Quoting admiralWillyWilber,
Making it so expensive that it is not worth upgrading just causes me not to upgrade ships. This train of logic to shoot yourself in the foot to do something just destroys the purpose of a feature; especially one that has been around a long time.
Exactly my point. I'm sure it wasn't trivial work to make ships upgradable, and the fix to admin cost proves it's a feature SD cares about. But when people don't want to use it because it's better to just build new ships means all that work was wasted.
Quoting admiralWillyWilber,
Have to disagree with the special weapons.I think they are useful until the tech is upgraded.
I've seen too many special weapons which are not better overall than normal weapons of the same tech level. And those that are, are often worse than normal weapons of the next level.
Maybe that's just a symptom of my aggressive expansion and technology play style: even with research set to very slow, by the time I reach the Age of war, half the techs I can choose to research will be finished within a single turn. And then I'd rather not waste my scarce resources on ships that may be outdated before I can finish their construction.
However, there are a couple of special weapons that simply don't hold up to their normal counterparts available at the same level. These may just be balancing issues: I'll try to put some examples together and post them in a separate thread.