Fleet Upgrading

[Savior59]

So currently, upgrading your fleet seems incredibly expensive and seems to take a lot more time than 2.1. Has this been confirmed to be a bug or is it a balance change?

If it is a balance change, I cannot say I really agree with the change, it almost feels like I should be making new ships instead of upgrading the ones I have.

*EDIT: Turns out it was actually a feature! Luckily, the cost and time for upgrading components has been greatly reduced in the beta. Thank you for the support!
Patch Notes Below:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ith-a-ton-of-new-fixes-checksum-555a.1138251/

 

[Serenity84]

It's obviously either a design choice or an oversight. People are way too quick to consider everything they don't like or understand a bug

I like the cost change. I think it now takes into account the cost of the components you take out, refunds a part of the costs and makes you pay for the new components. That's fair. It pushes you make meaningful changes and not upgrade every small iteration.

The upgrade time however is completely out of proportion. Takes years and years for large fleets.

 

[Savior59]

It's obviously either a design choice or an oversight. People are way too quick to consider everything they don't like or understand a bug

I like the cost change. I think it now takes into account the cost of the components you take out, refunds a part of the costs and makes you pay for the new components. That's fair. It pushes you make meaningful changes and not upgrade every small iteration.

The upgrade time however is completely out of proportion. Takes years and years for large fleets.

I mean, I get it if I was to retrofit my ships, but I don't think I should be paying 189 alloys to upgrade 10 corvettes with Blue Lasers (2 components per corvette). It's just too much, especially in the early game.

 

[Crowarior]

It's obviously either a design choice or an oversight. People are way too quick to consider everything they don't like or understand a bug

I like the cost change. I think it now takes into account the cost of the components you take out, refunds a part of the costs and makes you pay for the new components. That's fair. It pushes you make meaningful changes and not upgrade every small iteration.

The upgrade time however is completely out of proportion. Takes years and years for large fleets.

I dont think upgrade cost is design choice because 16 of my corvettes needed 1100 alloys to upgrade lvl2 laser to lvl3 laser.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

Why should it not take time?!?

The larger the fleet the more ships you have in it and thus the more time it should take.

You should however use all available shipyards so if you have four yards it would take one quarter the time as if you have one yard.

This will stop you from tailoring your fleet against every enemy in a few weeks and for almost no cost, that is just ludicrous.

 

[Cymsdale]

I kinda like that pressing the upgrade button on your fleet is no longer a no-brainer.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

I mean, I get it if I was to retrofit my ships, but I don't think I should be paying 189 alloys to upgrade 10 corvettes with Blue Lasers (2 components per corvette). It's just too much, especially in the early game.

It is to prevent you to upgrade all the time... just have some old ships there and produce newer ones.

I would upgrade ships allot more seldom. It also make it actually worth consider to disband ships after a war to save on alloys and energy for maintenance if you don't expect to fight for some time (perhaps 10-20 years). You would then just disband the oldest ships in the fleet.

Now you bunker up some Alloys and build new advanced ships when you actually need them.

This make sense.

 

[Serenity84]

You should however use all available shipyards so if you have four yards it would take one quarter the time as if you have one yard.

The game should automatically consider the number of shipyard modules on a station and speed things up a bit.
But having to manually split fleets is an idiotic mechanic. People complain about "micromanagement" for the most silly reasons, but this is the height of micro.

Otherwise, yeah, there needs to be some balance. When ships almost instantly upgraded it was bad too. But taking many years for it isn't good either.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

According to the defines the time for upgrade are 0.75% of what it would take to otherwise build. I guess it is the entire ship... not sure. But should be easy to figure out.

If you change a section your are refunded 75% of the cost of the old and pay for the new section.

If you change a component you are refunded 25% of the cost and pay for the new component.

It should not be hard to figure out exactly how this is calculated and if it fit what the define says.

 

[SGTHunteR]

Yeah I had a citadel with 6 shipyards hoping the upgrade speed would be 6 times faster... it looked the same as a single shipyard repair.

Strange D:

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

The game should automatically consider the number of shipyard modules on a station and speed things up a bit.
But having to manually split fleets is an idiotic mechanic. People complain about "micromanagement" for the most silly reasons, but this is the height of micro.

