I took a journey through the wiki today and made a list of every module I could find that you could build on your ship. The question being, of course, just how big does my ship have to be before I actually suffer losses by not having access to every module in the game. (Because I vendored one, for example.) People often say that equipping the very high end researched stuff is impractical because the upkeep costs are ludicrous. I don't know that I believe that, but I made two lists: one using all the top tier stuff and one using the penultimate tier stuff. The space taken by everything I could find is therefore either 4381 or 4094.
Currently I have 679 deck space and get an extra 1 deck every 11.6 hours. If I wanted to I could also get 5 more every level, and I level in actually around that same frequency. (Though if I started spending my level up bonus on decks instead of engineers that rate would certainly fall.)
Assuming I don't spend level ups on deck I will max out in 1789 days, or 1651 days.
Assuming I do spend level ups on deck and somehow keep the same pace I will max out in 298 days, or 275 days.
I'm going to continue to increase my artifact points per hour number so my rate will pick up as time goes on also. If I was willing to level up on deck it's actual conceivable I might max out. If I don't, well, I just don't see it happening. Also consider that the game keeps adding in more and more new modules and it's quite possible I'll just never get to max ever without buying more decks which is something I'm convinced I don't really want to do.
A high(er) level deck builder perspective.
ReplyDeleteI have 2857 deck size and I have long since passed the point where upkeep costs become ridiculous. My upkeep cost is listed as 1B, and I am a builder, as most high level players are to cut upkeep costs in half. At this point in the game, I focus on stat/upkeep rather than anything else, because upkeep is completely the limiting factor for me, so any special modules are considered valuable because all special modules have very low upkeep. With infinite income, my upkeep would be more like 10B/day, and I am nowhere near maxing out my research.
Due to upkeep being the limiting factor, it has become extremely attractive to pile on engineers rather than deck space, since the only way to keep up with upkeep costs is to conquer more planets and increase the mineral cap. I should further note that the cap on minerals is my primary limit to income, since I play relatively infrequently compared to most players my level and I reach my mineral cap in approximately 7 hours.
Finally, my ship is almost completely decked out maxing out all kinds of basic-type modules, although not at their highest level, with one glaring exception: I do not have a full complement of scanning modules. This would cost an additional 300-400 deck space at this time, and I do not foresee me reaching that in the foreseeable future, since when I am not actively adding deck space, special modules come in at a little higher than the rate that I obtain deck space through artifacts.