I might be interesting to have one chassis coming as a basic version, with additional slots ‘built’ (opened) as upgrades through crafting, each level of upgarde on a specific slot type becoming more difficult and expensive.
Ideally EACH separate upgrade would have its own blueprint.
Hm, what I’m asking myself currently while looking for a new tier 1 ship for my both characters (Deepcore / Frontier):
Why should I buy anything but the best existing version of a ship?
Building a ship might be a different story (as it would take significantly more time / train all the required skills for the better version), but buying?
The base version “Frontier” costs 187.500 on GEI, the best currently existing version “Boson” costs 264.000.
No huge monetary difference, especially for a hauler. I’m definitely going / waiting for the best version.
But that’s only one half of the problem. All the Frontier versions have exactly the same number of slots!
And hull/armor strength, base energy, cargo/freight increase with each additional required skill level.
Why would any hauler want to use a version with smaller freight capacity than Boson?
They’re not different versions, it’s a linear progression from “bad” to “good”.
As those ships are specialized, there is no excuse for not having the best possible version for each profession.
The point is:
- basic “NPC shop” version is fine (being the worst)
- player-crafted versions should offer slightly different slot OR at least specs configurations fitting one’s playing style
–> different Polestar versions have slot variety
–> different Frontier version: bigger freight for haulers, bigger cargo for traders? - in addition, corresponding ship skills could affect numeric properties (+x% energy output, +y% freight capacity…)
If however versions stay the same (same slots, different hull/armor/ene/…), consider upgrades to higher versions (hard to implement into current crafting, maybe upgrade recipes requiring ship-ver1 + additional resources) in order to justify the existence of low-tiers.