Cost to Refit to High (sorry for depulicate but posted in wrong spot)

But a Slower option 4-8 weeks for something around 150bc would also be reasonable.

That would be nice. I would like the option to upgrade all ships in a fleet at once or ships on a planet without removing them from the planet.

One other thing along this line; It bugs me that when I station a fleet on a planet the fleet disbands. I would like if the fleet stayed intact unless I specifically disbanded it.

I think the upgrade cost is tided to your economic status ?

It's a multiple of the base industry cost, just like if you purchased the ship at a shipyard. It is a little less, depending on the value of the original ship. It's definitely expensive right now and it discourages upgrading everything you have, but I think that's the intention.

Thats the biggist problem I have with the upgrade You are not buying a whole new ship.  And if the point is to discorage upgrading Why?  All I really want is for one of the companies to do the upgrade slower and at a much better price.

Better implement idea of refit for ships as being proposed, wich would take several weeks but cost "normally", not 1000bc for adding one sensor or such. Normally it'll much more easier to make new than upgrade, only ultra-elite ships worth spending bc on 'em.

Not sure since I didnt try yet but if refitting would be cheaper could you not:
1. pump out huge hulls with hardly any equipment (empty shells basically..just attach a drive and nothing else) at an insane amount of speed
2. have each that got produced upgraded to your other "fully armed and armored" huge hull next to the planet in 1 turn, effectivly producing the biggest, badest ship you have in a rate of like 1 ship/turn ?

Yes, I think the problem with making upgrades too cheap is basically avoiding manufacturing constraints. If they implemented a system along the lines of MoO2, where you had to remanufacture the ship to get the upgrade, that would be reasonable. The trouble with that is it would be a micromanagement nightmare.

The biggest problem with this game is people don't use their brains to play it!

Here just this once I will shine a lightbulb above your heads because this whining has to stop! You can purchase ship upgrade upfront even when you are in debt. So just buy upgrades for all your frikin ships on one turn running into a -2345345634 deficit, the turn after that it will revert to -2000 BC cap, then you can slowly crawl out of that, and if your empire is big enough you can do that in one turn.

Sorry you can't figure this out on your own. Maybe you should play a game of something less complicated, like checkers.

How can the current system be bad if I can upgrade one million frikin ships for the same price it would take to upgrade a dozen? What you want the upgrades to be free now?

The upgrade cost is significantly off in my opinion as well. For the same cost I can just rush buy a new ship of the line and have both the old and the new ship to fight with.

An "empty hull" exploit should be pretty easy to avoid if the formula for the upgrade cost is well thought out. For example, set a flat fee for each hull size, and add the difference between the old ship's cost and the new ship's cost. Maybe even double the difference. So, one way or another you wind up paying for the components and for the upgrade.

One way to possibly have cheaper upgrades is to compare the load-out of the new design to that of the old one, and don't make you pay for identical components. For example, if all I upgraded was my engines, I don't have to pay for a new hull, weapons, or defenses on that ship. Throw on a modernization/overhaul fee dependant on the size of the vessel and you're set.

@Astax: Putting yourself crazily into debt and taking advantage of the -2000 cap does not address the issue. Yes it lets you upgrade all your ships for a nominal fee, but its an exploit the AI certainly doesn't take advantage of and it ought to be coded out of the game. Its tantamount to a cheat, and if I wanted to cheat I'd turn the cheat codes on.

IMO, the upgrade cost of a ship should be the price of the new components minus HALF the price of the old components (with a minimum cost of 0). It would decrease the costs of upgrading while preventing any "empty hull" exploits like mentioned above (since you'd end up paying full price anyway).

The point of the empty hull thing isn't that you would get the ship for cheaper than building it, it's that you'd get the ship for 'build it yourself' cost without actually requiring that much production. To be fair, you'd have to figure out the cost of the new components, and charge 'purchase price' on those. Which I suspect is pretty close to what they are doing. If you just swap one component, the upgrade cost isn't very high.

@Astax: Putting yourself crazily into debt and taking advantage of the -2000 cap does not address the issue. Yes it lets you upgrade all your ships for a nominal fee, but its an exploit the AI certainly doesn't take advantage of and it ought to be coded out of the game. Its tantamount to a cheat, and if I wanted to cheat I'd turn the cheat codes on.

It's not an exploit Frogboy said he coded the deficit cap for a reason, so feel free to take advantage of it. Problem with cheap upgrade costs on pership basis is that it would lead to total cheese agianst the AI, you would essentially end up playing rock paper scissors with the Ai who doesn't comprehand the game on the level a human does.

