You Shouldn't Be Able To Upgrade Everything

Upgrades are a lot of fun. They provide players with a sense of progression and serve as a reward. They also give players a chance to reflect. An upgrade choice asks you what part of your strategy matters most. You strengthen your positional heuristics by bringing them into your conscious awareness. However, this only works if upgrades are, to some extent, exclusive.

One of the many ways that Slipways improves on the normal 4X formula is its research system. In most 4X games, like Civilization, scientific research is quite flexible. You can research everything that interests you without missing out on much. But in Slipways, you cannot have it all. For every second tech you research, your science level advances, blocking earlier tech tiers.

By preventing you from taking all the cheap, low-level tech, Slipways forces you to balance long-term and short-term concerns. An upgrade that is excellent right now might not be as good as one that becomes more important later. By making the two choices exclusive, it rewards your ability to predict the future.

While Slipways makes you consider which new abilities they need most, some systems ask players to think about what you already have. In Rift Wizard 3, Haste and Chronomancy shrines permanently enhance one spell. Haste lets you cast a spell in half a turn, and Chronomancy gives it infinite uses but adds a cooldown. These shrines are rare enough that you can't rely on finding enough for every spell.

When you encounter a shrine, it forces you to think about your build differently. You have to consider not only how important each spell is, but also how you use them together. Decisions that you normally make in the moment come under the microscope. This deliberate analysis forces you to trace how your engine actually works.

You can go even further by asking players to choose what NOT to upgrade. In Everything Is Crab, the upgrade system has two layers. The obvious layer is that you pick between three skills every level. Some choices are new skills, while others improve an existing skill. The subtler layer lets you spend mutation points to increase a skill's quality. The only catch is that you can only improve a skill's quality when you buy an upgrade for it. If you max out a skill's level before maxing out its quality, you can't reach the Legendary tier.

When you're low on mutation points, you often pass up the chance to upgrade an important skill. After all, if you wait a bit, you might have a chance to improve its quality later. Instead, you dump the upgrade opportunity into a useful but noncritical skill. In other words, the game encourages players to upgrade non-essential skills! This asks you to learn how to tell the difference between critical and merely nice-to-have.

Upgrades are a great excuse to get players thinking about their playstyle. But this only works if those upgrades are exclusive. Players who can have it all never have to figure out what they actually need.