This week we're excited to show off the ship upgrade system! Turn your
into a
in no time!
You can install four types of upgrade on your ship, starting with one slot in each category in addition to your faction's pre-installed upgrades. The categories include:
- Sails - Improve your ship's sailing characteristics or rigging durability
- Hull - Improve your ship's hull strength, sailing characteristics, cargo capacity and more.
- Cannons - Improve your guns' damage, range and reload times.
- Crew - Improve your crew's health, melee or ranged combat, cannon reload times and more.
You'll notice that some categories have overlapping benefits, so it's possible to double-down on, say, your ship's speed and acceleration by installing certain sail and hull upgrades.
These also stack with your faction upgrades, so you can specialise heavily in some areas depending on which faction you join (or the faction of a ship you captured).
The video shows two examples of a feature I've wanted to include since the start: upgrades that have a visual impact on your ship!
While most of the upgrades are behind-the-scenes improvements, some like the copper sheathing and bronze barrel upgrades change the look of your hull and cannons, respectively.
We previously had a simpler copper effect on some ship paint schemes, but this will now be removed in favour of the upgrade.
You may also notice two buttons in the upgrade info panel: "Buy" and "Buy and Install". The latter is a convenience option, and I'll explain why it exists.
You can acquire upgrades by either buying them from a shipwright or finding them in the world (e.g. as quest rewards or in buried treasure). Think of these as "plans".
Once you own an upgrade, you can install it on as many ships as you want, but there's an installation cost that scales with the upgrade's rarity and the size of the ship. So if you can afford it, you can choose Buy and Install to do both at once, but if you can only afford to buy the upgrade, you can do that and then install it later once you have more funds.
This is to make upgrades an investment that can justify sticking with a smaller ship instead of buying a larger one. So if you find a ship type that you really like, but want to stay competitive against the next tier above it, you can heavily upgrade it to boost its stats. Equally, if you prefer to have a smaller fleet of fully upgraded ships instead of a larger fleet of ships with fewer or no upgrades, you can do that too. Think of it like the "tall" or "wide" playstyles in a 4X game, but for ships and fleets instead of cities and empires.
The last thing to note is that
all upgrade values in the video are subject to change, as we still need to go through and thoroughly test them for balancing.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this system. Which upgrades would you like to see in the game?