I understand where you comming from, if you are looking for more realistic gameplay. But you always have to weight cons and pros. This could lead to some heavy micromanagment of units which might not be fun in the end. I think, as long as unit is within your own empire influence, it would be nice compromise. Very often people have ideas and features, which sounds realistic to them, but they are not so fun ingame. And for me personaly, fun is more important then realistic game.

The upgrade process don't always happen in one turn. Its can take several turns if the ships are far away from your planets and starbases. Considering that all ships have 1 hp in this process, they are quite fragile.

Also the prices for upgrading is determined by rush buy rates, not by by the cost of building them on planets. Overall, you are paying 10x the difference (I think its the difference) when you upgrade. Often, it is cheaper to simply build new ships than build new ones.

Ok, in my games upgrading took always 1 turn, maybe I wasn't far enough away from my bases.

Ifupgrading on a colony would be a production project, you wouldn't pay rush buy rate, so it would be cheaper to upgrade (and keeping the experience).

Upgrading on a colony or a starbase would also protect the 1 hp ship. Of course, you can also do this in GC2 by putting some warships on top of the upgrading ship. But this wouldn't be necessary any more (if the base is armed).

Well for that matter, rush building a huge hull battleship in one week is kind of ridiculous as well.  Even if it is from a star port.  And same goes for planetary improvements.

I wouldn't say no to limited ability to rush build, rush upgrade everything.  Perhaps make it a game option for those who don't care.  Perhaps if you have to research a technology and then it still takes multiple weeks.  So paying for a rush build would reduce the time to build a project by half or a third or something depending on tech level.  And upgrades to ships would take a number of weeks based on how much difference there is between types and your tech level.  Ships not in orbit take at least an additional week (so two weeks minimum) to upgrade with distance scaling much more than it does in order to account for the time it takes to rush parts out to them.

I wouldn't be upset if they do it the GC2 way but it does bother me that I can at any time upgrade my ships in 2 or 3 weeks to the last version no matter where they are.  No need to keep ships up to date if your military rating is high enough, you can do it on the fly when you need to.  Right now if I suspect war might be coming, I keep researching so that when it breaks out I can design new ships and upgrade my whole feet right then and there.  With this disabled, when I suspect war is coming, I would have to start upgrading here and now so that I can be ready in 10 weeks if it happens.

Just my thoughts.

Another way to look at it would be that all the ships you and the other players build represent the only military and civic based ships. No doubt there are countless civilian ships of all races flying around doing what they do in their daily lives. Just like in real life not every boat, car, and plane is the product of the government. I would even say that once a tech has been researched that technology will be available to these civilians and some then make it available to the player at a cost. Civilian traders are common in many space based games. I think to put all of this on the player would detract from the "grand strategy" and make it more of a "tedious strategy"  

Hello and thanks for not flaming me for commenting about a game I've not even played!  I'm just saying I agree with the OP that if something feels impossible IRL, no matter how advanced the technology, it takes away too much from immersivity which is not necessarily 'fun'  I want to sweat and panic and earn my territory when I go to war.

It's fine for rush-to-buy on a planet because you're paying civilians who are already there to do it, but equipping a smouldering battleship in enemy territory is a ludicrous place for civilians to be.  And it would be very expensive to man every ship with skilled engineers at launch that could jury-rig old tech to be something like new tech on the fly.  Maybe this is reflected by the very expensive cost of refitting in space, but then the jury-rigged tech should not be as efficient and/or reliable as that which could be achieved at a shipyard.

That said, I understand that GC2 was released what, 7 years ago?  And GC3 will be more complex, I think, because Stardock seem to welcome complexity, judging by the variety of items in the ledger of our UI - graphs screen.jpg "Leases", for example, what might they be for?  Excited to find out.  Indeed, I need to be more patient, in general, for alpha release.

Agreed. What I want to point out is that even a capable civilian contractor can't do magic - it takes time to completely refit a big starship. And we're talking about military hardware here, often cutting edge tech for your civ. I don't see many civilian contractors having the newest mass driver weaponry simply on store. That's why I'd say military buildings (like starbases and star ports) can have those tech available.

I'm going to have to beg to differ on this. A lot of high-end government tech comes from civilian companies under contract. Also there's logistics to take into account. If your big shiny battle-ship is sitting next to an enemy homeworld then you can guarantee there are support ships aplenty close at hand, ammo haulers, fuel tenders, ect. Given enough money, time, and logistical support anything can be done anywhere. That being said, I agree it should be hugely cost/time inefficient to prevent "cheese" but I don't think it should be limited to just bases and planets.

I don't have any particular problem with the upgrade system, so long as the costs are appropriate. If I've been hoarding BC for a while and not spending, why shouldn't I be allowed to open the vault and hire an army of contractors to get the upgrades done? If my ships are relatively near support, it wouldn't take that much longer.

It's one of the ways they can make stockpiling BC interesting, rather than always spending it ASAP. I just want them to avoid what happens late game in Endless Space - where production & dust scale so far out of control that you can refit entire fleets every turn because you have so much money. (Also you can rush build an entire new fleet every turn, on top of the one your production systems can already build every turn...)

I use the "upgrade all ships" option whenever I can afford it, but I never saw it cap the upgrade time for my far-off ships. Some of my more distant ships take 5 weeks or more to upgrade. It never made a difference where the ship I issue the upgrade order from is.

Which ship you choose doesn't matter.  But when upgrading individually, I sometimes see 5 or more weeks to upgrade.  When I upgrade them all, I have never seen more then 3 weeks in the time estimate.  I suppose it was possible I was just lucky when I click upgrade all, but I play on immense maps and have ships all over the place and I haven't had a long wait for upgraded ships that way yet.

I've just tested this in my game, to make sure, and it doesn't work. I sent one my ships deep into enemy space, until the upgrade time was 5 weeks. Then I used the "Upgrade all" option on one of my ships near my planets. The upgrade time for my far-off ship is still 5 weeks.

The current model for upgrading might be an exercise in stupidity, but it's an efficient exercise in stupidity.