Something needs to change for upgrade prices, I agree. It was certainly worth every penny when I upgraded a pair of lvl 10 ships that were kicking dread lord ass left and right, but it just wasn't worth upgrading a lvl 2 ship for the same price. So, I would propose two modifiers.

The first modifier is based on the experience of the ship. The more experience a ship has, the more it will cost to upgrade. Not to a prohibitive level, mind you. Just enough to force the player to make a choice: "Do I upgrade two of my lvl 3 ships, or just my ass-kicking lvl 10?" It will also prevent all those ships you built and never used from instantly becoming cannon fodder or scrapped, as they would be quite cheap to upgrade.

The second modifier is based on the weapons/defense specialization of the ship. Upgrading a beam attack/beam defense ship to a class that also specializes in beam/beam will be cheaper than upgrading to a missile/beam or beam/missile. Which, in turn, will be much cheaper than upgrading to a missile/missile specialization.

doublepost, damn web server

Put it in as a militay starbase module and make the upgrades cheaper. That way, you spend time getting the ship to the base and you still spend money, but not as much.

I actually did sell older ships once I was able to build some of my better designs, until one time after I saved a game and decided to go 12,000bc into debt upgrading my corvettes, and going on a rampage. Right, so first turn my debt was 12,119bc or something. The turn after it was only 2,000. Three or four turns after that my economy was recovering and I was able to continue playing normally. Brilliant feature, by the way, thank you, Stardock Since discovering this debt forgiveness, I've been updating pretty painlessly, except for two or three turns with no research or production, since then. When you're going from 2 attack to 4 attack corvettes, trying to defend against rampaging Korx and Drengin invasion forces, I'd say the couple of turns of down time are worth it

I agree, but doing that feels like cheating to me.

Something just occured to me. You know what *is* cheating with the whole -2000bc cap? Building a bunch of empty BB hulls for 110bc each, then when you have ten of these or so, going 85,000bc into debt upgrading them into your latest nano ripper loaded monstrosity. This takes eleven turns, with one decent industrial planet, and you've got two invincible size 25 fleets with gods know how much attack/defence

I'd call *that* cheating, but upgrading responsibly is okay, as long as you don't exploit it IMHO.

I personally do try to stay under the -2000 cap, if I can afford it. But when I've got 40 ships in a huge armada three weeks from my planet, you bet I'm going to upgrade every last damned ship I can, forget the expense. For the record, it was 17 corvettes, and those barely fought off the invaders, even upgraded. Considering how amazing the AI is at getting a good economy running and building huge hordes of ships, I'd personally consider the whole debt cap a fair trade, allowing the player to stay competitive on higher difficulty levels. I think this is the first game I've played where the AI is so good the player has to have built in cheating!