Send out tons of hulls hips with nothing but engines on them, at enemy territory upgrade to contructors, bam instant military bases.

Send in an armada, what';s this Im using beams but the AI researched shields? Let me fix that, for a nominal fee I jsut changed all my ships to guns, and I isntalled shields while I was at it, beacuse ther ai uses beams aswell.

Yous ee? That would totaly negate the strategic aspect of the frikin game. If you goign to do that might aswell do away with 3 kinds of weapons and 3 kinds of defenses.

I do agree yes, way to expensive.. But just think about this they are updating 5 LA class Subs in the ship yards in my state for a total cost of 150,000,000.

Don't rember what the original cost on a LA class Sub was though.

I do agree yes, way to expensive.. But just think about this they are updating 5 LA class Subs in the ship yards in my state for a total cost of 150,000,000. Don't rember what the original cost on a LA class Sub was though.

I only spent a couple minutes looking and couldn't find the build price of an LA class sub, but...

Virginia class subs are $2.6billion to build and Seawolf class subs are $2billion to build
(Link)

I did however find that it appears to cost $21million a year just to run an LA class sub, $150million for upgrading/retrofitting is pretty cheap when you look at the actual cost of the sub.
Link

It would be nice if costs in game were as cheap as real life! Do remember that bc stands for "billion credits"... So when we spend 1000 bc to upgrade something, that's 1 trillion credits. I guess we are talking about space travel here, so things should be pricey....

I like the initial suggestion, to have a more time consuming but less expensive option for upgrading ships. It would make for another interesting decision that the player could make based on the circumstances.

I dont know, I mean if you sent a US Cruiser into dry dock to be refitted and the job had to be done in a week, I would think that the refit would cost almost as much as the ship itself depending on what needed to be done of course.

Two words on Upgrades

Modular Construction - yank one module replace it with another.

Lets look at the typical breakdown of what a GC2 scenerio may look like, normally you get four options, listed below are the options that could exist and the follow on section that should exist with it.

1 Week U/G - 100% of current cost*
2 Week U/G - 75% of current cost*
4 Week U/G - 50% of current cost*
8 Week U/G - 25% of current cost*

* =
100% of current class U/G = 100% of cost
50% of current class U/G = 50% of cost
25% of current class U/G = 25% of cost
10% of current class U/G = 10% of cost

To keep from having to micromanage this process, the governor or AI controlling the ships can look and see which planet the ships are on, which planet current has the best protection, which ships are closer to a planet, which ships will be closer to a planet with a shipyard, which ships are just to far out to upgrade effectively, etc etc... Give the choices you have above the list appears on your class management of which ships will be in the first wave of upgrades... than you can micromanage to your hearts content (which of course could wreak havoc with the numbers and your cost.)

To expound on the equation... if you want a one week upgrade that is fine, however, your short on cash and do not wish to break the bank... so the second option under the one week upgrade is to only do a percentage of that class. So basically you pick 25% of the class to be upgraded per week. You pay the fee per week (now of course your interest rate, yes a factor in the game already existing in the money area) can play a part on this also with a fee calculated based on the rate of credit you have (tied to the interest rate) I am sure you investment bankers out there could better expound on the caculated interest rate but the theory is there and working already in GC2 I believe.

The overall cost by spreading out the class upgrade across numerous weekly plans is more, but somewhat more affordable than the one time fee. And yes I have seen the -2000 bc as the max spending and frankly I think its a cheap way out of an integer problem using negative numbers in the system vice a "Well we are going to put a spending cap?" GC2 doesn't want to go below that fine, but don't freeze the numbers, let them keep going in the background and force the player to be conscious of spending habits.

Sidebar here:
Gods forbid that we hold the player (person) responsible for their own actions in the matters of finance...
End sidebar.

Anywho,
The above is clearly open for debate, however, be advised that typically, shipyards have specific programs dealing with time/money & manpower today for working on all classes of vessels from LA Class submarines to Super Carriers and usually a refit/upkeep is in one of three categories. So the choices I have given above could be kept at three following modern doctrine.

W/R
Suralle Straykat
Kat Lord @ Large

I did however find that it appears to cost $21million a year just to run an LA class sub, $150million for upgrading/retrofitting is pretty cheap when you look at the actual cost of the sub.

Because subs fly in space millions of miles from any planets? This is a game dude pelase don't try to tell anyone how much it will cost in the future to upgrade something. If you make it any cheaper to refit it will be exploited so just drop it already. The game isn't that frikin hard.

