[wilhil]

took ages! updated wiki entry, please read there for instructions, I beleive they are better than the ones I wrote in first post, I will post here...


In space Empires, Later on in the game, usually around turn 50-60 you usually start to make big attack ships, or ships capable of steller manipulations such as opening warp holes, or creating black holes. As good as these ships are, they can take over 10 turns to create. The better players of Space Empires IV have usually already got enough resources coming in and storage available to enable you to upgrade ships, but it can be very tricky to work out as the new ship can only be a 50% addition of the previous ships resources.

With the upgrade calulator, you can easily work out upgrades to allow you to create a very expensive ship in just one turn (excluding repairs needed for components, and resources permitting!)

There are two diffrent calulators in the excel spreadsheet, the first and default to open file is the new one, and the second sheet is the old style. The new style one basically does a lot of the work for you, but is not as accurate as the old one.

With the new one, you start by typing in the total ammount of resources that your end resault ship or base will cost, secondly in the next 3 boxes down, type in the cost of anything you can build in one turn, If your end item is very expensive, you should try and build something worth at least a minimum of 3k (when you add min + org + rad).

Now the fun part! in the 3rd row, type in the cost of a fill item, this ideally should be something that costs a lot, and takes up little space, for example crew quaters.

Now the spreadsheet should have already updated everything automatically. On each row it will say how many of the fill item you need to add. This means that if it says fill items three, you should create a design exactly the same to the first one, and just add three crew quaters. When you see a green box to the right of the ammount, this means that you can skip that stage and just upgrade straight to the end ship/base.

Please remember that every ship/base you upgrade, must always be the same size ship or base, (meaning type e.g. escort, cruiser e.t.c. not the same weight)


As for the old style upgrade calulator, it is not friendly or easy to use, but I personally beleive it works better. In the top 3 spaces, type in the base ship/base ammount, on the end of the next row down it will tell you the most that your new ship/base can cost, you should then alt+tab to the game and create a upgrade, try filling it up, and when you think you are near, alt tab to the calulator and type in the combined cost of the ship/base, if you are over the ammount, it will not warn you, but upgrades will not work, so make sure it is under.

keep doing this for as many rows as you need. I advise that on the last row you type in the total ammount of how much the end ship/base costs, this will enable you to see the converted cost ammount at the second to end of the row. When this number is LOWER than the number at the end of the row above (however many columns above) this means you can safly upgrade to this stage.

I do not think you will ever need over 12 stages unless playing some heavy mod with ships/bases over 5000KT, or hundreds of steller manipulations on one ship! but there is space incase!

I hope you like this tool! I will try and upgrade it if people like it, I have been using it for a few months now and tried to do it up nicly to show others and help your game, the old style works best for me, and I have had nor eason to make it much better, if I get good feedback, I will improve it for you.

Thanks