I'm not sure if this has been discussed before but let me just put it out there. I was having a look over my ship designs and admiring my fully upgraded state of the art navy when I notice a pretty interesting design in one of my fleets. I had forgotten I received this ship from a quest. I really liked the lines on the scorpio class attack ship and I noticed that it had empty weapon slots. I gotta say even though I knew I could not change this ship or build more of them, I wasted 5 minutes trying to click any combination of buttons to let me retrofit this ship with new weapons. After surrendering to the situation I thought of this idea.

Add a new minor faction whose faction  bonus after getting 50 population is that you get their faction hulls. The lore around it could be that they are master ship builders who didn't have the resources to create their masterpiece. They have been trying to collect the resources required by selling their designs to pirate factions and that would explain at least where the kinda metally svette ships like the scorpio class come from. Just an idea for incorporating mechanics with a little more lore tidbits like the Mavros Skunkworks quest. If this is too hard to inplement or would cause problems with this wonderful game then totally disregard. Thanks for listening.

There is no such thing as a minor faction hull, all minors use only 4 families of hulls.

Sublustris wrote:

There is no such thing as a minor faction hull, all minors use only 4 families of hulls.

I never said there were. I'm saying add lore to one of those families by adding a new minor faction. 

hera35 wrote:

...

One additional idea: perhaps we could use a hero skill that noticeably buffs mercenary ships, kind of like the Roving Clan faction bonus that doubled the HP of all their mercenaries. That way you could make semi-powerful mercenaries accessible to all factions rather than just one.

Also, I think late game merc units should also receive fleet support modules like fleet shield or perhaps even repair. In Endless Legend it was often viable to hire mercenaries not only for more battle power or more beef between the enemy and your main units, but also because of their various support abilities, f.ex. Eyeless Ones for their heal ability or the Sisters of Mercy for their poison cleansing ability. 

Of course all of this should be carefully balanced, as normal faction ships require various techs, strategic resources and production so merc ships you only get for Dust shouldn't be inherently as powerful.

I dig the idea of perhaps having some sort of system of Crew Types available for mercenary ships based on Minor Factions. The ship models all stay the same but just get an icon to mark them as belonging to a particular minor faction, with an associated bonus.

Come to think of it that'd make a nice basis for an upgrade system, just adding little icons to the corner of a Mercenary ships stats to show which Mercenary Empire Improvements you have. Perhaps add a series of new Fleet Empire Improvements that either only apply to Mercenaries, or have one weaker effect for normal ships, and a second stronger effect for Mercenaries.

Also if any Hero class should get Mercenary abilities, it should be Seeker. Allow Seekers to become Privateer Heroes and you have the makings of a really cool feature.

I would like to just be able to retrofit them. 

I just trash them immediatly as they are way too slow, cost upkeep and weak to use for anything.

VirtualAngel wrote:

I would like to just be able to retrofit them. 

I just trash them immediatly as they are way too slow, cost upkeep and weak to use for anything.

Exactly. I don't want extra game mechanics or new abilities, just retrofitting these hulls that are relagated to garbage as soon as you get a decent economy and somewhat good tech.

I would like to be able to re-fit, but to keep things balanced, prevent us from building them (although you could buy them from the market).

ZortPointNarf wrote:

I would like to be able to re-fit, but to keep things balanced, prevent us from building them (although you could buy them from the market).

I agree.