Small Space Port refitted to Large Space Port?

[Nikratio]

Hello,

I just started a new game and quickly researched projectile weapons. After that, my advisors suggested to retrofit my existing bases and ships to the resulting "new designs that incorporate this technology", and I approved the recommendation.

However, this actually resulted in my Medium Space Port (MSP-1) being retrofitted to a Large Space Port (LSP-1). Is that intended? The LSP-1 is not an improved design of the MSP-1, it is not new (has existed since the beginning of the game), and does not incorporate projectile weapons either. So it seems to me there is absolutely no reason why it should be retrofitted at this point, or in response to this message...

Confused,
-Nikratio

[Aeson]

Spaceports are the only ships or stations in the game where you can upgrade/downgrade/sidegrade between several separate roles, namely Small/Medium/Large Spaceports. This is intended behavior, presumably so that you can stick a small spaceport over a new colony and upgrade it to something bigger later on if you decide you want to, rather than having to tear down the existing station and build an entirely new station in its place.

Also, the Large spaceport is arguably an improved Medium spaceport, which itself is arguably an improved Small spaceport, at least if you're keeping the designs roughly true to the base designs that the game provides for you. Small Spaceports are essentially minimal shipyard and trade hub facilities with minor defensive power, Medium Spaceports are essentially mid-size shipyards with moderate trading facilities and moderate defensive power, and Large Spaceports are major shipyards and trade centers with significant defensive power.

More than likely, despite your LSP-1 being a fairly obsolete design by comparison with your MSP-1, the game looked at the settings in your empire policies and went "we have a Medium Spaceport over a planet with 10 billion people on it! Imperial policy states that we're supposed to have Large Spaceports over any world with more than 7.5 billion people. We'll ask the Emperor for permission to upgrade the station to the 'latest design' and adjust the station type to something appropriate while we're at it." Note that the populations I listed are completely fictitious; if 7.5 billion happens to be the point where the game switches from Medium to Large spaceports, that's pure coincidence, and I of course have no way to know how large the world that your spaceport was built over actually is.

As a result, if you want to accept advisor recommendations to retrofit your state ships and bases to the latest designs, either keep all the spaceport designs that you use and that are larger (at least by name) than the one(s) you use up to date; an easy way to do this is to just use large spaceports or just copy the medium spaceport design and reclassify it as 'large' - that way, even if the MSP does get 'upgraded' to an LSP, it still has whatever capabilities you decided you wanted it to have, though you may need to go through and manually mark older LSP designs as obsolete if you take this route. You may also want to disable automatic retrofits, though I don't know that this will affect whether or not it receives retrofit orders when the advisor recommendation to retrofit pops up.

Also, just a comment on station design: really short-range weapons like railguns are perhaps not the best option for station defenses, especially if you don't have tractor beams. A handful of ships sitting at standoff ranges, or really even normal blaster ranges, is effectively immune to all the firepower you invested in those railguns; it's only the ships (mostly pirates) that close with the station, for example to perform a raid or because the attacking ship also uses railguns, that are vulnerable to these weapons.

[Nikratio]

Thanks Aeson! So, to put a long story short: this is expected behavior, and if I don't like it, I should turn off automatic retrofitting for all my space ports?

I'll probably go with that. I just tried to create my own improved MSP-2 design, but the game still upgrades to the old LSP-1 instead. Somehow I'm not comfortable with an automatic where I don't fully understand how it makes its decisions...

[Aeson]

So, to put a long story short: this is expected behavior, and if I don't like it, I should turn off automatic retrofitting for all my space ports?

Yes. Also be advised that I don't know that advisor suggestions obey automatic retrofit settings, as you do in some sense order the retrofit (since you approved the suggestion to retrofit 'all state ships and bases'). You may also want to look around in the Empire Policies menu; there's some settings in there that allows you to choose what kinds of spaceports you want built when (in terms of population size, though the population size breakpoints are fixed) at planets, but I can't recall if those settings allows you to tell the computer never to build a Large Spaceport anywhere.

[catweasel]

Exactly the same happend to me, when the advisor asked. What somewhat screwed at lot, as I manually controlled the Small Space Port (which wasn't so small at the end).

As Aeson describes, it seems to be related to population (or revenue?) levels, as one SSP was upgraded to a medium and the other one to a large.

As a workaround (and to bring maintenance down), I upgraded the LSP/MSP designs manually and took the components out I did not want/need in it, then ordered a retrofit which bascially removed a lot.

If I want to upgrade manually from a SSP to a MSP, how would I do that? When I last checked, I could only retrofit to the latest design, i.e. not, as it already was the latest design. Is thats somewhere hidden in a submenu?

[spiralaxis]

Select SSP. CTRL + right click. Retrofit to > (list of options)

Pretty sure Aeson is 100% right about population governing Spaceport size. It's one of the empire policy options. You can also design an ultra-small starbase and make it an autobuild at new colonies, I think.

[AKicebear]

If I want to upgrade manually from a SSP to a MSP, how would I do that?

Select -> right click -> retrofit -> MSP-XX

[johanwanderer]

If you don't want to mess with spaceports sizes, the best way I can think off is to change both Small and Medium spaceport designs to manual, then obsolete them. Then focus strickly on the large spaceport design as your only spaceport design.
 
