Lets be honest here, the current Arms race planetary edict is basically useless. By the time you can throw around 150 influence for warship construction projects that take longer than 5 years, you'll probably be building dozens of battleships at a time. And I'd much rather split that evenly between some 4 large spaceports in my empire than try to stack all of them on a single spaceport with the Arms race modifier.
Early game - Total time spent on building warships will be maybe 200 days at the most. You don't need the 10 years you pay for with 150 influence, influence better spent on frontier outposts and colonies
Mid game - Total time spent on building warships will be maybe a year or 2, still not worth the 150 influence for 10 years of the edict. Spreading out your build orders will also be much faster and require no additional influence
Late game - You should have more than enough space ports to spread around your build orders, even for a small empire. 4 spaceports can churn out 12 battleships far faster than 1 or 2 spaceports with Arms race activated can
I propose that it instead becomes a empire wide edict. Costs 2 influence to maintain per month and available to fanatic militarist only. Effects are
Early game - Total time spent on building warships will be maybe 200 days at the most. You don't need the 10 years you pay for with 150 influence, influence better spent on frontier outposts and colonies
Mid game - Total time spent on building warships will be maybe a year or 2, still not worth the 150 influence for 10 years of the edict. Spreading out your build orders will also be much faster and require no additional influence
Late game - You should have more than enough space ports to spread around your build orders, even for a small empire. 4 spaceports can churn out 12 battleships far faster than 1 or 2 spaceports with Arms race activated can
I propose that it instead becomes a empire wide edict. Costs 2 influence to maintain per month and available to fanatic militarist only. Effects are
- +20% Ship build speed
- -25% Ship build cost
- +50% Army recruitment speed
- -50% Army recruitment cost