I'm not talking about battleships, I'm talking about the light-attack cruisers. Cruiser hull 3 wants 2 steel, 6 guns would bump that up to 8. If you only put 2 guns on the production model, it would be 4 steel to produce and 4 steel to refit, and all you're paying is something like 400 IC for the basic refit cost. To halve your steel consumption. If this spirit makes the refit comparatively cheaper, there becomes less and less of a reason not to do this.
That is the dynamic I was referring to with the exception, base strike buffing non-carrier planes. But naval doctrines compared to other doctrines, don't really have the same amount of power boosts. As much as its said TI is the meta pick, it is really only that one particular tech that reduces your visibility that matters in the whole doctrine. Unless you're doing subs.
This may be my personal preferences showing through, but when I initially did my playthroughs on MtG way back then I did pick all the best stuff, but as time progressed I learned that making your ships with the shiniest modules isn't neccissarily the best option. Bear with me Here:
Going from '36 Light Cruiser Guns to '40 Light Cruiser guns there's a whole difference of 1 SA and 1 SPiercing compared to the increased cost of 1 steel per gun added, Honestly I'd say chilling on using that and instead going more for things such as more advanced fire control or better shells would serve you better since it makes it so that your CL only costs 2 steel per dockyard instead of 8, has the exact same HP, and is 150 IC cheaper in exchange for 6 SA and 1 Piercing
But time to get to Number Crunching time.
I got LC: Control which is a SALC according to your standards with 6x LC Gun III. Its cost to Produce is 5,651
and I got LC B which is a refit of LC C(which is the hull+2 guns): The cost to Refit is 1,840, on top of the initial cost of 4,183 for a combined total of 6,023
Because how the wording of the spirit can be, I decided to do a test wherein I measured how long it would take for LC1 to produce, and how long it would take to produce LC3 and then refit it into LC2(I already made some LC 3s via IC for this test, obviously)
The Time it takes to Produce a SALC in one go is 192 Days with 10 dockyards on it
The Time it takes to produce CL C is 142 days, and it takes 76 days to convert into a SALC for a total of 218 Days
And, of course, these tests were done with the Naval Refit Yards Spirit on
Bear in mind that there are modules that the devs made disproportionately harder to refit compared to something like Secondaries or AA, for instance a LC turret III costs 300 to make, but to add it onto an existing LC costs 822 IC. A LC Belt refit can cost somewhere in the range of 90-95% of the cost(something to note, however, is that if you DO NOT have a belt on the ship it actually doesn't cost that much, for instance reducing the CL's Belt from II to I costs 3,825 IC, but putting a LC Belt I/II onto Italy's Unarmored Montecuccoli Class of LCs costs a total of 437/456 IC), and Engines with a refit cost similarly to changing the Belt, and this ain't just for Cruisers this applies to every ship(even though for DDs and Subs you might not notice it easily since both are rather cheap)
