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More I play this game, more I think this is the most under-rated all time best 4x+ game probably since MOO.

Vets will likely know this but it was new to me so thought I'd share. Knew retiring ship got you progress towards new tech - or full discovery - but also learned not only do you get resources back for retiring a ship, but the mechanics of how and what you get back is pretty damn logical.

It turns out you even get back the tank of gas - however much you had left - in your fuel tanks when you retired the ship. Wow!
Not only does that make so much common sense, but it just adds to the feel of it being a legit economy underneath the strategic / tactical game layer.

Was lucky enough to discover one of those supply depots out in middle of nowhere on ring map, and it had bunch of supplies but it was a fixed number. With no freighters going to it, I could retire a ship there and easily see the before/after cargo.

I don't know if the recycling is 100%, maybe it's only a proportion of the total resources used in the components that were unbuilt - but I thought it was pretty awesome about the gas tank fuel being saved.

It's like if you were going to sell your old car to some new person, and you said - um wait, before you take delivery I'm going to need to siphon all my gas out of that tank first.

Yeah, I love how the underlying resources are handled in the game. Those resources you get back from scrapping aren't likely to make any strategic difference whatsoever, but it's awesome that it's even modelled. It's all part of the "ant hill" aspect of the game.

I know a lot of people claim there's no point in adding systems to a game if those systems don't significantly and clearly impact the player's decisions, but that discounts the intangible aspects. Adding flavour text and race histories also don't impact player decisions, but they're invaluable in immersing the player in the game. The civilian economy often ticks along without the player having to worry about it, but the fact that it's there, ticking along, adds a certain magic to it all. And if the player does decide to interfere with it (e.g., blowing up enemy freighters shipping ultra-rare resources), it all reacts logically and predictably.

There are advantages to scrapping a ship. I build 'scarpheap' class ships anytime I move into a new territory and then scrap them at the first spaceport to come online-giving a source of much needed minerals to get your local mines built up. It is horribly inefficient I'm sure. But since for some unknown reasons none of the hundreds of billions of citizens in the galaxy has the vision to build a functioning military transport/supply ship it's the bes you can do.