Expanded Ship Upgrades Thread - Enhanced 4X Mod for Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion

Ah! So I can post here, lovely.

Anyways, I don't think I can gush about how clever the ship upgrade system in E4X really is, and I would love to see it expanded upon. Multiple tiers of capital ship, and even frigate-level upgrades would be great, and I have some ideas on how the later could be done both easily and with an eye towards continued game balance.

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So, capital ship upgrades, easy enough. Just more research projects unlocking more and increasingly expensive add-ons applied by the cap-factory.

At the second tier unlocked by research it's all simple, same-y things in the end, but the order and cost of their application being unique to the factions, and they come with faction specific debuffs. For example, the Orthodox Advent getting a tier 2 upgrade which gives a comparatively weak +2 to their armor, a +10 health buff per armor with a max of 100 more HP, but have to pay more in terms of upgrade research unlocks, and more in application since their ships are held together mostly by happy thoughts instead of solid metal. It incurs a -15% hit in their total antimatter reserves, and a 2% increase in ability cool down times. Something like this would make the upgrade a no-brainer only if the player were already doing well, and they might not even choose it at all given the expense and reduced utility of their capital ships outside of friendly space.

Third tier upgrades are wherei t gets interesting, though. An example being a Trader TEC getting a tier 3 upgrade, and this upgrade only affects laser weapons, giving them a +5% damage boost, but also imposes a -10% damage de-buff upon the target of said weapons. While a Trader HTS, with a similarly tiered ship grade, would enjoy a +10% damage boost, and inflict a -1 armor de-buff upon their targets. The TEC player's tech unlocks 'microwave-enchanced pulse chamber' while the HTS unlocks 'x-ray pulse impeller', or something suitably science fiction-y. Another example would be a Vasari VCC versus VIR getting a tier 3 upgrade that affects plasma waves, the VCC get a range increase of +10% and their wave cannons now also deal a mild AoE damage (akin to the cluster munitions buff of the Javelis, but permanent upon the upgraded capital ship), meanwhile the VIR get a +5% damage increase, and inflict a damage over time debuff of -5 hp a second that stacks up to 3 times. They could be called 'dense plasma wave containment' and 'ionized fluorine seeding' respectively.

So, with the examples above, the upgrade paradigm would be something like as follows: tier 1 - universal to the faction, absolute good, nothing changes; tier 2 - universal to the faction, good/bad trade offs depending on what you want; tier 3 - subfaction specific, absolute good, highly expensive to implement, endgame.

A similar system would apply to titans, but titans upgrades would, no matter the tier, only be a universal good, since a titan, by its very nature, would be large enough to house secondary systems needed to mitigate any drawbacks. Also, you WANT to encourage the player to pour everything they can into their titan, no? Yes.

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Now then! On to frigate upgrades. Frigates are, to me, a totally different sort of paradigm to capital ships and titans. Frigates are small, comparatively cramped, finely tuned craft. That is, they are designed to within their tolerances from the get-go, with little room for serious add-on systems, so trying to fiddle with them will incur a give-and-take upon the overall performance of the craft. The other difference between frigates and capital ships/titans, of course, is that there are a lot of them. Like, seriously, there are a LOT of the compared to the big ships, especially when the Outlaw Systems DLC is enabled and there are militia flying around. So, given both the conceptual and the logistical differences, how would frigate upgrades even work?

Well, the logistical side is rather easy, and most of the legwork is already there. Frigate upgrades can be applied to all ships within a range (like the Trader star base Resupply ability), incur a low material cost per cast, and have a short cool down period. It can also extend to trade/refinery ships by some of the upgrade castings being dependent on whether the target has weapons or not (example would be in the Kol hero-unit's ability list only being able to debuff targets with weapons, but this would only apply to ships WITH weapons, while other upgrades would affect all owned ships).

Now onto the conceptual differences, and how they could be overcome with an eye towards maintaining game balance, while still allowing for a natural progression of power as a game continues, thus rewarding players for actually upgrading their small ships. Well, the easiest way I could see of doing that would be applying relatively universal bonuses coupled with faction, or even subfaction specific penalties. For example ALL factions have a speed boost applied to their frigates, not mass reduction, but a boost to their maximum speed, with a faction-specific secondary buff, coupled with a debuff. The Traders would get a turn rate boost, the Advent an acceleration bonus, and the Vasari would get a phase jump speed increase between systems and especially along stabilized nodes. The negative for all this goodness, however, would also be faction specific, with the Traders suffering a -10% hp penalty, the Advent being hit with a -3 Armor reduction, and the Vasari enduring a -15% shield mitigation. The respective upgrades could be called 'high-temperature engine charging', 'psikinetic acceleration matrix', and 'permeable phase fields'. The traders force higher energy plasma through the main engine and maneuvering thruster systems, increasing performance, but stressing the tolerances and making catastrophic failure in combat conditions more likely. The Advent slave a cadre of their psintegrate, forcing their thoughts to a single aspect of the ship - speed, unfortunately such induced focus is a parasitic influence upon the ship's other operators and overseers, stressing their minds and by extension the ship's own ability to mitigate physical threats. The Vasari are able to exploit and upscale their miniaturized phase technology, allowing them to envelope their smaller ships in a low level phase field within gravity wells similar to their phase missiles, increasing their speed and boosting their main phase drives. Unfortunately, these fields seem to have a deleterious effect upon their shields ability to respond to incoming damage through random phase-mass fluctuations. I bring up this specific example, because it could apply also to trading and refinery ships, increasing their efficiency by reducing their turnaround, thus leading to a faster, more competitive game overall that better rewards good empire building while punishing turtling. Other tier frigate 1 upgrades that affect weaponized ships could include weapon cooldown bonuses, and minor armor increases with thier own faction bonuses and debuffs. This would reflect the factions beginning to try and overhaul their frigate fleets in generally useful ways.