Having said that, I think it's nice (especially in harder difficulties) to have different spaceport designs. Also, at higher difficulties, I generally will not follow the advisors' retrofit advises. I may even turn them off all together since they don't generally take into resource shortages and such. Given that, I generally design a very small and minimal small spaceport, just enough to kick start a planet's commerce. Once that is finished, it's generally upgraded to a medium spaceport immediately. Then to a large if warranted.

I generally leave the Medium design on automatic until later in the game, when I start to get enough components to make it worth a manual design.

[DeadlyShoe]

It's directly related to population levels. If you look in your empire policy in the military construction section it lists the population breakpoints. These default to like 30-500-3000 iirc but you can set them to whatever you want.

[Mortimer14]

ORIGINAL: catweasel

Exactly the same happend to me, when the advisor asked. What somewhat screwed at lot, as I manually controlled the Small Space Port (which wasn't so small at the end).

As Aeson describes, it seems to be related to population (or revenue?) levels, as one SSP was upgraded to a medium and the other one to a large.

As a workaround (and to bring maintenance down), I upgraded the LSP/MSP designs manually and took the components out I did not want/need in it, then ordered a retrofit which bascially removed a lot.

If I want to upgrade manually from a SSP to a MSP, how would I do that? When I last checked, I could only retrofit to the latest design, i.e. not, as it already was the latest design. Is thats somewhere hidden in a submenu?

Another thing you could try is to set the empire policy so that medium and large space ports require an exceedingly large population base. I.E. 1 trillion (1000 billion). Then no planet in your empire will ever be big enough to upgrade to those spaceport sizes.

[corwin90]

It seems like the auto-upgrade of my Medium Spaceport on Earth once blew away all my science labs...

[Mortimer14]

Your medium and large spaceports should have at least the same number of labs as your small port does to prevent what corwin90 ran into.

[FarAway Sooner]

This is a common issue that beginners struggle with. I know I have.

The most elegant solution I've found involves playing around with the "Obsolete" setting and not every letting the Advisors retrofit your ships. That sucks, but any time I tell the Advisors to retrofit for a certain technology, bad things happen (unintended star port upgrades, unexpected resource shortages, all my ships stop patrolling for pirates at once and line up to get retrofitted at the same star port, etc.).

It's annoying to have to micromanage ship upgrades and retrofits, but I'd be lying if I said I've spent a lot of time on the fleet or ship screens yet to figure out if there's a way to pick the retrofit path for more than one ship at a time. The big problem I have is making sure that they follow the intended upgrade path.

I'm fine that the game suggests new ship designs as technology progresses, but I wish I had some way to flag one particular design for each role as the "default" upgrade path. When my whole fleet is built around a mix of Plasma Torpedoes and Rail Guns, it annoys me that if I just tell the game to Retrofit a Destroyer, it'll default to the "generic Destroyer with six Maxos Blasters" design.

The functionality here seems a bit obtuse, but I'm not sure what the ideal streamlining path is.

[Aeson]

I'm fine that the game suggests new ship designs as technology progresses, but I wish I had some way to flag one particular design for each role as the "default" upgrade path. When my whole fleet is built around a mix of Plasma Torpedoes and Rail Guns, it annoys me that if I just tell the game to Retrofit a Destroyer, it'll default to the "generic Destroyer with six Maxos Blasters" design.

Generic upgrade orders, such as the Advisor retrofits or the fleet order 'retrofit to latest designs at nearest spaceport,' retrofit the ships to the most recently created non-obsolete buildable design within that ship role; what design that happens to be can be determined using the filter 'latest buildable designs' in the design list. If you have a manually created destroyer design and allow the computer to create additional destroyer designs, the computer's designs will almost always be the more recently created designs and will typically be buildable with your current construction technology.

It's annoying to have to micromanage ship upgrades and retrofits, but I'd be lying if I said I've spent a lot of time on the fleet or ship screens yet to figure out if there's a way to pick the retrofit path for more than one ship at a time. The big problem I have is making sure that they follow the intended upgrade path.

If you go into the Ships list, you can select a set of ships within the same role and click the retrofit button; this brings up a drop-down menu that allows you to select any non-obsolete buildable design you have in that role to retrofit your selected ships to. This is the easiest way that I know of to handle mass retrofits of ships when you have more than one design within a given role. Other ways include updating one design and issuing generic retrofit orders to all fleets that use that design line, then upgrading the other design and issuing generic retrofit orders to all fleets that use that design line (note - this requires that you not mix designs within a single fleet, and you may need to allow some time to pass between these upgrades); manually going through all your ships to issue individual retrofit orders; or issuing generic retrofit orders and then cancelling the orders for all ships that would be upgraded to something that isn't an upgrade of their design line.

You can select multiple ships in the Ships list by holding down control while clicking on ship names, or by selecting a ship then shift-clicking another ship. The shift-click method selects all ships between the two that you selected, while the control-click method adds individual ships to the selection.

[Bingeling]

I think the spaceport upgrade during the "retrofit all ships and bases" is a bug, but reporting it has not helped.

My best advice is to never accept that retrofit suggestion. It is quick enough to open the ship list, select all with control-A and then press the retrofit button there. Apart from in the very early pre-warp days I would never want to retrofit all ships at once, anyways.