up the costs of maintaining a fleet having one. And you could never just build them for a rainy day like you do fighter/troops/satellites. The cost should serve as an adequate limiting factor. Additionally, flagships should be so full of command components, etc. granting the fleet whatever bonuses it receives to leave little room for weapons, meaning it needs and should have a lot of friends to do the fighting and even a fleet of flagships shouldn't be near as good as a single flagship and same number of the best attack ships. Further the happiness/experience/morale of the race should be seriously affected by the loss of one as this represent the pride and joy of your armed force, the best of the best so to speak and its loss would reasonant throughout your empire.