Everything you need to know if you’re considering buying the Imperial Fleet Penthouse Stronghold on Vaiken Spacedock in SWTOR!
Table of contents
Imperial Fleet Stronghold at a Glance
Fully unlocking most strongholds costs tens of millions of credits. We don’t list specific prices for each stronghold because the amount you’ll spend unlocking all the rooms is nothing compared to the money you’ll have to spend on decorations. Unfortunately, this is a case where if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.
| Expansion Count | 0 |
| Max Deco Count | 400 |
| Centerpiece and Starship Hook Count | 4 |
| Maximum Number of Occupants | 30 |
| Layout | One-Story Apartment |
| Style | Imperial Standard |
| Source | Jaleit Nall |
| Release Date | Game Update 6.3, 2021 |
| Cost | 8 Galactic Seasons Tokens |
| Usable by Guilds? | No |
Floorplan and Appearance
The Imperial Fleet stronghold is comprised of 4 rooms connected together on a single level at the top of Vaiken Spacedock. It is the smallest stronghold in the game.
The overall size of the Imperial Fleet stronghold is most similar to that of Dromund Kaas and Coruscant, and while you can’t place as many decorations planetside as you can in the Fleet Penthouse, the strongholds on the capital worlds are quite a bit larger.
It’s worth noting that the value one places on size is such a subjective thing, so I don’t criticize or praise it in any of my Stronghold buying guides. Many players seem to prefer smaller locations, but there are those who want to decorate a large estate.
Matching Decorations
Normally, we don’t like to do this section so early because you lack context and it feels a bit like free advertising for the Cartel Market, but one of the bundles is integral to understanding of the Fleet Penthouse stronghold.
Regarding the Fleet Wallset Bundle
These decos don’t go all the way to the ceiling unless you use poorly executed ceiling covers also included in those bundles.
These Large and Small Ceiling Sections only fit on Large or Centerpiece hooks, which are typically only found in the middle of the room, and drive an ugly pillar into the heart of your stronghold so they connect to the floor.
I don’t understand why the lowered ceiling decos have to exist at all. Yeah, they can let you make new rooms outside in other strongholds, but it would still make far more sense to just make the wall decos taller so they reach the actual ceiling in the stronghold they’re intended for.
Regardless, past strongholds have offered these sorts of things in game on the cheap, sold by Meridat Stato on the Fleet for practically no credits, or the Martial Fabricator Droid added alongside the Rishi stronghold.
It’s pretty sleazy for these to be so essential to decorating the Fleet stronghold, far more than walls were for past locales, and for the devs to then charge money for them, especially considering the shoddy workmanship.
That poor quality extends beyond the bad wall height, poor hook selection, and connective pillar. In both the Carrick Station and Vaiken Spacedock bundles, the pillar is not centered on the ceiling.
I’ve placed a perfectly vertical line so you can see what I’m talking about. Note how the lights are mostly centered with the pillar and not the central dais, which is wider on the right. It’s more noticeable when you try to work with it and get the walls aligned.
Since these take up a Large or Centerpiece Hook and occlude lighting from the ceiling hooks while barely emitting any light themselves, your options are extremely limited in such spaces.
The best I could do to conceal these issues is Dantooine Tree (Medium) with Hanging Forge Lamps surrounded by Austere City Benches and Executive Shrubs. It still looks weird though because the other greenery in the room is encased in glass.
The Large Ceiling Section is not the only problem deco in the set. The texture on one side of the Double Wall Section (Vaiken Spacedock) also just cuts off abruptly and the tech around the sconces at the bottom are missing.
Before you ask, yes, I am 10,000% certain that this is unintended because all the other pieces in both Penthouse Wallsets are mirrored and it’s not even symmetrical. I can’t think of how this sort of issue could arise unless copy/paste or some sort of mirroring function is not being used, which seems far less efficient.
In effect, they’re charging money for the stronghold while trying to make it look like they aren’t, and given how expensive decorating is, decorating fiends are more likely to spend CC for these decos than other player demographics.
Your run-of-the-mill decorating fiend can’t afford them on the GTN because decorating fiends have more Prestige than credits.
