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Ship Loadouts: Which Upgrades to Buy First

Damage feels good and rarely helps first. Why survivability and cooldown upgrades usually outperform raw firepower in the early sectors.

By Published 5 min read

Reign Creative LLC makes Space Galaxy Attack Hardcore, which this article links to, so we have a commercial interest in it. How we write and check articles.

Key takeaways

  • Survivability upgrades are worth more than damage early, because an extra thirty seconds of run time earns more currency than a slightly faster kill does.
  • Damage is the trap pick in almost every persistent upgrade tree: it is the most legible node on the screen and the one with the least compounding effect.
  • Movement handling is chronically under-bought, because it does not appear on any kill or damage readout while quietly deciding how many hits you take.
  • A cooldown reduction that applies to a strong ability is a damage upgrade in disguise, which is why it needs watching more carefully than damage does.
  • Between-run upgrade trees and in-run power-ups follow opposite logic: the tree rewards breadth, a single run rewards commitment.

Buy shields first. Not damage.

That is the short answer, it is the opposite of what almost everyone does, and the reasoning is arithmetic rather than taste: in a shooter with a persistent upgrade tree, currency is earned by time spent in the run. An upgrade that keeps you alive thirty seconds longer pays you for those thirty seconds, every run, forever. An upgrade that makes each kill marginally faster pays you a little sooner for kills you were already getting.

Damage is the most legible node on the upgrade screen and the least compounding one. That combination is what makes it the trap pick.

The economics of a between-run tree

It is worth separating two systems that often get discussed as one.

A run is temporary. Whatever you pick up inside it evaporates when you die.

A tree is permanent. Gold collected during missions is spent on ship upgrades that persist, which means a failed run still moves you forward — the structure that makes this genre survivable on a phone, where a run lasting a few minutes has to be worth starting on a bus.

Because the tree is permanent, the correct strategy is to maximise cumulative earning rate rather than peak performance in any one run. And the single largest input into cumulative earning is how long the average run lasts.

That is why survivability leads. It is not that shields are exciting. It is that they are the node that buys every other node faster.

The order our playtests converged on

Space Galaxy Attack Hardcore has upgrade nodes for damage, firing speed, piercing, shields, hull durability, movement handling, cooldowns and ultimate charge. Across internal testing, the order people independently arrived at looked like this:

  1. Shields, to a moderate level — not maxed, just enough that one mistake is not fatal.
  2. Hull durability, to roughly the same level. The two together change the shape of a bad run more than either alone.
  3. Movement handling, which is the one nobody buys on their own and everybody appreciates afterwards.
  4. Firing speed before raw damage, because a faster cadence interacts better with enemies that move through your line rather than sitting in it.
  5. Cooldowns, once you have an ability worth using more often.
  6. Damage and piercing, which become genuinely correct once you are losing to bosses with health remaining rather than to attrition on the way there.
  7. Ultimate charge, last, because an ultimate you can afford to use twice a run is already doing its job.

Two notes on that list. It is a tendency, not a rule — a player who dodges very well should move damage up, because their survivability is already coming from skill. And step 3 is the one worth arguing for, because handling never appears on a readout. It shows up exclusively as hits you did not take, which makes it feel like nothing while doing the same job as a shield node.

The cooldown node we had to cut back

Cooldown reduction is a category of upgrade that deserves suspicion in any game, and ours proved the point.

The pitch is modest: your abilities come back sooner. The problem is that a cooldown reduction is not really its own upgrade — it is a multiplier on whatever the ability does. If the ability is mediocre, the node is mediocre. If the ability is strong, the node is a damage upgrade with better wording, and it stacks with every other improvement to that ability.

In an earlier build the cooldown node was generous enough that one loop dominated: reduce cooldown, use the shield ability almost continuously, take the survivability you would otherwise have bought in the tree, and spend everything else on damage. It was not a clever exploit. It was the obvious thing to do, which is worse, because it meant the upgrade screen had a right answer and everything else on it was scenery.

We cut it back, and the test we used was not "is this node still good" but "does the sentence cooldown or hull this time? still have two plausible answers". It does now. That is the whole standard, and it is the same standard we apply to difficulty tiers — a choice that always resolves the same way is not a choice, an argument worked through in what difficulty modes actually change.