Otherwise, yeah, there needs to be some balance. When ships almost instantly upgraded it was bad too. But taking many years for it isn't good either.

I was intending to mean that is how it should be, the game should do just that. When a fleet is upgrading it should halt any other ship building there and use ALL shipyards automatically. Forcing people to chop their fleets up too much seem a bit harsh.

 

[Serenity84]

If you change a section your are refunded 75% of the cost of the old and pay for the new section.

If you change a component you are refunded 25% of the cost and pay for the new component.

It would be great if the upgrade time considered such things too. So if you make radical changes to the hull it takes longer. If you change the size of the weapons it takes a medium amount of time. And if you change a weapon for another one of the same size it's relatively quick

 

[Tyrax Lightning]

This will stop you from tailoring your fleet against every enemy in a few weeks and for almost no cost, that is just ludicrous.

I woulda swore this was EXACTLY what the Game was designed around on PURPOSE by the Devs...? Was this a mistaken impression? Now i'm confused... (Still trying to learn the game... probably still a long road ahead of me.)

For the Topic: I kept trying to Upgrade a large fleet of Corvettes from T1 Lasers to T2 Lasers & it kept saying "Preparing to Upgrade" but never did anything after that... I was wondering if this was a Bug or if the process was awaiting sufficient Alloys. Glad I found this Thread & I now know the answer. Now Upgrading is never worth it compared to just getting older Ships blown up then replacing them. Upgrade Button might not have any reason to exist anymore... spending so much time & cost on a little Upgrade is impossible to justify compared to just suiciding the Ships & replacing them imho. :/

 

[Serenity84]

It entirely depends on your current situation. If you aren't planning to fight anything and have enough alloys there is no harm in upgrading

 

[Tyrax Lightning]

It entirely depends on your current situation. If you aren't planning to fight anything and have enough alloys there is no harm in upgrading

So, if in this Situation, it is not a Bang for Buck loss compared to old fleet suicide plus ship replace?

 

[Serenity84]

So what? The game doesn't force ideal play on you. Unless you're in a life or death situation you can play inefficiently. What else are you going to do with those resources? And upgrading in peace time when you don't need the ships is still quicker than building new ones in war time.

 

[Kilmantor]

Agree … seems like they've taken the Mineral Prices from 2.1 like 1:1

 

[EvilKnievel82]

I think it is bugged because:
a) There are sometimes negative upgrade costs shown,
b) if you have an up-to-date fleet and hover with the mouse over the upgrade button it will still show upgrade costs.
So something is clearly not working as intended.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

It is not bugged it works as intended as far as I can see... please test things before you jump to conclusions!?!

This is how it currently works...

If you have a ship that cost 100 Alloys (starting corvette) which take 60 days to build.

You then swap out all three weapons for a newer tier II laser which cost 13 Alloys a piece.

The total cost for that is 13*3=39 Alloys
The old components cost 10*3=30 Alloys

Now you get a refund of 25% of the old components and that is 30*0.25=7.5 Alloys

The total cost for each Corvette will now be 39-7.5=31.5 Alloys

The time it takes to upgrade ONE corvette is total cost of the corvette of 109 Alloys versus the cost of upgrade based on the normal speed to build a corvette with a multiplier of 0.75. So...
(39/109)*60*0.75=16.1 days

So 10 corvettes will now take 161 days to upgrade for a price of 315 Alloys.

I have not tested if several yards will effect the build speed but I will test that too.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

Upgrading fleets work exactly as building ships... one fleet per yard.

So you must cut your fleets up in several sections to upgrade them faster.

THIS is worth complaining about in my opinion because this is just busy work. I think that upgrading a fleet should just use all yards and cut the time down due to how many yards you have. Even if this means you upgrade one battleship super fast in several yards, this is a small insignificant side effect.

It should just halt all other building until the fleet is upgraded and if you have several fleets they should just be sequentially queued.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

One thing to note is that late game ships will take much longer to upgrade because their components have a much higher total cost of the ship in comparison of early game ships where the section cost is a much bigger part of the cost. The section cost does not change but the cost of components will. This result in more advanced ships taking more time to upgrade.