Upgrade/retrofit costs.

[Rand alThor]

Hi all,

Firstly, really enjoying the game, thank you for the effort.

My question is, as you might have guessed, about the costs associated with upgrading ships. From what I've checked so far, it seems that the cost of upgrading a ship is more than simply building a new ship from scratch. Which doesn't seem to make sense. Am I missing something here? If this is the case would preserving an outdated ship's experience be the only reason to not simply scrap it?

[Firefox440]

For the record, it can be edited and reduced easily. But probably it was thought as in real live. Tell me, how many time takes upgrade a airplane, car, ship from real life? usually it takes a lot of time, more than the original. Because we are not speaking from take some components and replace them by others, you must create all the infrastructure for all them.

[RandomAttack]

True to some degree, say for major change to hull design-- but we can't do that in-game. The whole point of "modular" construction is to allow for relatively quick changes. So I would say it should definitely take less time to upgrade (how much less depends on extent of changes) than build new, and we should really only pay for the DIFFERENCE in costs of weapons/armor/etc. We can't change a Corvette to a Frigate, or even the weapons mounts-- just tinker with the basic Corvette loadout. A tank analogy might be upgrading the main gun/engine/etc. on a Panther (relatively easy compared to building from scratch) vice trying to change it into a Tiger (a different animal altogether).

[Rand alThor]

I'm fine with this if that's the way it's supposed to work, I really just wanted to be sure it wasn't a bug or I wasn't missing something obvious.

I would have expected some level of upgrade to be possible for a fraction of the cost of building a new ship and it doesn't seem to considerwhat components are changing/staying the same. For instance, I added two small turret, Excimer lasers to a corvette design. The cost to upgrade one of the old corvettes to the almost identical design was:

124 production,
10.5 orbital,
10 gravitonium,
26.4 reidium
35.5 metal
83.6 organic
43.1 radioactive.

That's way more than the individual cost of those lasers and turrets and even includes radioactives which aren't required for those components at all.

Again, it doesn't bother me now that I know that's just how it works. It's a great small studio game and I'm more than happy with it. Thanks!