Ship Components

Concept · Game mechanic

A ship is upgraded component by component; each component sits at the ship's tier or one above it.

A ship's tier is reached by upgrading its components — weapons, shield, armor, warp, impulse, cargo — one at a time. Each component is built for the NEXT tier while the ship waits at its current one, and the ship tiers up once every upgradable component has been. So at any moment a component sits either at the ship's own tier or one tier above it, never below the ship and never two ahead; at the ship's top tier there is nothing above, and every component sits at that tier.

A component's stats come with its tier, so a ship part-way to its next tier already fights with the upgraded parts it has: a tier-10 hull routinely fires tier-11 weapons. Some slots — the sensor, deflector and special — keep the same part at every tier and have no tier of their own.