Building rather than buying upgrades for ships?

I agree that AFAIK this is not currently possible. Also I have no idea the reasoning behind being unable to build an upgrade, perhaps it just hasn't been thought of before.

The only point I have in relation to your question is that the approximate 10X penalty for buying over producing a ship does not quite apply to upgrades. Upgrades though expensive are probably closer to 5X the equivilient production cost although that is merely a guess on my part. I do know that for example building a bare hull and then upgrading to the full ship can easily be half the cost of buying the ship outright.

This is just a minor clarification and realy doesn't impact your request for being able to produce an upgrade at any starport. Seems like a reasonable and interesting request to me, however I have no idea how difficult or not it's implementation into the game would be.

Thank you for your reply Mumblefratz, I have one question you may be able to answer.

When I am in the shipyard making an upgrade is there any option to keep the weapons shields and the like on the design so that if I want to make a minor change to a complicated ship eg. engine change I can change just one component?

I am playing DA as I am waiting for TA to come out of beta.

I can answer this question for you: in the options screen, under interface, uncheck the 'remove functional components when upgrading a ship design'.

The nice thing about upgrading is that you can keep basic, low maintenance hulls in orbit and make them state of the art warships in a single turn if the AI declares war on you - assuming your treasury can take the hit. It isn't particularly realistic but can be a useful strategy.

Upgrading is a very useful and cost effective thing to do.

It seems as if the charge to upgrade is minimal as long as you aren't making dramatic increases to weapons or defenses. You should really keep this in mind if you find the need to switch from beam to missle weapons for example or switch defense type to deal with a new opponent.

If you keep the total value of weapons and defense about the same you can switch weapons and defense types very cheaply. Far cheaper than building new ships of the new type.

I have tried upgrading my ships, but when i pay for the upgrade it turns the ships into a battle axe or some sort of generic ship. I went to war with the Torians once and tried upgrading on the go. I had ships with Plasma/Barriers/Point defense and wanted to upgrade the plasma to phasors. When i purchased the upgrade, it turned all of my ships to battle axes with lasers ONLY. No defense at all. To make a long story short i lost the war and was conquered because of this bug. Has that been fixed with Dark Avatar 1.80G??????? Because i just upgrade my ships and change the name so i will not screw myself. If the upgrade function is working now, that would save me a lot of time:)

pharoah247 - when you upgrade a ship have you designed a new ship to upgrade to?

What you need to do is have a new design and then select the ship you want to upgrade and then select the design and then choose how you want to pay. Is this what your doing?

Yes........this is what i am doing. And when i pay and wait a couple of weeks for the upgrade to complete.........it turns into a Battle Axe with generic weapons and no defense.

Example:

I design an ALPHA FIGHTER(like in the ROBOTECH series) and put lasers and deflectors own it.

Later when i have researched plasma and shields, i try to upgrade the ALPHA FIGHTER with those weapons and defenses.

When i try to upgrade all of my existing ALPHA FIGHTERS in my fleet with my new weapons, after the upgrading process concludes, all of my ALPHA's turn into defenders or battle axes with lasers and no defense:(

Upgrading is much easier if you create your own ships in small increments. I also obsolete any pre-built ships, since they dont fit into my custom model.

I think Xtanto was asking about was what kind of ship are you trying to upgrade *to*?

There are two paths to upgrade. One is to have a ship that you designed like your ALPHA FIGHTER and then later on develop some new tech and want to upgrade your old ships.

One way is to create a new ship, let's say ALPHA FIGHTER II for example. Then you select one of your current ALPHA FIGHTER's and press the "upgrade" button. It then take you to an upgrade screen for that specific ship which gives a list of ship to which you can upgrade to. Note you can only upgrade to ships of the same size hull as the current ship (also note that a cargo hull and a Large military hull are the same size and so you can go from a cargo hull ship to a Large military hull ship via upgrade.

When using this method you can also select a check box to upgrade all ships of this class. However the point is that to upgrade in this manner you need to specifically select the ship that you're upgrading to and so if you upgrade to Battle Axe it should be because you specifically selected Battle Axe as the ship to upgrade *to*.

The other way to upgrade ships is to go into the shipyard and select the current ALPHA FIGHTER design and hit the upgrade button there. That will take you ship design screen where you can modify the current design. In this case nothing happens until you "save" the design. If you save the design to the old ship name ALPHA FIGHTER it will say that this is not recommended but it will allow you to do it anyway but will ask you if you want to upgrade all current ALPHA FIGHTER's. If you save it to a new name then it won't ask about upgradin your current ships but if any planets are currently building ALPHA FIGHTER's then those planets will instead start building the new ships.

I think the issue is that folks (myself among them) aren't understanding what it is that you are doing because as far as I know for you to upgrade a ship to a Battle Axe you must have selected Battle Axe as the ship to upgrade *to*.

I think you need to describe your issue in more explicit detail because no one is really understanding precisely what your problem is.

I think i understand what i am doing wrong. When i first started designing my own ships i didn't change the names of the ship unless i made a break through in a more advanced technology for example:

I would keep Alpha Fighter Version I as long as i had less say stinger technology on it.

When i completed my research on harpoon technology, i would change the name to Alpha Fighter Version II.

So lets say i had a fleet of ten Alpha Fighter Version I. Once i completed my upgrade to Alpha fighter Version II. I would choice the version I Alpha and select upgrade. i always assumed that it would automatically select the Alpha Fighter Version II as the upgrade. I didn't realize that you can CHOOSE what type of upgrade you wanted with in the Hull Parameters!!!!!!!!!!

So let me see if i have it right:

1)Choice a ship and select upgrade

2)Select the type of ship upgrade you want within the hull paramaters(large for large,small for small etc....)

3) pay for the upgrade.

I was not choosing what type of ship to upgrade to!!!!!!!! I just assumed it would upgrade to my new design. Inadvertently, you guys solved the problem for me.

Thanks!!!!!!!!!!

This does make the upgrade system much more flexible and you will find it more useful now.