I was under the impression that they never increased in power. For example, system with orbitals in the early game usually destroyed attacking ships pretty consistently, especially if you had more orbitals. However, those same orbitals proved to be less and less effective as ship technology increased. With max tech levels, I'd never ever lose a ship to an orbital battery. Heh, usually I didn't even see hull damage (and Romulans with their torpedoes almost always succeeded.) If they did “upgradeâ€￾ themselves when energy was upgraded, I did not notice. However, whatever upgrade gained wasn’t very effective when compared to ship upgrades. So, I’d probably stick with an actual upgrade path for orbitals, unless it is deemed that there are too many different construction projects. However, with the fact that ship construction is now a separate system, I don’t see that problem so it might be warranted to sink some additional construction time and/or credits.

Are you sure about that, sblewett? I certainly don't remember it saying +80 anti-ship defense per Energy tech...or any other tech for that matter.

It says this for the Planetary shields (+50 Shields per energy tech) but i'm sure it doesn't for Orbital Batteries. of course I might be wrong... 8O

I don't think it is right to set a number of turns for an upgrade, afterall everything is based on numbers, eg. "1234 Industry points and 200 raw materials required for upgrade" - why set two different systems? It wouldn't make sense.

If you've got 20 Mass Replicators they're gonna perform the upgrade much more quickly than if you have just the 1, so setting it at an arbitrary number just wouldn't work.

And I would assume that the batteries are taken offline during the upgrade. Outposts and Starbases will be, so why shouldn't the Batteries?

Oh, I'm fully against coding in a turn time requirement for the upgrade. I'm just throwing out what I would expect the amount of turns the upgrade would take. I don't know the production values of replicators versus ships versus buildings and other structures, and chances are they'll all end up changing anyways as we rebalance the game.

If a good system has replicators that produce 10 production total, then I'd expect a technological equivilent orbital would take 10-30 production to upgrade. If the replicators produce 500 production, I'd expect each technological equivilent orbital to take 350 - 1350 production.

Depending on the production tech levels, and when these orbital batteries become available for upgrade, the amount of production required will be different. Since I don't know these details, I'm going to guesstimate the amount of turns it'd take, which would be one or two turns for a highly populated, up-to-date system that is devoted to production.

As for upgrading them one at a time or all at once, I guess it depends. If we power the orbitals down, then they should be done one at a time and any orbital caught in the middle of an upgrade when the turn resolves would be offline. Or, we can upgrade them exactly like the other structures get upgraded and keep them on and upgrade them all at once.

Personally, I'd prefer to keep one upgrade system for the entire game for anything that is upgradeable for consistency and simplicity, so this might extend the discussion to more than just upgrading orbital batteries.

It is what I observed. I'm not sure which tech exactly, or if it required all your techs to govern it as it is tricky to determine what level your opponent has.

But my observation was from having opponent empires start at different tech levels while I played the Romulans. When I invaded the Federation systems who were level 8 my Battlecruiser 1s would be destroyed. Battlecruiser 2's have shield+hull of 650, thus they were doing 640 damage (+80 antiship times Tech . They would have 10 hull, but their shield completely restored as battle was over.

The other part was that Orbital Batteries and invading ships lined up with each other with each Battery shooting at only one ship. Thus it was necessary to have as many warships as their were Batteries to soak up this damage while the Transports went by.

I'm not sure in turn what your ships targeted, but if there were Planetary Shields those tended to get high (but not guaranteed) priority as they completely blocked Transports.

As you can see, the early ships would get creamed by Batteries, but as Tech goes up ships outstrip the damage. You will also note that the high end Command ships were better than strike cruisers.