How to upgrade ships with the latest design?

In GC IV there are no ship upgrades in that way (taking an old ship and turning it into a new design).

Instead, specific ships can acquire ship upgrades through levels. There are two types of ships that can do it.

1) Commander Ships (which you can get from the leader area).

2) Any ship with the survey module.

You acquire XP from either surveying (and note, all ships in your fleet that are eligible recieve this XP, so this is one way to level up your commanders early, send them into a fleet with a survey ship), or from combat.

When you get a level, you will be able to upgrade the ship with certain modules.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Larsenex

Join Date 04/2009

+212

Yes you can upgrade your ships. In Gal Civ III this was called retrofitting.

Example You create your own small hull that has basic lasers and all three defenses, call it 'laser boat'.

Later you research disrupters and better defenses and a shiny new engine upgrade.

You go back into your designs, use the existing design, upgrade with new parts and call it 'laser boat 2'.

Now, HOW DO YOU UPGRADE IN GAME? Funny you ask. I found out only via the discord when another old player showed me.

You must create a way point in game with any ship. Drive your ship you want to upgrade on it, if there is still movement left you can click on that ship and you will see an UPGRADE ARROW, click this and you will have a pop up that lists what that ship can upgrade to and it includes designs you made!

This was my biggest peeve and its is back. While its clunky and only one ship at a time I will be just happy with it!

Hope this helps.

+3

Successfully updated karma reason!

Avatar137

Join Date 06/2004

+48

Quoting Larsenex,

reply 2

...

Hope this helps.

Nice! Thanks for sharing this!!

Successfully updated karma reason!

Yeah, totally thanks for this.

It is very clunky and took me a bit to even figure it out. Now, for groups of ships, you CAN take them in as a fleet, then select each one and right-click it on the same spot until they are all out of the fleet and just a stack of ships. Then left-click the spot (slowly) until you go "through" the stack to the "bottom" which should be the rally point. In that window, you can select each ship in the stack and upgrade them one at a time, but at least they'll all be happening at the same time.

Another thing I noticed, when trying to upgrade core ship designs (like probes or basic survey ships), if you haven't created a personal version of them, your upgrade options are limited. On the other hand, it seems like experience upgrades carry over to the new ship design, so that's a plus.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Is this intended design, a workaround for something broken, or a glitch allowing you to upgrade when you shouldn’t be able to? I hope not intended design.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Quoting TheBrono,

reply 5

Is this intended design, a workaround for something broken, or a glitch allowing you to upgrade when you shouldn’t be able to?

Since they obviously copied a significant portion of the game code over from GC3, my guess is: unintended glitch stemming from copied code.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Quoting TheBrono,

reply 5

Is this intended design, a workaround for something broken, or a glitch allowing you to upgrade when you shouldn’t be able to? I hope not intended design.

Which part? The method of stacking, the method of updating, or the core design issues? Personally, I think they are "intended" but not final. It is still more in beta than anything. And it doesn't allow upgrades when you shouldn't be able to. It's just the way to update a ship when your tech base allows you to build better versions. I recently hit the point in-game where I could mount all three weapon types onto my tiny/small hulls. There are no already existing designs at that level for this. So I made one and started updating all of my existing little defense craft into them.

Side note, kinda cheaty or an exploit of game design, but when you get to the point of being able to do this, you can add the Probe module to pretty much ALL ships... which means no boundaries for your new death fleet...

Successfully updated karma reason!

Sorry should’ve specified - meant the having to create a waypoint to fudge upgrading ships. If they’re just not meant to be upgraded that’s one thing, but I’d like to think you could upfit them at a star base, shipyard, colony etc

Successfully updated karma reason!

Well, in previous versions of GC, you could update your ships pretty much anywhere. I don't know if the waypoint requirement is intended to be that way, but I suspect it's actually a workaround for now until they smooth out the code that allows both updating ships and UPGRADING ships, especially since many of the upgrades are also parts that can be designed into the base of the ship initially. The module that comes to mind is the Crew Quarters experience upgrade. In the ship design, there's also a version (Hull Support) of it that adds a base of 4HP. You can only add one Hull Support during design, but you can keep upgrading, via experience, the same Crew Quarters addon. All in all, it's screwing with me just having to remember the 2 different words

Update for design changes and upgrade for experience changes

Successfully updated karma reason!

Quoting TheBrono,

reply 8

Sorry should’ve specified - meant the having to create a waypoint to fudge upgrading ships. If they’re just not meant to be upgraded that’s one thing, but I’d like to think you could upfit them at a star base, shipyard, colony etc

This has been discussed since the start of Beta if not sooner.

From what I have read here and on discord upgrading any ships other than leader or survey ships is not a part of the game. The "work around" is actually a bug. It appears that the Dev Team does not have it high on the "must fix list" atm.

While no "Official" word on this being changed I get the feeling that it may be up for reconsideration at a later point.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Quoting gypsy2299,

reply 10

Quoting TheBrono,

reply 8

Sorry should’ve specified - meant the having to create a waypoint to fudge upgrading ships. If they’re just not meant to be upgraded that’s one thing, but I’d like to think you could upfit them at a star base, shipyard, colony etc

This has been discussed since the start of Beta if not sooner.

From what I have read here and on discord upgrading any ships other than leader or survey ships is not a part of the game. The "work around" is actually a bug. It appears that the Dev Team does not have it high on the "must fix list" atm.

