Shipyards: more use for player - upgrade material, increase ship size, etc.

[LeonserGT]

Shipyards kinda mostly useless right now, at least for me.

 

They could have more love to become useful for more players by adding following functions:

 

- Upgrade material of your current ship: as it says, instantly upgrade all blocks on your ship to next material tier, while blocks missing in that tier will remain one tier lower (armor blocks if you upgrade to materials, which don't have them);

[That can be done even now, but too tricky for daily usage, I'd better pay shipyard to do it in more comfortable way]

 

- Change the size of your current ship: again, you can easily increase or decrease block size of your whole ship you sitting in with selectable scale step;

[And again, can be done now too, but tricky, it's better to give more comfy options for this]

 

- Buy player-made ships from player list of saved ships: so I can buy it with "station founder" option and full crew with captain from start;

 

- Buy community made ships (not generated) submitted by players and approved by developers: apparently, as KeenSWH did to fill random encounters with community made ships and stations, select best combinations of really cool and detailed designs with functionality and add them as "special offers" to shipyards (one per station, randomly), so if other players who are not interested in building, but don't like those generated ships either, can buy cool looking ship and explore without spending time on building. Famous copyrighted designs are forbidden - no ships from Star Wars, Mass Effect, Eve or anything else non-original, only unique-enough ships, so nobody can say "hey, that's TIE fighter from SW!"

Player can also select material for those ships using same functional as for upgrade material feature.

 

Or maybe do this in other way, if steam workshop will be implemented - allow player to buy ships, he subscribed to in workshop. Or combine both, when cool-looking pre-made ships will be in vanilla game no matter what at some point :)

[GrimJahk]

There are reasons to not automatically do a full material upgrade... later stages of the game you have access to materials that are capable of the upgrade but actually provide no benefit..

 

Ogonite for example is very dense... horrible for computers and other functions and will make your ship VERY heavy... more HP true... but now it will handle like an Iceberg... you want to be able to change out specific types of blocks... Ogonite makes great armor and lousy shields, Trinium is amazingly sturdy and light you want your generators and Integrity fields made of this stuff...

[LeonserGT]

Still, until trinium players would like to have easier way to easily upgrade whole ship ;)

I personally, don't try to rush to barrier from very start, I prefer to enjoy each tier stage.