Retrofitting mercenary ship

I agree.

However, I'm uncertain about the way that an empire would go about upgrading market-bought ships. Currently you have to unlock a ship/hull design before being able to upgrade it, and because no major faction has access to minor faction hull designs, it's impossible to upgrade those minor faction hulls.

Perhaps there could be a marketplace feature where you spend extra Dust to upgrade your mercenary ships. The lore behind that is not hard to write: freelance shipbuilders with specialized knowledge are contracted by your empire to update the design of older mercenary ships you'd rather keep in service than decommission.

In Endless Legend, players were not given the capacity to upgrade mercenaries, for balance reasons I think. It seems like a loss, to me, and I'd rather not have that ruling carry over to ES2, so I hope your idea gets used.

I understand that implementing the upgrade to the ship design window might be problematic for a number of reasons.

But it should be easy to have an up to date design unlocked at each era.

It would be great if the discovery of weapon types would also be implemented into this but I will be ok with just the latest components for existing designs.

Knyghtefall wrote:

I would assume the same mechanic that allows you to upgrade your Hero ships could likely be used to upgrade a merc ship. 

Better yet, create a mechanic where by you can "spend" your merc ship to buy the blueprint. Or, better yet, offer a way to buy/capture blueprints. 

That a good idea.