Standard Matching Decorations and Styles
Just like with the Dromund Kaas Apartment, you’ll find that decos with grays, blacks, whites, reds, and a dash of purple or blue, along with synthetic materials, tend to look best on Vaiken Spacedock.
If you’re looking for decorations that match particularly well, the following search terms will get you 95% of the relevant decos in the game:
- Imperial
- Sith
- Dark
- Senat (don’t type the “e” so you get both Senate and Senator)
- Empire
At the end of the day, the Fleet is already a hodgepodge of varying styles, you can put down just about any deco and it will match just as badly as it does with the Fleet’s Imperial style. Below, you’ll find the list of deco bundles from the CM that match well:
- Imperial Fleet Penthouse Wallset
- Dromund Kaas Utility Decoration Bundle
- Imperial Console Decoration Bundle
- Security Bureau Decoration Bundle
- Sith Lord’s Artifacts Decoration Bundle
- Imperial Personnel Bundle
- Force-user Personnel Bundle
- Imperial Essentials Bundle
- Mandalorian Forge Decoration Bundle
- Mandalorian Clan Personnel Bundle
- Mandalorian Rebels Personnel Bundle
- Mandalorian’s War Camp Decoration Bundle
Hooks and Room Alignment
The alignment of hooks and rooms on the Imperial Fleet Stronghold are atrocious. It’s so bad that you can see many of the alignment issues on the (automatically generated) map itself!
We aren’t going to go through all of the highlighted regions. Instead, we’ll be focusing on the most distracting issues. First and foremost, we have the uncentered window facing into the VIP area of the Imperial Fleet.
Famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright pioneered the architectural principle of compression and release, and we see that in practice with the compressed connective rooms that release you into expansive spaces, creating a temporary sense of tension followed by relief. Sadly, the effect is ruined by poor geometric alignment.
The window panes are not centered with the door or the room. Your focal point is either clearly off-center with the door as you enter the room if you choose to center it with the window, or it’s off-center while you’re in the room if you choose to center it with the door.
The main hall has a similar issue where the stair segment is not centered within the room and isn’t aligned with the front or back doors. The decos are centered with the doors, not the stairs.
It’s worth noting that this sort of thing is far less important for actual level design where you’re shooting for a specific feeling and have other gameplay and budgetary priorities.
It doesn’t matter as much in the open world because players are concerned with finding objectives and loot. They aren’t inspecting room alignment so they just don’t notice these sorts of blemishes, like the inconsistent size of the recessed areas above the doors.
I didn’t even notice a couple of things like the issues with moulding around the stairs and framing the ceiling, until I was taking pictures for this buying guide.
Still, it’s frustrating to see stuff like this, especially in an Imperial space station, which belongs to a culture that reveres order and exactness so much that they commit genocide in pursuit of it.
On top of that, because we have to place the walls themselves, it’s even more important to have solid hook alignment!
Given that these sorts of uncentered spaces are relatively common outside of strongholds, it’s probable that the devs don’t distinguish the importance alignment within strongholds and regular level design.
That being said, it seems unthinkable that any level design software would lack measuring tools, or that the devs wouldn’t make use of copying and pasting, but I’m not an environment or level designer.
Ease of Decorating
Any stronghold can be decorated easily by just plopping down a thousand Basic Beds, but that’s not what I mean. When I say “ease of decorating”, I am referring to how easy or hard it is to make the stronghold look good.
Some strongholds have well thought-out Hook layouts, reasonably sized-rooms, and a variety of Hook sizes. These sorts of things make it easier to decorate because you don’t have to think as much about where to put things and it’s more about what you want to put in each room.
Other strongholds, particularly the more recent ones, are more difficult to decorate. It’s harder to decorate a stronghold when you aren’t given a lot of space to put decorations, or the room size doesn’t match the hooks, or you can’t line anything up because the devs slapped the thing together in half a day.
Since you need to hit 100% decorated for the Conquest Bonus and get all of your Prestige for Public Listings, the maximum number of decos you can place in a given stronghold also affects how easy it is to decorate.
