The hangar is too restrictive

[analog saddle]

In the midst of the new patch, I decided to look back and give feedback on something that wasn't changed as much as everything else, which is the state of ships and the way they are balanced, what immediately jumped out to me is the extreme "grind" if you even wanna call it that, for the ship metagame, the hangar and it's upgrades.

💡What is motivating your suggestion : 35 prestige points. For 3 ship slots. That's 17 prestige levels, 18 if you spent your first level's bonus token on something else. That's 900 levels at least, it's insane. Let's think about what you get for that. 3 ship slots? So basically 3 compact crates at best, and at worst just the opportunity to stockpile 3 more cool ships you wanna run with your buddies, which is barely an actual benefit since you can craft all of them on-demand except for the red baron's ship.

💡 What is your proposal : My suggestion would be to increase the base capacity of the hangar and reducing the amount of prestige points it takes to obtain a new slot.

💡 What should be changed and how : Increase base hangar slots by 3, up to 6, and rebalance prestige slots from 5,10,20 points, to 5,5,10,15 (adding a new prestige reward slot as well, up to 10 total at max prestige level)

Now obviously, this raises a concern that players would get "too much inventory space". Personally, my stance on this issue, just as with the fold mechanic and not being able to put bags of stuff in containers, is that I don't see the problem with letting hoarders hoard, but if you really are hellbent on not letting players have lots of inventory space, you could remedy the increase of base hangar slots by implementing one of these changes :

-Reducing the amount of storage each ship provides by 1 vertical and 1 horizontal row
or
-Removing the ability for ship storage to be used when the ship isn't set as your active one.

Again, repeating what I have said, I do not think these nerfs would be anywhere close to necessary, but they are an option if you are turned off by the idea of increasing hangar spots specifically due to the bonus inventory space it would provide.

[jade jewel]

[gentle granite]

I agree that the second and third hangar upgrades are way too expensive now that the prestige points cap at 2 per prestige level after the first. They could simply drop the costs down to something reasonable, maybe make the first one cost 3 and the next two cost 5 each. That means you could prestige 6 times to get all three ship slots. That's a significant amount of play time but it's far more reasonable than expecting players to prestige 17 or 18 times just to unlock that last ship slot.