Is their any advantage in holding off upgrading your equipment? What happens is when I approach the next Era, I hold off upgrading my equipment with the thought that I will save on dust.

I haven't done any testing, but I think you do save on dust and other resources. Early on I would rather spend my dust on city improvements rather than troop improvements(usually play Vaulters or Broken lords).



You should upgrade basic equipment though, as that just costs production resource and you don't need to do a quest for t3.

I usually have my most experienced force upgraded and wait until the t3 quests before upgrading any other unit. It does give you a good advantage, especially if you can find a t3 quest mid-game. During one of my campaigns I was able to find t3 equipment early on it allowed me to defeat most of the weaker enemy empires with a single offensive army commanded by a high level hero.

I used to think you save on dust by waiting to upgrade, now I am not so sure. When you upgrade and put the new equipment on top of the old equipment it is cheaper than putting it in an open accessory slot.

I'm also very interested in this, hopefully a developer can talk about this question.

paperhero wrote:
I used to think you save on dust by waiting to upgrade, now I am not so sure. When you upgrade and put the new equipment on top of the old equipment it is cheaper than putting it in an open accessory slot.

That's because you only pay the difference between items when replacing them.



There's no savings by waiting to upgrade-- but there is the opportunity cost of spending your dust! There's no benefit to upgrading your military unless you actually battle. (For that matter, there's no benefit to even having a military unless you actually battle.) The ideal way to do things is to spend dust on improvements/governors up until you actually have a battle, then upgrade fully at that time. The thing is, you can't always predict when you're going to need your military. The costs mean that you actually have to think ahead a bit if you want to play this way.

You can ignore early equipment upgrades to get two extra technologies and still get solid equipment in the next Era.

1 other thing worth mentioning is that each upgrade in a specific resource grouping, aka titanium/glassteel, palladium/adamantian etc. reduces resource costs for equipment by 10% so if you finish both of the researches for an era before upgrading you are using less resources. thats assuming you actually care about some of the weapon techs of course i never skip an armor tech though cause it gives accessories