Ships are a shape, not a power level

Each ship carries its own primary weapon, alternate attack, shield and ultimate. What that changes is the shape of a run rather than its strength: a wide spread suits dense formations and struggles on single targets, a concentrated forward weapon does the reverse.

For the first several hours this matters less than the tree does, because most of your capability is coming from persistent upgrades. A well-upgraded ordinary ship beats a bare specialist. Once the tree is broadly filled, ship choice becomes the interesting decision, and the useful question is not "which is strongest" but "which failure mode do I want".

If you are dying to bosses specifically, neither answer is in the upgrade screen. Multi-phase galaxy bosses carry destructible modules and weak points, which means learning where to aim outperforms buying more output — boss pattern recognition is the relevant skill, and it is free.

Tree logic and run logic pull in opposite directions

Players arriving from roguelites often apply the wrong logic, and it is an easy mistake to make because both systems present as "pick an upgrade".

Inside a single run, commitment is usually correct. A run is short, the effects vanish at the end, and a spread of small unrelated bonuses rarely crosses the threshold where anything becomes noticeably strong. How in-run power-ups combine works through why stacking one synergy beats hedging.

In a persistent tree, breadth is safe. Everything you buy is still there tomorrow, covering a weakness is permanent insurance, and there is no end-of-run reset to justify going all-in on one line. A ship with nothing but damage is a ship that dies in sector four every time, and it will keep doing that no matter how long you play.

The two systems can coexist in one game without contradiction. They just need to be read differently.

Score, and why any of this is worth optimising

Scoring in video games is usually an optional, side component — points accumulate through normal play and often have no immediate relevance to the game itself, and the appeal is beating a high score set by the program, another player or yourself.

That describes the long tail of this genre exactly. Once the campaign is finished, the upgrade tree stops being a progression system and becomes a scoring tool: the thing you tune so that an endless run goes further than the last one. Which is a decent argument for not rushing the tree. A maxed ship arrives with nothing left to decide, and the deciding is most of the fun.

What to check before you invest hours in any shooter's tree at all — readability, control offset, frame stability — is covered in picking a vertical shooter worth learning. The game and the rest of the studio's short-session titles are listed under Action & Arcade Games.

Good to know

Frequently asked questions

Which upgrade should you buy first in a space shooter?
Something that keeps you alive — shields or hull durability in most trees. The reasoning is economic rather than heroic: currency is earned by time spent in the run, so an upgrade that extends the average run by thirty seconds compounds into every subsequent purchase. A damage upgrade shortens individual fights slightly and does not change how long you survive the fight you are currently losing.
Is damage or survivability better early?
Survivability, in almost every persistent upgrade tree, and it is not close in the first few hours. Damage becomes the correct purchase later, once you are consistently reaching a wall you cannot break through rather than dying to attrition before you get there. The switchover point is recognisable: you start losing to bosses with health remaining rather than to a slow accumulation of chip damage.
Why is movement handling under-bought?
Because nothing reports it. Damage shows up in numbers on screen, shields show up as a visible bar, and handling shows up only as hits you did not take — an invisible benefit. In a genre where survival is the resource that buys everything else, an upgrade that reduces incoming hits is doing the same job as a shield node while looking like it is doing nothing.
What is the difference between an upgrade tree and in-run power-ups?
Direction of commitment. A persistent tree carries between runs, so breadth is safe — every node you buy is still there next time, and covering a weakness is cheap insurance. A single run is temporary, so committing hard to one synergy is usually correct, because a broad set of small bonuses in one run rarely reaches the threshold where anything matters. Applying run logic to a tree produces a lopsided ship; applying tree logic to a run produces a bland one.
Does the choice of ship matter more than the upgrades?
Early on, less than people expect. Ships differ in primary weapon, alternate attack, shield and ultimate, which changes how a run feels and what patterns are comfortable. But in the first several hours, a well-upgraded ordinary ship beats a bare specialist, because the tree is where most of your capability is coming from. Ship choice starts mattering once the tree is broadly filled and the question becomes which specialisation you want to lean on.

Sources

  1. Shoot 'em up (opens in a new tab)Wikipedia — accessed
  2. Score (video games) (opens in a new tab)Wikipedia — accessed

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