Ironlion45

Join Date 04/2006

Unofficial Ship Building Guide.

Since it was asked for...

Since there is no guide, let me start one. I designed this guide while using the beta patch. Consider it a sort of gift to the community. Feel free to take this and add to it, correct my mistakes, etc. as you see fit. If you want to.

I: Before you begin

Before you even begin to start building, you should have a plan, which you should keep in mind while you are building the ship. Or, if you are really bloody-minded (like I am...), write it down. I don't mean necessarily pre-designing the ship, though you may choose to do that as well. You should also keep these things in mind:

1: The type and role of the ship. Is it a fighter? Cruiser? This will determine your hull choice. Pick one of the appropriate size that is consistant , as a foundation, with how you would like the ship to look. By role of the ship, I am referring to what the ship will do. Is it for defence? Recon? Is it your menacing juggernaut bristling with weapons? Keeping these things in mind will help you in making your ship's appearance consistant with its purpose.

2: How much freedom of rotation do you want? I would recommend setting your rotation (in the options menu) at 15, or even 5, degrees for maximum control of the positioning of the parts, though when learning the interface it might be easier to set it at a simpler number, such as 45 degrees.

3: The other ships in your fleet. I don't know if this is important for everyone, but I like to have a unified and consistant look to all the ships in my fleet. They should look like they belong together, rather than some patchwork mishmash of varying design styles.

4: Your ship style. The components and hulls that you can choose from depend upon the racial style of your ships. The human and antaran ships tend to be either angular or Star-Trekkish, while the alien styles tend to be much more Curvy and sleek-looking. This choice can be limiting to what you can do.

5: Ship size. Fighters tend to look way better if you choose simpler desings. More complex designs with lots of little bits sticking out everywhere really tends to make them look overdone. Whereas these traits in your big Dreadnaught ships can turn out quite nice.

6: Ship name. I like to choose a class name for the basic version, and then use series names for future versions with upgraded components. (e.g Viper, Viper Mk2, Viper Mk3, Recon Viper, Recon Viper Mk2, etc.) I know it isn't very creative to do it this way, but it will help you later on, when you have 10 different versions of the craft still in service, based on that basic hull design. By the series number, you will immediately know which ones are the older ones, and which are the newer ones.

7: Start simple. Nobody's first ship is going to win any awards. In the beginning, you will just want to get comfortable with the interface, and learning exactly what you can do with it. At first, be happy if your ship doesn't simply have the enemy laughing in their cockpits. Make it symmetrical, and try to have a flow to the design. Engines in back, bridge on top, weapons facing foreward. Once you are comfortable with this, you can get more creative with better results.

II: Interface

Having gone through that, Lets cover the interface. We'll start with the very basics. Open up your shipyard, and click on 'new'. then you will see a list of hulls to choose from. Do so. On the menu of tabs above, you will see next to 'hulls' several more tabs: Extras, and then your various types of components after that.

Extras is the place where you will spend the most time. These do not use hull space, or affect the caracteristics of your ship, except its appearance, and how much memory it uses up

. The other components, (weapons, engines, etc.) are what makes the ship useful. They affect your ship's stats, and take up hull space. You will see, above the image of your ship, an indicator of how much hull space you have, and how much of that you have used. At the bottom of the ship image, you will see to the left the camera controls for the ship viewer. You can also rotate the view and zoom with the mouse weel, and drag the image around when holding the left mouse button. To the bottom middle-ish, you will see three dials (with beta patch), which control the rotation of the components on their X, Y, and Z axes, repsectively. How specifically you can rotate components with the dials depends on what number you put in the options menu. To the right of this is a slider, which determines the size of that component. The middle is the default size, and moving it left or right will make that component smaller or bigger, respectively. Below the ship image are your menu controls. When you are done with your ship, be sure to choose the 'save' option, not the 'done' option, or you might undo all your hard work. Below that are your ship stats, which are fairly self explanatory. The manual covers that information quite well, as do the tutorials.

