Where's the 'mass upgrade' feature?

[miltonic]

Ok...Let's say I have 20000 EC's to burn. Let's also say I've got 70+ formers and 120+ crawlers. And I'd like to upgrade them all with hovertank technology and the some psi defense. So I create protoypes for both. Now is there anyway I can upgrade all crawlers to the new design WITHOUT having to find each one and individually upgrade it? Please say yes... even if you can't

[Flubber]

Yes -- because you actually can do it and pretty easily-- Since you have designd your desired unit, it is as easy as going in the design workshop to your old style unit and clicking upgrade. You will then get the available options for upgrading and their costs. Click a few more confirmation buttons and you are done.

The only thing to remember is to find units that are obsolete and upgrade them too-- scroll left along the bottom bad in the design workshop and all non-retired and non-upgraded unit types should still be accessible

[Chaos Theory]

When upgrading, the following rules must be observed:

The chassis cannot change (no supply crawler -> supply hovertank)
If noncombat, the weapon cannot change
The status of being artillery cannot change
and there are some other restrictions based on not reducing weapon and armor strengths, but they aren't straightforward.

[GeoModder]

Once SAM ability is implemented, that can't change as well for aircraft I think. Ships and land units I'm not so sure...

[miltonic]

Chassis not changing for the crawlers is alright, but that sucks for upgrading formers. Really sucks in fact. Thanks for the help though, exactly what I was looking for.

[Santiago_Claus]

Remember that the Nanofactory halves upgrade cost. It might be worth the wait, if you're close to getting the tech to build it.

[Commy]

May I ask why you have 20000 ecs? I can only think of one reason: rush build Ascent to Transcendence in one turn. Really, man, you need to use those before some probe team takes them or some random event causes them to all dissapear. Unless you're going for economic victory or something...

[Qwerty88]

I think you can upgrade non-artillery units to artillary, but not artillery to non-artillery, the same will probly be true for SAM units.

[Blake]

non-artillery cannot be upgraded to artillery.
Interceptors (SAM) can only be upgraded to Interceptors , Pentrators (non-SAM) can only be upgraded to Penetrators.
There are no restrictions at all on SAM for ground/artillery/naval units.

[Commy]

Ahhh, I see. But then how could he mass upgrade, might I ask?

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Commy
Ahhh, I see. But then how could he mass upgrade, might I ask?

I will often "mass upgrade" smaller groups of units. Perhaps I have only 4 or 5 chaos units since fusion came so soon after and then shard. Even a few hundreds of credits are enough

I also find its handy to check your defenders . In one game I just upgraded pretty much all my 1-<6>-1*2s to 1-<8>-1*4s.

I also find going through all your units in the design workshop can be handy. I often find units that I have made obsolete but which I still have hanging around somewhere, sucking up support for no reason

[Blake]

I have one final little comment:
The morale bonus from High Morale is retained when the unit is upgraded outside the workshop, it is lost when upgraded inside the workshop, unless the new unit ALSO has high morale. So IOW, if your using high morale shell units, don't be tempted to mass-upgrade them.

[Fido Dido]

So it is possible to upgrade Formers to Superformers? I can never seem to be able to do it, it always says "We cannot upgrade, as we don't have a prototype". Possibly, because I've put a speeder chassis on it, but I can never seem to do it. Am I just imagining things, or is this a bug or something. (This is in SMAC, I think I got it to work in SMAX).

[Blake]

Infantry Formers -> Super Infantry Formers works absolutely fine. Main decision is whether to wait for both clean and super, mainly depending on your techs.