Experience and ship replacement

[Reginleif]

I'm confounded with an odd problem right now. Getting experience doesn't seem to be that easy.

But I found the early ships to be. . well, weak. And since they don't (yet) have ship swapping, I'd really like to scrap ships. . but worry the experience loss is too great.

Should I not be concerned? Resources are plentiful.

[BLWK]

Quite honestly there is no solution to this.
You cannot swap ships and you cannot send ships to reserve.
So yeah, if you want to upgrade your fleet with better ships you will have to scrap your old ones.

[Tacitus]

Crew veterancy can make a notable difference with certain types of ships. For escorts, I haven't noticed a huge difference between a level 1 and level 4 crew. However, for line ships, especially cruisers and above, it can make a world of difference. I think this is because of a few things:

- Crew veterancy affects rate of fire and crit chance, and since line ships carry more weapons, a faster rate of fire and higher crit chance has more impact
- Upgrades in the tech tree only apply at certain crew levels. More upgrades apply exclusively to line ships than to escorts.
- Your "fleet level" is based on the crew level of your flagship. A level 4 flagship of any type gives your fleet 4 movement points (for the Imperials, at least).

Your best bet to minimise experience loss is to try to build new ships in sectors that are upgraded to allow ships of that faction to start from level 2. For example, upgrade the Schola Progenium in the Cadia system fully and build your Imperial Navy ships there whenever possible so that they will start at rank 2 rather than 1.

[Sang The Racc]

I'm assuming you're playing the Imperium campaign. The experience level loss from building new ships is just a hit you have to take in the early stages of the campaign. But once you start filling your fleets with grand cruisers and battleships (multiple Avengers super strong btw), your campaign will start to snowball significantly. If you aren't bad and are able to not lose ships, or only lose 1 once in a while, the experience levels of all your ships will fill up nicely.
By the time I completed my campaign I was making over 2k resources every turn and had like 50,000 with nothing to spend it on.

[Aldehydra]

For the Imperial campaign, I think cruisers and larger are worth keeping if they're experienced while you can safely get rid of escorts and light cruisers that you don't want. Those light cruisers will be destroyed in the next major battle anyway. Cruisers are sturdy enough to be useful for the whole campaign, but don't hesitate to scrap a few of them to make room for a battleship flagship in each fleet.

[Reginleif]

It would be great if they instituted ship swapping between fleets or mothballing, to use ships for new fleets.

I don't think this would upset the difficulty/challenge curve all that much and it can always be turned off for, like, iron man runs or whatever.

[Ashantai]

The lack of fleet swapping is baffling indeed, but hopefully it'll be added soon. it feels bad to scrap Spire's starting Lunar Class just so I can get a grand cruiser instead. Would love to see it continue with a new admiral. Alas.

[Glitch]

They should just change ship xp to crew xp. Build a new ship, swap old ships crew to new ship, then scrap old ship. Better yet, instead of scrapping to build a new ship, just take an existing ship and upgrade it to the new ship, allocating its crew xp depending on tonnage. Hypothetical Example: A 60 point Escort took 1000xp to gain a lvl 4 crew, upgrading it to a 200 point Light Cruiser= 140 build points, also its lvl 4 crew takes 2000xp, so in this case you get a lvl 2 crew instead.

[Reginleif]

I like that idea. Because it really is the crew, not the ship.

It'd also be nice if there was a system to respec attributes of admirals. Spire has ramming and torpedos, at least in my game (dunno if it's random) and I'd much rather at least one be something else.

[Ashar]

is there anywhere to view the xp for the ship, not just the level? I cant find any ui or tooltips that shows anything.

[Ashantai]

No, only the level is shown.

Also, thread necromancy....