Resource usage for ship upgrades

Pff, who upgrades ships? I just decom and build new ones. Upgrading can be too costly, and I can pump out new ships just as fast as upgrading.

But seriously, that is probably because the game sees it as making an entirely new ship anyway. As it is, you are basically just taking a preexisting ship and trading it in for a new one, rather than actually changing components on the old ship. 

Unless you're on the other side of a large+ galaxy and at war. I can upgrade ships in 1 or 2 turns. It could take 5-6 turns for a new ship to reach the same destination. 

Fair enough. I have never had trouble with needing to send ships in under a time constraint. Ships only leave my territory for one way trips, and I send them out in large stacks of expensive ships. They are usually powerful enough to last a while without reinforcements or upgrades. I almost never run into a situation where I need to upgrade even if it were more convenient to do so travel-wise.

I still support you on needing better ship upgrade mechanics, though.

Well, I see that problem with resource consuming upgrades seems to be solved already, but as a new player to this game (jumped directly from GC2 right now) it saddens me how upgrade system works right now.

Insane costs of upgrades have completely no sense to me, especially when we compare it with the effort of building brand new ship from the scratch. I mean, c'mon, retrofitting existing design, especially if it is most commonly replacing some cannon, adding defense system or sensors should NOT be less economically sensible than building new ship. But it currently is, serious upgrade of one ship costs dozens of weeks of empire income, while building it from scratch is, well, is completely free from the point of view of coffers, it costs time only; I find it pretty bad concept, to be honest.

I think upgrading fleet should be feasible strategic/economic choice (as well as honoring veteran crews with new tools, instead of sacking poor old warriors and hiring new recruits instead...).

I understand that due to ability to upgrade ships on the fly, hundreds parsecs away from home somewhere in deep space, it should be costly (and it should remain as it is), but how about seriously lowering the costs when ships are stationed in your shipyard?

It is not emergency retrofitting, should take some time, need either credits or military production in form of cluttering shipyard queue (or both) and cost roughly as much, as the production costs difference between the two designs, plus maybe some small flat cost depending on hull size (but much, much less than insane costs now, while upgrading anywhere in space).

This way upgrades could be actual choice, when you are ready to sacrifice some production time and some credits (some, not all...) which would make some freaks like me happy  (I can see that there are a lot of upgrade lovers out there), while in the same time emergency upgrading in space would cost plenty, as it costs now, so it will present completely different strategic choice between sending new ship from the distant homeworld to the frontier and having extremely expensive and relatively fast upgrade right where it is needed.

Any thoughts on that? Any dangers for balance?

(I would also appreciate if someone could point me to the file when it would be possible to mod this for my single games, i.e. at least reducing upgrade costs while in shipyard, if adding upgrade to shipyard production queue is too complicated)

I reduced upgrade costs in my mod, see no balance issues what so ever tbh. Currently the further you are away from your zone of influence the longer it takes to upgrade a ship. The AI also upgrade their ships with the lower costs. I also force the AI to use Tourism, currently, by the time the AI get around to tourism most of thier planets are maxed out and they do not therefore build tourism improvements, so they are never short of cash, couple that with enhanced AI Ship designs, it makes for an interesting game at times.

This one is interesting, feeling irritated that upgrading ships in enemy territory is not realistic and too expensive. How about the fact that the ship is upgrading itself without the use of a shipyard? If we want realism then yes bring the cost down from building a brand new ship but make it mandatory to bring the ship back to a shipyard There should be special requirements for shipyards too, a constructor ship sent deep into enemy territory building a starbase in one turn should not be it, realism is a lofty goal but it would come at a price.

I think you are missing the point. My point is that economics-wise making it easier to build brand new ship than refitting existing one is just plain silly.

I do not oppose ability to upgrade ships outside, because with current economy the price is steep anyway and it's not used so often, and many players I read claimed that they like to be able to do it in space.

Personally I don't like this concept as well and could live without upgrades outside of shipyard, what I do want is upgrading my ships IN shipyards for reasonable money/time/production to be feasible option. Making it cheap everywhere could be potentially problematic balance-wise, and disabling the ability to do this in space is perceived as tedious and not funny by many players. Hence my proposal being sort of middle ground.

And it's not much about immersive realism, more about common sense feeling.😉