Hi,


This one is about upgrading ship designs flexibility. I won't go into costs or insta-upgrade themes, cause they've been discused in other threads. What I want to explain here is a suggestion to improve a bit the actual system, time ago @AndreasK made another idea in same way, which I uvoted, left the link in case you're interested.


Actually all designs are upgraded to the next version with a higher nuber, but if you want to upgrade a design to another you simply can't. Making this with actual upgrading buttons can be messy, as this will require to open menus, look for other designs, etc.., making this cumbersome.


I will present you two different ways I think this can be improved.


First way: Ship upgrading paths defined in military screen.


My idea is to add a new feature to the military screen:



These boxes in the lower part will be where you define the upgrading path for you designs. You will be able to drag any design from your list to a box, like this:



Here each design you put will be upgraded into the one into the box pointed by its arrow. the only limitation is that the original design and its upgrade must have the same base hull. you can't upgrade a scout into a battleship. After a while you'll have something like that:



Here as example, "Arma 10" will be upgraded to "Marchio", when you clic the upgrade button, don't matter if into galaxy view or military screen. Having only one upgrading path, will make easier to manage it, as there's only one button to click, but you're are defining what this button does.


Another thing you can see in that example is that both "Herramienta 9" and "Invasor 4" will be upgraded to "baro" desing. So if you are interested in doing so, you can, just clicking same button, and not having to redesing both and upgrading separately to identical designs.


Well, what if you want to upgrade a design to two new design. to way you want half your cruisers upgrade to have bombers and other half to have lots of shields? Well, actually you can with lots of patience. With this new system it may be a bit cumbersoma, but easier: you make two new designs, drag first one, upgrade half your cruisers, drag the second, replacing the alternative design, and upgrade the other half. Yes, a bit cumbersome, but lots less laborious than now.


And what happens with upgrade button? Well, even easier. If you just use same name like now, and the game sees "Arma" is just aside of an empty bow, it will create "Arma 1", following actual auto-upgrade system. Once you create "Arma 2" and it replaces "Arma 1" design like its doing now when you modifi a desing, the game will automatically put "Arma 1" in place of "Arma" and "Arma 2" in its upgrading path. also you can add an auto-upgrade button that auto-upgrades all your designs into next version in one click, so a bit less micro.


Second way: Deployable menu in upgrade buttons.


 Tis one consists in a  deployable menu both in galaxy and military view like this:



Here all fleet is composed of same ship design, and when you click over upgrade button, all desings of this hull are displayed and you choose the one you want to upgrade to.

But finally I went for the idea posted here, because past very early game, sure most of people have fleets with more than one hull and desing/type, even if its due to recovering old ships from fleets aftr a battle, and merging with new ones.

I really don't know how to couple this system with a fleet with various hulls. And if you're capable of matching this, there will become very cumbersome to manage once you have various fleets and are upgrading from military screen. For this I prefer the first option, but after asking a bit into VIP forums before posting this idea, there are people most fond of this one.


Thanks for reading.


As final note, let me add that this is about UI and how the game knows what path is followed to upgrade each desing, and not balance.


Actually I know @plutar is working in balance proposal about upgrading ships system to avoid some exploits/abuse that appeared in MP and can be easily tranlated to SP. When this is ready I'll post the link, as I'm sure you'll be interested to read it.