Gritty Economics
From SEWiki
Gritty Economics, often referred to as GritEcon for short, is a mod for Space Empires IV which focuses on making the economic model and technology of the game more realistic. Minerals are replaced with metal, organics are replaced with labor, and radioactives are replaced with energy. Most facilities consume small to moderate amounts of resources just by being operational; for instance, a miner facility takes labor and power in order to produce metal. (Note that the resources spent on facility maintenance will not be subtracted on the budget screen due to a bug in SE4. They will still, however, be subtracted from your treasury!)
Another major feature of GritEcon is the ship cost/maintenance scheme. Ship cost, through scale mounts, increases as the cube of hull size, while maintenance costs remain constant (both depending of course on the individual components you install on your ships). Thus, a 200kT ship may actually cost only a few hundred of each resource, while a 2000kT base may cost on the order of 50K of each resource, but both will have roughly the same maintenance cost. This means that small ships are good to build when you're fighting a war (they're cheap cannon fodder, and you don't need to worry about the high maintenance costs per unit size, since they will die soon anyway), while larger ships are better for peacetime (they might take a while to build, but they are quite durable and can be maintained virtually indefinitely).
A third "feature" is the weapons system. Originally it was designed to be fully "gridded out", but that proved to be too much for SE4 to handle, so a temporary system has been set up until Suicide Junkie can think of a better scheme. There are a number of weapons chassis (cannons, torpedoes, missiles, etc.) and a number of weapons technologies (kinetic, chemical, polaron, etc.), and for each combination of those there is a single weapon component. So for instance if you research chemical weapons you will get a variety of chemical-based weapons - explosive shell cannons, chemical rockets, etc. Unfortunately the weapons techs are not particularly unique or numerous, and they do not "level up", so this remains a weak point of the mod. However, the missiles in GritEcon are quite interesting - they do massive amounts of damage, track targets indefinitely, and can only be shot down by specially equipped fighters, but have an atrocious reload rate!
GritEcon of course features leaky everything - leaky armor, leaky shields (though solid shields are included as an advanced shield tech branch), and leaky intel.
