That's a possibility too. Questions would be: do upgrades use up the constructor? If yes, do you need additional funds for the upgrade? How to balance the constructor use for upgrades?
But it does take away the strategic element of placing the starbases with the spacedock modules



I must admit that I didn't take cost into account. I guess that be part of the fine-tuning if this idea is ever considered at all.

That's how it all started

I love to expand the strategic elements without reinventing the game. Additionally this pushes the use of military starbases which I haven't used until now. Mostly I go with economic for my planets, some influence bases and of course the resource bases.

The second suggestion of using old ships in a refit just goes with me not liking the choice to either scuttle ships for a low price or upgrade them for a big price where it would be sweet to use them as a time-saver for building new ships (of same size). Oh well, just rambling ...

I didn't know that. I seem to remember I had above 50 k bc reserves in my last game But have to admit, I'm still on normal.



Why not include this: ships being upgraded at a starbase with spacedock could still be visible on the map and therefore be target of surprise attacks. They could still keep there upgrade symbol

While thinking of it: does the radius of a military starbase mean that my ships repair faster within its range?

it's not an absolutely max; when your treasury hits 20k, your economy takes a penalty. i agree that it's annoying; it should at least be scaled to map size/ total number of planet tiles/ something.

but it doesn't kill me. a lot of people hate financing their purchases, but i worked in a mortgage company for a year and developed a think skin (it's all about cash flow!). for major upgrades, i will sometimes allow my treasure to shoot into -100k, but only if my gross income will allow me to recover in a few turns (12 is my usual max). it's a lot faster than trying to save up. sometimes i'll use a lease option with payments to help soften the blow. i've actually modded in the InterestRates tag as a point-buy race ability for my own use, which does seem to work.

i don't like the idea of requiring ships to be docked or in orbit. you can only have 10 ships in orbit at once, and the tedium of moving dozens of small fighters on and off a planet would suck! i'd have a newer ship design by the time i was done upgrading them all! it doesn't bother me that i can't see who's performing the upgrades - i can't see the cruise ships that're bringing me tourism revenue, either. i do think there should be times that it's impossible to upgrade, though. maybe a better middle ground would be that it takes exponentially more time and money to upgrade ships that are outside an SB's AoE (or the same distance from a planet), like this:

inside SB/planet AoE: 1 turn, 100% cost
1 radius outside an SB: 4 turns, 200% cost
2 radii outside: 9 turns, 300% cost
4 radii: 16 turns, 400% cost
etc.

and at some point it needs to become impossible. i've seen the AI with ships that're going to take 200+ turns to upgrade. these are usually gifted ships where the AI player's range does not reach - perhaps that'd be the best cutoff point; if the ship is outside the range of a ship w/o any life support modules, it simply cannot be upgraded.

Yah, very good point, it'd be a real PITA jockeying ships in and out.

Really about the only thing I dislike about upgrades is the cost. I do pretty well financially,its one of my primary (if not #1) focus, but its never been healthy enough to take 20-80K hits with any regularity. So I almost never upgrade, save for the occasional "surprise" tactic the ever-chockful-of-good advice Mystikmind mentioned.

To rationalize the way upgrades work, I just assume each ship has an auto-repair function (nanotech, probably), and they can receive a message including the instructions for assembling new gear as it's researched. The repair bots would disassemble the current engines (or whatever) to make the new design, which accounts for the downtime.

I prefer the current system to one that added more micromanagement, like having to move them to a starbase, or send constructors (ugh! constructor micro for starbase upgrades is already my least favorite part of the game). I enjoy micromanagement when it's fun, and adds something to the strategic depth of the game. Having to move ships around to upgrade, just seems like busy work to me.

Leave it the way it is. You get a time penalty the farther away from a planet you are...that is enough.

Any other system would be micromanagement hell.

That's one major point I did not take into account with the original idea - micromanagement.

Since I played only in small and medium galaxies this was not a concern for me but it could turn out very annoying if you have to manually move all ships to corresponding shipyards. My only suggestion remaining would be an automatic move of all ships to the closest starbase for upgrades to be performed and afterwards returning to station. But I don't know how this would work out ...

Very interesting - I didn't know the history of the upgrade discussion

Is there any information provided by the game to see whether it is cost-effective to upgrade a given ship on the spot?