If the deco count is too high, you’ll be forced to hide a bunch of small decos inside walls and larger decos or end up with a super cluttered stronghold. If the max deco count is too low, your stronghold will likely feel barren or you’ll be forced to leave some rooms undecorated.
| Easy to Decorate | Hard to Decorate |
|---|---|
| Thoughtful hook layouts | Floors and walls are covered with hooks |
| More variety of hook sizes | Less variety of hook sizes |
| Hook sizes match room sizes and shapes | Huge open spaces and tight quarters |
| Appropriate deco maximum | Excessive or insufficient deco maximum |
| Close attention to geometric alignment of architecture | Misaligned architecture and pointless asymmetry |
If you want to throw something basic together with the Centerpiece hooks in each room and the utility decos as many people do, there is nothing easier than the Fleet Stronghold.
If you want the Imperial Fleet Penthouse to look good, that will take a lot more work. The rooms are big, empty rectangles linked together by tiny, empty rectangles.
Those connecting hallways are too narrow for anything substantial, forcing them into being liminal spaces. Anything beyond non-existent selection of suitable wall lights, small benches, guards, or some potpourri will make them feel cramped.
The large rooms will feel empty unless you use some sort of divider or get super creative with large decos.
Thankfully, dedicated wall deco bundles exist specifically for these strongholds, but as I explained earlier, they’re basically the answer to the question “How can we get away with selling a stronghold on the Cartel Market?”, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was asked verbatim in a meeting a BioWare.
It would be far more reasonable if we got a smaller amount of these wall decos for free upon purchasing the Vaiken Spacedock Penthouse as a starter pack, or could puchase them with GS tokens.
Still, the fact that the walls are separate does make the Imperial Fleet stronghold more of a blank canvas. The added flexibility is nice if you have a clear vision of what you want your penthouse to look like, but it is a lot easier to paint by numbers.
The limitations of SWTOR’s hook-based decorating system are more readily apparent with empty spaces as well. It’s super frustrating when the hook layouts can’t accomodate that vision.
The fact that Centerpiece hooks exist in the middle of each room make this problem worse because your alternate hook layout options are severely limited.
There are additional hooks on the regular and Cantina Centerpiece layouts, but they’re meant for small accents and additions to the larger centerpiece decos. They aren’t an entirely different layout.
Those alternatives include an empty large hook surrounded by 8 medium hooks, a standard large hook, or the small/narrow cross layout. This means that the middle of each room has to be filled with something huge or something tiny.
Imperial Fleet Stronghold Secrets
The window in the west room looks into the VIP area of the Fleet, and while the layout doesn’t make geometric sense, the implication is that each of those windows you see from the Fleet itself is looking into a stronghold.
The outside VIP area also gets decorated during holiday events like Life Day and Nightlife, just like it does on the actual Fleet.
Imperial Fleet Stronghold Ideas and Inspiration
Vaiken Spacedock is the heart of the Imperial Fleet, so you can come up with a reasonable justification for just about anything you can imagine, though it makes far more sense for it to be Imperial-oriented.
- Ultimate Utilities Center
- Throne Room (AKA Seat of Power)
- Main’s Private Chambers
- VIP Box (like at a stadium)
- Mandalorian Armory and Shooting Range
- Imperial/Sith Intelligence Office
- Alliance Embassy
- Sith Academy
Don’t forget to check out the Public Listings for more ideas!
Review and Recommendation
The Imperial Fleet stronghold isn’t some fantastical vacation destination like some of the other strongholds, which would be fine if not for the horrendous hook and room alignment adding to the already challenging space you’ll need to decorate.
Category
Score
Ease of Decorating
Hook and Room Alignment
Visual Appeal
There’s something magical about seeing your Stronghold from a public area, and the sheer convenience of being attached to Fleet chat and the accompanying opportunity to see a larger volume of LFG and trade posts make Vaiken Spacedock a must-have for any endgame player or seasons enjoyer.
You know what they say about real estate, “It’s all about location, location, location!”, and that somehow manages to ring true even when land scarcity does not exist.
