| Only if being totally vunerable during the entire upgrade period "deep in enemy territory" doesn't count as an inconvienience |
Well OK, fair comment, but you know what I mean. You know this is an easy "cheese" - to build cheap ships then upgrade them "on site" far quicker than you could build them from scratch. Why does it take 1-2 weeks to upgrade from a 6Beam/3Shield old Laser-Destroyer to a 64-Beam/30-shield PsyFrigate that is hundreds of light-years in enemy territory, when that same ship would take 10 or 15 turns to produce in a shipyard on my homeworld? At the very least there should be a significant time penalty for upgrading away from starbases or planets with shipyards - a time-factor of 2-5 seems reasonable, depending on distance. I feel like the logistics ability should play as a factor as well somehow - in fact that would make a lot of sense: in any one turn, the player can work on upgrades of as many logistics points of ships as his logistics ability. Ships in orbit around a planet with a shipyard or parked on a military starbase take 1 turn in the queue; parked on economic or influence starbases take 2 turns; in space in a sector with a player starbase or planet, 3 turns; in space in a sector with no player starbase or planet, 3 turns and +25% upgrade cost; in space with an enemy starbase or planet, 4 turns and +50% upgrade cost. The queue would be processed in order of ascending upgrade time and then and ascending cost. The upgrade cost for a ship to be levied when a ship begins the upgrade process, rather than a huge wodge up front.
I reckon this would be a lot more realistic and would prevent the "instant fleet" cheese (which I am as guilty of as anyone). Since the AI is much less aggressive about upgrading, this shouldn't affect play-balance too much, and make the strategy more realistic.