While no "Official" word on this being changed I get the feeling that it may be up for reconsideration at a later point.

Well, there's upgrading when levelling up and 'upfitting' via the rally point, so, which one do you mean? Just wondering.

And yea, that upgrade/upfitting via rally point does seem like something leftover or as a workaround. But it's not practical for anytime other than early game since you can't go fleet by fleet. I did use it to upgrade my probe surveyors, but that's a small group anyway.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Quoting gypsy2299,

reply 10

Quoting TheBrono,

reply 8

Sorry should’ve specified - meant the having to create a waypoint to fudge upgrading ships. If they’re just not meant to be upgraded that’s one thing, but I’d like to think you could upfit them at a star base, shipyard, colony etc

This has been discussed since the start of Beta if not sooner.

From what I have read here and on discord upgrading any ships other than leader or survey ships is not a part of the game. The "work around" is actually a bug. It appears that the Dev Team does not have it high on the "must fix list" atm.

While no "Official" word on this being changed I get the feeling that it may be up for reconsideration at a later point.

OK, maybe we shouldn't call it upgrading or updating, how about retrofitting. If I get my tech base up to the point where I can re-design my probes to have a bunch more engines, or some weapons and shields so they aren't taken out by every pirate or space monster out there, then I should be able to recall the old ones and retrofit them into the new design. Probes don't get XP (normally, unless you put them as part of a fleet) so they are never upgraded in any way, except for universal effects like Moves or basic armor/shield/point-defense techs.

If retrofitting them is not supposed to be part of the game, well, that's just stupid. When I can make better ships, what am I supposed to do with the outdated ones? Scrap them all and build replacements? That's lame and doesn't make any sense.

+1

Successfully updated karma reason!

DivineWrath

Join Date 05/2006

+135

You could always use outdated ships to defend military starbases. Military starbases makes it impossible to conquer planets within their AoE, but their defenses are weak, hence why you should consider giving them ships to defend them. Its not the optimal solution, but its all I got.

I also don't like the fact the devs changed upgrading to be a level up system. It used to work fine back when upgrading retrofitted your ships.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Quoting DivineWrath,

reply 13

You could always use outdated ships to defend military starbases. Military starbases makes it impossible to conquer planets within their AoE, but their defenses are weak, hence why you should consider giving them ships to defend them. Its not the optimal solution, but its all I got.

I also don't like the fact the devs changed upgrading to be a level up system. It used to work fine back when upgrading retrofitted your ships.

Agreed with the ship building mechanic not having needed changing, it worked well in 3 even better in 2 when you did not need steady hands to place parts and the ships stayed still on the page while doing it (personal whine).

Successfully updated karma reason!

Is this still the case with supernova? Wow, the ship upgrading mechanic really sucks if so.

Successfully updated karma reason!

The game has change hugely in the last 10 months so no way to answer your question as this thread is way out of date.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Just verified. In Supernova there still isn't a way to upgrade ships, and this half broken buggy workaround still exists. It's insane that the game has supposedly been out for a year and yet this system hasn't improved.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Well, I have upgraded my flag ship T.A,A Discovery. This way is easy:

1) Select your ship. A window will be open at the bottom left of your screen.

2) Click on the square at the botton right of this window.

3) The upgrade options will appear.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Yes flagship have upgrades. But it would be nice to be able to upgrade older designs to new ones.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Quoting pixelcowboy,

reply 17

Just verified. In Supernova there still isn't a way to upgrade ships, and this half broken buggy workaround still exists. It's insane that the game has supposedly been out for a year and yet this system hasn't improved.

How do I create the waypoint to make use of this workaround ?

Successfully updated karma reason!

Quoting cammagno74,

reply 20

How do I create the waypoint to make use of this workaround ?

Per game design we want to move away from this mechanic, but while code is still there, you could use it:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1357210/discussions/0/3819659084189364716/

Successfully updated karma reason!

Quoting Zabik_2,

reply 21

Per game design we want to move away from this mechanic, but while code is still there, you could use it:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1357210/discussions/0/3819659084189364716/

Thanks for your answer

I hope you'll reconsider your design decision, it's both unrealistic and annoying to have lots of obsolete ships that can't be updated. You could make it more difficult instead (for example it could be needed to move them to a shipyard to be able to update them)

Successfully updated karma reason!

Quoting cammagno74,

reply 22

Thanks for your answer

I hope you'll reconsider your design decision, it's both unrealistic and annoying to have lots of obsolete ships that can't be updated. You could make it more difficult instead (for example it could be needed to move them to a shipyard to be able to update them)

For sure we do want to have a possibility to upgrade ships, at least in some way, I have phrased myself poorly.
It's that we want to replace the mechanic with another one. There are some ideas on it, but all are in early stages, so I cannot tell you the specifics

+1

Successfully updated karma reason!

Quoting Zabik_2,

reply 23

For sure we do want to have a possibility to upgrade ships, at least in some way, I have phrased myself poorly.

It's that we want to replace the mechanic with another one. There are some ideas on it, but all are in early stages, so I cannot tell you the specifics

Good to know!

Successfully updated karma reason!

Upgrade in shipyards (or a core world/military starbase). It'd be somewhat of a pain but it is realistic. Upgrading shields, armor, weapons,etc etc in the middle of space somewhere isn't realistic.

Successfully updated karma reason!