It's into tier 2 frigate unlocks that things get more varied. Players can start to enjoy faction specific bonuses to their small craft, or perhaps even a further boost to their tier 1 upgrades, and these upgrades are absolute good as they would reflect the natural result of technological advancement within a culture that's spent decades waging war. This would, I think, actually give the game something it's been lacking (THOUGH E4X DOES GO A LONG WAY TO FIXING!) and that is asymmetric faction balance. For example, the Vasari are the most expensive faction, with the hardest hitting, least numerous ships. Decades of stalemate have proven a series of fundamental technological short comings. Losses are becoming unacceptable to the looming doom, so now those ships are even more expensive but they also hit farther out, reduce enemy shield mitigation, and their weapons are vampiric; doing a tiny amount of extra damage per hit but also healing their own hulls for an exact tiny but significant amount of hp thanks to phased energy funneling and energy-matter conversion. The Advent are the zerg-y faction with the least expensive and most utility-oriented ships available. Driven not by careful planning, but through auguries and determination and intitially a shared hatred the Advent have found their fleets ultimately stymied, though they faced a foe unprepared for them on two fronts. Though slightly more expensive, their attack vessels fire even faster, they all do more damage before going down, and their utility ships can cast their powers much faster well. The Traders, meanwhile, are the castle faction, enduring hardship and coming away stronger while their economic juggernaut gains more and more steam. Well, now their powerful economy has been put to work overhauling the frigate fleet that's been languishing under a regime of desperate stop-gaps and jury rigs for 30 blood-soaked years. Now they all have thicker armor with tougher hulls, more accurate weapon computers, and weapons featuring more versatile systems whether it's micro-sub-munitions bursting at the back of autocannon shells, adding a helical photon-plasma component to the laser blasters, or just standardized cluster warheads upon the missiles all Trader weapons now boast a minor AoE effect in addition to their regular damage output to better throw back the inhuman hordes and reclaim the lost worlds.

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So! Uhm... thoughts? So far as I've seen, nothing proposed here would be too hard to do, and I hope it's without ego that I would be happy to help with balancing. I don't have much coding experience (yet), but I do have an eye (I hope) for game design.

Edited by: TrollofReason

The biggest problem with expanding ship upgrades is that each upgrade needs to use an ability slot. That's why capitalships and titans get 3 each, as that's all that really fits. :p Sins sadly doesn't really allow creating new menus and windows that would make choosing from a lot of different tier upgrades feasible.

You could I suppose make a new structure as a "Refit Dock" or something, but even that would only get you 5 new upgrades per faction.

You could add some upgrades to the frigate yard but sadly there's the issue that upgrading ships needs to be done manually unless its a free upgrade. I don't think the average player will want to click on every frigate they're building to purchase a +15% damage increase or even an AoE.

The AI also struggles with the purchased upgrades, which is why there is one upgrade that is always free and on auto cast so the AI will get something out of the whole system.

Ah, I was wondering about that. Since Idon't think I ever see TEC AI ships with more than the jump interference immunity upgrades. Fair points on the other things, too. Oh well.

... Wait, what about new structures that could apply the upgrades, then, while adding two more to the frigate factories? Or adding more to existing utility structures like the repair bays and stuff? And the frigate stuff, again, would be set to a wide-reaching AoE casting.

Edited by: TrollofReason

Yeah, we'd basically need a new structure to do any more upgrades to capitalships and titans. I'd have to double check that here is a spare building slot on all factions for it though.

Not for Traders + the phase stabilizer minimod, I'm afraid. All full up, so there's an unfortunate UI limitation there. However, adding abilities to existing structures would still at least be viable? The frigate speed increase-thingy, for example, it could be free since conceptually it isn't adding anything new to the ships, but rather just pushing existing space frames; it could be placed on repair platforms as mentioned. Same with, perhaps, either a titan or capital upgrade. Upgrades could be spaced out among certain tactical and all logistical structures, encouraging the player to diversify a bit... or at least create, like, a shipyard complex, instead of having a hyper-centralized shipyard area. Make the ships in one place because anomalies make them cheaper, and then send them elsewhere for refit and finishing. And while they COULD put everything in one gravity well (lositics permitting) they would risk bottle-necking their own production, and upgrades aren't affected by local anomalies anyway. This would, again, reward smart empire planning for the player... while not necessarily hamstringing the normally slap-dash way the AI typically plans out its systems.

Ooh! It would also allow for some theme-ing of the upgrades, as well as further asymmetric game balance stuffs. For example, a minor accuracy/range bonus upgrade to a titan from a Trader/Vasari culture structure, since these structures deal with long-range, dynamic, and even super-luminal energy transmission. For the Advent, the same could give an increase in enemy culture repel, as experienced psintegrate are transferred onto the ships. The Orbital Refeinery structure could give TEC capitals "pre-stressed armor plating" which just gives more armor and a little more HP, while HTS refineries gives something like "radioactive munitions" which is a weak but stacking passive DoT not unlike the incendiaries on the Marza. Both would fit theme-wise since refineries are basically enormous orbital foundries. For the TEC this means ready local access to high-quality materials, while the HTS look at all of the dangerous waste these things are spewing out into the void and they see wasted energetic substances for immediate exploitation.

You don't have to take or use those specific examples, of course, but I think in the main that could work. Given what you've told me, Traders have 10 potential upgrade... giving... slot... THINGIES! to work with in the logistics branch alone. 16 if you're willing to include asteroid extractors. Which is goofy, but limitations breed greatness.

Edited by: TrollofReason