I appreciate the effort you guys are putting in to the game. The fundamentals are really solid, you just need to work out all the details.

I was thinking something similar for Warlords, some kind of mechanic that allows them to convert outposts in to shipyards with some kind of significant RO bonus. I haven't thought through exactly how it would work, but the idea is that they "sacrifice" a planet in order to build a super-capital ship, but in a way that also requires them to defend the planet during construction. I don't really know what "sacrifice" means in this context, though. Destroy the planet? Reduce it's resource generation rate to zero? The balance I'm looking for is for the Warlord to make a significant, interruptible sacrifice of a resource other than RO in order to get a super-capital ship without paying for it through the normal channels.