I'm fairly sure this isnt going to be a popular suggestion, but bear with me.



IMO ship refitting is overpowered. As long as you have plenty of cash sitting around it's just too quick and easy to upgrade entire fleets to the latest tech. This, IMHO, takes away some interesting strategic decisions from the player over the course of the game, i.e. when to refit, and when to scrap fleets of old ships and replace them with new, shiny ones.



So, i'd like to see ship refitting nerfed in some way, possibly by implementing some or all of the following suggestions to some degree:



* Make refitting take some reasonable amount of time, e.g. determined by the cost versus the industrial capacity of your empire. Make it so that i cant leave a fleet of clapped out old bangers in orbit above a planet, and then instantly convert them to state-of-the-art deathships one turn before an enemy fleet arrives.



* Make refitting be a task which has to be carried out using a system's industrial capacity, instead of just something you buy with cash. i.e. to refit you must disband a fleet, then refit the ships from the system screen.



* Limit the type of upgrades a ship design can have from when it was originally built, e.g. you cant add completely different types of mods & weapons, only upgrade existing ones. Thus you cant refit a scout into an attack vessel at a moment's notice.



* Limit the increase in tech levels a ship can be refitted to. If a ship was designed at a point where you had (say) level 2 shields, then that ship can only be refitted with up to level 3 shields. Yes you can refit a destroyer to use cruise missiles. No, you cant refit a napoleonic sailing ship with a nuclear reactor.

Hmm...I can see why you say retrofitting fleets that it shouldn't happen right away. Realistically, anyway, it shouldn't happen like that. But if we change this feature I think we'd more or less have to change the entire construction system. Buying out something that is being built is roughly the same as the insta-retrofit: You pay X Dust and get your item instantly. You could argue that this is overpowered as well.



Lore wise, though (this just came to me), it does make some sense. The nature of the Dust, being the little nanomachines they are, lets it happen. The empire is willing to expend such a valuable resource to have their ships converted quickly, likely by the Dust swarming through the ship and changing everything much faster than humans could ever hope to do it. The more you are changing, the more Dust needed to get all of the changes completed within a year.

How about a combination of both: Normal refitting a ship/fleet costs production and has to get "builded" like a new one (maybe the fleet as only one project), but when you want to get it instantly, you have to pay for it.

Landhund wrote:
How about a combination of both: Normal refitting a ship/fleet costs production and has to get "builded" like a new one (maybe the fleet as only one project), but when you want to get it instantly, you have to pay for it.

I like this. And I just realized that the hangar would be the perfect place for this. Simply return the ships you wish to retrofit to the hangar of a planet. It shouldn't take as long to retrofit as it does to build the ship (or so I assume, but I don't know if there are real-world complications to this process I don't know of), and if you so choose, you can insta-retrofit with the Dust like we can now.

How about that: the older your ship is the longer it takes to refit it, BUT when its to old its cheaper/faster to build a new one. Should be quite realistic.

Could be accomplished relatively easily. Only allow retrofitting of ships in the hangar. When you retrofit one, add the latest version to the system construction queue - delete the existing ship and reduce the construction cost of the new one by the industrial cost/value of the old one. You only pay the difference as construction time.



Alternatively - as I think this would still be too easy, only reduce the industrial cost of the new ship by HALF the industrial cost of the old ship. (Hell, you could even have a racial ability somewhere which makes retrofitting more lucrative to a specific race as a side-result of this)

I think the second suggestion is better, otherwise it would be realy to easy. But i also think that you should be able to refit more than one ship at the same time. Maybe the hangar should get an own construction queue for refitting/repairing ship(s).

FinalStrigon wrote:
Realistically, anyway, it shouldn't happen like that .... Lore wise, though (this just came to me), it does make some sense.

Dont get me wrong, i totally agree that it fits in with the way dust works. My problem with it is that it removes some interesting decisions from the player.



One of my favorite parts of Master Of Orion 1 was that you could only have 6 ship designs at a time. Sure it was an artificial limit (probably imposed by a lack of RAM in those days), but it forced you to really think about when to scrap an existing design to make way for a new one. You couldnt just refit your entire fleet every time your scientists came up with a slightly improved cup holder for the captain's chair as you could in MoO2, instead you had to judge the right moment when the tech advance was great enough to be worth it, and you could do without the scrapped ships for enough turns to get production up and running on the new design.



It made for great gameplay. It's a shame (IMO) that ES doesnt have a similar mechanic and has instead gone for a more Moo2-like approach.

daveybaby wrote:
Dont get me wrong, i totally agree that it fits in with the way dust works. My problem with it is that it removes some interesting decisions from the player.



One of my favorite parts of Master Of Orion 1 was that you could only have 6 ship designs at a time. Sure it was an artificial limit (probably imposed by a lack of RAM in those days), but it forced you to really think about when to scrap an existing design to make way for a new one. You couldnt just refit your entire fleet every time your scientists came up with a slightly improved cup holder for the captain's chair as you could in MoO2, instead you had to judge the right moment when the tech advance was great enough to be worth it, and you could do without the scrapped ships for enough turns to get production up and running on the new design.



It made for great gameplay. It's a shame (IMO) that ES doesnt have a similar mechanic and has instead gone for a more Moo2-like approach.

True, it does remove a layer of strategy. Hopefully that would be fixed if they require retrofits to start in the hangar, meaning you still need to lose ships for a while. You can sit out the turns needed to retrofit every ship, or if you have enough Dust, that option is still there.



It could possibly be helped if the Dust price was upped a bit as well.

You could have only the weapons and defences upgrade, leaving older ships with weaker hulls?

Or they can just make refitting more expensive, and dust more difficult to earn (way too easy to get dust now).

They can start by nerfing industry -> science/dust conversions lol

Its a bit silly how a single star system can just convert industry to dust and increase the empires income by 5-10x

Well dust is actually made you know? is not like there is such a thing as too much dust.

Sure there is such a thing, there is too much dust for gameplay balance. Its alright in the beginning, but by midgame you just end up with vast amounts of it, which causes other gameplay issues such as extremely low tax rates for a huge empire resulting in epic FIDS bonuses, as well as instant retrofitting of entire fleets

The give reasons to to upgrade? like leaving some of a ships experiance when decommissioned for newer built ships to pick up when they are made?