Hi Everyone,

I'd like to post my review of all the upgrades of the races and how I rate them. The purpose is to bring these to the attention of newer players to help them, and to the developers who will hopefully see this and maybe hit some of these with the balancing stick.

I'm giving them a rating based of these options:
S Tier = At a competitive level, a must pick in nearly every match up. These skills far exceed the usefulness of others that you could select.
A Tier = Very good upgrades that are rarely if ever a bad choice. Still overshadowed by the S tier, but they won't feel like wasted upgrades
B Tier = Usually ok upgrades that are usually felt, but often heavily dependent on the match up.
C Tier = Highly situational, but useful in those circumstances. Or just meh but not the worst.
garabage = These skills just need to be removed from the game, or completely reworked.

As always if you see that I've misinterpreted something on an upgrade or just think I'm insane, please do discuss it.

On a totally unrelated note, not being able to copy/paste from Onenote sucks. Hope images work.

Navigator shields could also make the ship harder to hit if inside the asteroid field, 20% or so.
IIRC, this is how the fields worked in the first game but the tooltips make no reference that this property made it to BFGA2. And it would make sense being harder to hit inside the fields.

Of course, still being tied to map composition still doesn't make more than C tier.

Amazing list. Hope the devs check it out. I find it pretty accurate.

My gripe about some of the later Chaos Perks are that they are all extremely boarding focused. Perhaps they could change the Hell Drake upgrade to give your bombers more toughness or Improve Anti Interceptor and Turret capabilities cause thats what they are. Aircraft killers.

all "improved augur array" upgrades are useless. they don't raise the passive stealth detection range and you don't need a increased non-stealth passive detection range. 18.000 range ships have no benefit from the increased admiral range upgrade, because the game does not support 27.000 range shooting (for macros and lances) and you always want lock-on active at extreme ranges. I don't think shield armor gets reduced by lances, but even if it gets reduced, most shield damage is done by macros.

power ram is mandatory for navy, you have to build your fleet around it. the second good pick for navy is short-burn torpedos (afaik the navy meta is spurs and torpedos). culexus assasin (against orks), shield armor (against necron star pulse spam) or faster shield reload (if you have to shield tank) can be usefull depending on match-ups. the other navy upgrades have no good synergy with the meta pick.

Very impressive, props to you good sir. I can nitpick here and there but agreed in 95%. Maybe you could do the same for the skills, I wonder if that is too much to ask. You seem to have a good grasp of current meta.

Of course you will only ever pick one skill, since MWJ is an immediate auto-pick.

@fosil
I see your point about the improved augur array skill. I did slip my mind while writing this that it doesn't help vs stealth. I still wonder if it's useful if you've got lots of LC. Probably not, but maybe.

I was not aware of the 23.5K range cap. If only we had a sandbox or custom lobby we could test this stuff out DEVELOPERS.

As written, all lances state "This weapon reduces target armor by 25" As written, the armored shield upgrades state "Gives a 25 armour value to shields". So I do interpret this as removing the 25 armor entirely when lances hit. My interpretation may not be correct though. A developer could answer this. I must say that I believe shields normally get popped at medium-long range with lances more often than macros. However I do agree that once the brawl starts, macros will come into play much more. Maybe I should re-value this skill back to B tier due to this.

I normal build for Imperial Navy is a GC Vengeance, 2x Tyrant, 4 Dauntless, 3 Firestorms. I don't get much use out of power ram, so I do not believe it's mandatory. It's up to fleet composition.

I didn't think about the 25 armor reducing starpulse/novas.

@tr3iz said in Review of Ship Upgrades:

Navigator shields could also make the ship harder to hit if inside the asteroid field, 20% or so.
IIRC, this is how the fields worked in the first game but the tooltips make no reference that this property made it to BFGA2. And it would make sense being harder to hit inside the fields.

This is what really surprised me, I think the asteroid field also didn't require your ships to stop in order to get stealthed. They really should consider buffing the asteroid fields somehow.

The Kastelan robots upgrade is something that really annoys me, who would think this upgrade is going to be good with just +1 boarding action for battleships? I honestly would turn this upgrade into a whole-fleet boarding upgrade where lightning strikes are as good or almost as good as normal boarding attacks. This would fit in nicely with the general kiting strategy of admech fleets.

Hey @Myridus, thanks again for another awesome list! This will also be forwarded to the developers.

@furmano You did have to be stationary in astroid fields to cloak. But it did give a defensive bonus which made it a pretty big deal tactically.

Astroid fields do need a buff but i also think they should deal a little more damage to ships as well as some morale damage when moving with some factions like orks being immune to the effects of astroid fields.

I rather think that it would be better if asteroids debuffed accuracy and sight range if you did not have special skills.

40k ships are pretty tough vs just rocks, but I imagine these would get in the way of sensors or incoming/outgoing fire.