You've encountered these upgrades time and time again when Survey ships explore Ship Graveyards. Improved Sensor Range, or improved Ship Speed, or improved Ship Range. I've had some ships go from a per-turn movement rate of 5 to >31, just from those improvements. Sensor ranges from 2 to 20+. Ship ranges improved to >100 from friendly territory.
Don't the ship captains ever bother to file progress reports that layout "How to build our ships to go faster, see further, and travel farther"?
I understand your point, but what would you suggest? after all, this is still just a game. If all of these improvements would apply to the entire race, two problems would immediately arise.
1. All 5 (or more) opponents in the game would also have these race-wide upgrades and could quickly use them to exterminate you. How would you like to face 5 opponents who all had the race-wide improvements that you described?
2. This interesting game element would become way too overpowered, and would have to be curtailed drastically - or even eliminated entirely. Would that be preferable to you?
If so, I believe that in the set-up you can reduce or turn off all of these game elements. Why don't you try that, and see if it makes your gaming experience more enjoyable.
As popular as these individual unit upgrades are with the players, I would suggest two things:
1) Make upgrade discoveries be seriously rare-ified. Perhaps as rare as only 10% of the frequency we have now.
2) Put a cap on just how much improvement ships could get before Physics slams down and and bellows "Thou shalt not pass this limit!" Instead of getting ships with speeds >30, the absolute most a ship could achieve would be perhaps 10. Similar limits for sensor range and Life Support range.
As something of a compensation, any ship performance boosting find in a Ship Graveyard would also give the civ the corresponding tech that gives the boost, free of charge or need to do the research. (They already know how it is accomplished. No need to research it.) This would make the mechanism to build ships with similar capabilities available empire-wide immediately.
One of the fun things I did in my current game was to add one survey ship to my 'massive 42 logistics' fleet (Lg carrier, lg atk, lg support, 3 med asault, 2 med escort) and have them go and 'tap' 3 or 4 graveyards to get these speed, sensor and life support upgrades. After I get some upgrades I remove the Survey ship.
Its Amazingly fun! That fleet can go and see farther than your standard fleet. It give them something to do if not moving to a war theater. The bonuses are 'fleet wide' which makes it rather Over powered.
Do the bonuses you get persist after you upgrade the ship?
I'm not entirely sure. I've upgraded quite a few ships, and the choices can be quite varied. But what they show is the "basic model" of the available upgrades. For example, the shown model is speed 5, but because of some techs the player has, the actual conversion will have speed 9. So that sort of suggests that if you upgrade an improved ship, it will revert to the basic model of the type you upgraded to.
Bonuses do indeed persist after upgrades, they make great "rapid response" ships to take out unprotected enemy support ships.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