I agree that a more time consuming, yet less expensive, way of upgrading ships would be a well received addition to the game.

As coded, they may as well remove the feature altogether because it's too inneficient to use (except for the first turn colony upgrade -- but I always feel bad about doing that because they AI never does).

For people that can easily afford the upgrades, or that generate 2000+ BC per week soley by their economy, I say you're game is lasting far too long. My games rarely go beyong using small hulls for the backbone of my military fleet, or of generating more than 200 BC per turn.

Because subs fly in space millions of miles from any planets? This is a game dude pelase don't try to tell anyone how much it will cost in the future to upgrade something. If you make it any cheaper to refit it will be exploited so just drop it already. The game isn't that frikin hard.

Selective quoting is bad.... Malkuth, who I also quoted, said that they were refitting 5 LA class subs for 150,000,000 near him. His post made it seem like that was a lot. While yes, 150 million is a lot of money, it is very little when looked at beside the actual cost of building the sub or even keeping it running.

Are your serious?
Running the deficit beyond the -2000 cap just so you can get free upgrades has to be one of the most blatant and obvious program exploits of any game I have every heard of. There ought to be a picture of that next to the word "cheat" in the gamers dictionary. You might as well reload the game evey time you lose a ship too. Come on, they gave you the ability to save the game, so it must be intentional they want you to save/reload because the feature is there. So cheeze your way to victory, there is no reason not to because the game to is too easy....

Give me a break.
******
MinionJoe.
Play STARS! recently? (thats how that game is set up). The limit there was retrofiting had to be done at planets with a shipyard. That might be an option to consider if they do change the upgrades.

Meaning, leave the cost just as it is. To be honest I really don't think it's that much of an issue, but I don't upgrade all my ships everytime I get a new component. Add another benefit to the starport, and that being "upgrades cost 50%". of course they would have to fix the orbiting ships display to include an upgrade button. I would also increase the cost of starports

If it were up to me, I would implement an option to allow shipyards to upgrade ships currently orbiting that planet, provided that there is an upgraded version of that ship availible. I would probably elect to retain the current costs for instantaneous upgrade, but manual upgrade should be signifigantly faster then building the ship raw.

Allowing a manual upgrade would allow me not have to worry about having all those near useless 1st and 2nd generation ships I build a hundred turns ago back on my core planets. Just let the shipyards on those planets refit their garrisons absent any current orders, same way that the planets automatically upgrade your factories when you get new industrial tech.

This would be a non trivial feature though, since you would need an option somewhere to allow or disallow upgrades of one ship type to another, or to layout a chain of ship designs for upgrade purposes.

With the above change, I would also allow some sort of unique refit improvement as a galactic wonder, to accelerate the upgrade process or make it cheaper.

END COMMUNICATION

you should just sell off your oldest models for influence points or techs. when you start building larger ships, you can sometimes trade 1 ship for one tech. maybe 2 or 3 ships if it is an advanced tech.

I agree that ship upgrades are way too unattractive right now (1.0.x). I just played through a game where I built ships like crazy, but haven't upgraded a single one because it hardly makes any sense. Which is a pity because the old crew's experience is lost that way.

My suggestions:

- As already said, simply make the upgrade last longer. I was very surprised when I first upgraded and lost around 1000 cash because I thought that was just an option if you need it quick I'd say an average upgrade should take about 3-5 weeks. After all, it's not the time to upgrade when you're in the middle of a fight. And if you're in a hurry, there could still be the option to pay for it, just with the other production in the game.

- Simple fix to the "empty hull" / "adapt on the frontline" problem: Only allow upgrades in an area around a planet with a starport, or even while in orbit. This makes a lot of in-game sense, anyway... how would you crank open a ship, rip out the parts and put new ones in, in the middle of nowhere, with no facilities around? There could be a starbase module, too, like "Ship Repair Bay". Install it, and you can upgrade ships around (or at) this base, too! Third option: A repair / refit ship module, like in Space Empires 4. To simplify things, all three options (starport, starbase, ship module) could have the same area of effect.... maybe 3 squares radius or so. This would represent shuttle range, for sending parts and engineers to the ship.

- For the price / production cost formula: I agree that it should be based mostly on the new parts. It really bugs me when I just want to slap on two new lasers, and I end up paying more than for a complete new ship.... With the change that the upgrade isn't always done in one turn, I don't see any problem to just take the price of the new components, with maybe an added percentage for balance.