Click on the 'Extras' tab. You will see a list of components, and some sub-tabs which will let you sort them into three categories, if you like. Those are all things you can stick on your ship.

Now look at the image of your bare hull. It appears to have a case of the measles. If you zoom in, or look closer, you will see that they are actually tiny red arrows. They are known as 'hardpoints', and they are the places that you can join components to your ship. Each component has a top, a bottom, a front, and a back. the orientation of the hardpoint in relation to your hull will determine the orientation of anything you place on it, with the 'top' being the side facing out from the hull, and the 'front' being the point of the arrow.

To put a component onto your ship, click on one in the components menu, and you will see that it is stuck to your curser in the ship view window. point the arrow of your curser over one of the hardpoints on the hull, and you will see how it would look if you put it there. To put it there, simply left click. You can place another of the same component elsewhere by doing the same thing. To unselect that component, right click. You will now see at the top of the ship view there is little icon of that component.

Don't want that component there after all? Then you can either click on that component directly, or its icon at the top. You will see that it is highlited on the ship. Press delete on your keyboard, or right click, to delete the component. To unselect it, left-click elsewhere on the ship view.

If you want to rotate that component the opposite way, then first select that component in the components menu, then click to the 'six o'clock' position on the middle (y axis) dial. This means that you are turning it around 180 degrees. Then hover your curser over a hardpoint, and you will see it is pointing the opposite way. once again, left click to place it. Or don't. Its your choice. You are the one in charge, after all.

Changing the size of the component, or rotating it other ways works in the same way.

You will notice that you will see hardpoints on the components that you place. This is what makes it possible to build your ship up and out, or glue weapons onto the ends of wings.

I have noticed that when you are trying to put an object on a hardpoint when there are a whole bunch of them crowded together, it can be hard to get the right one. In these situations, zooming in helps a little. Also, moving your curser just a little bit around the area of that hardpoint will help you get it too. You'll know you have it when you see your object pointing in the intended direction.

When you are done with this, it would be a good idea now to click the 'Save' button. Choose a cool name for your ship, and a short description of it. You will then be back in the shipyard menu. Click on your ship, click 'Edit', and get ready to put the good stuff on it.

III: Components

When you are done placing extras and your fearsome war-machine is finally done to your satisfaction, it is time to place the REAL components. These are not just cosmetic additions. Placing them is exactly like placing the extras on your ship, but when they are attatched, they will affect its stats.

It is important to bear in mind, when choosing components, that all ships already have three basic things even without components on them: Engines, sensors, and support. They are all very basic, and short-range, but your ship will be able to move even if you don't put an engine component on it. It just won't go as fast as if you did. The same is true for sensors and support. I was quite relieved when this fact donned on me, as at first I thought the tiny hull was too small for both weapons and engines (wich it is, but only for add-on engines). In reality, your first fighter will only have the basic integrated engine, by necessity, because you can't add an engine to it.

The thing you will learn immediately, is that you never have enough space on those tiny to medium-sized hulls for all the stuff you want to put in them. Your first early-game fighter will probably only be able to carry a weapon and maybe a couple basic support pods or a sensor pod. This will change, as you advance technologically. Improved versions of components are smaller, which means you can fit more of them in. Improved types of technology (i.e, from Lasers to Plasmas) will do more damage; A laser has an attack of 1, while a plasma has 2. So as you discover improved ship technologies, it is important to update your designs. This is why I earlier recommended numbering each design. This way, you easily know how old it is. For example, your old 'Fighter' has a laser and a sensor, and a life support pod. A couple years later, you now have plasmas, and Improved Impulse drive, enhanced life support. You will be able to double the capability of your fighter when you update your design. You may even be able to fit some armor or shields on there. You update the design, and save it as 'Fighter 2'. Back in the shipyard screen, you can then mark your old 'Fighter' obsolete, so it won't appear in the ship-building menu anymore. You can, at this time, also decommission all of the old models. I personally don't like to do that. It is better to upgrade them. Or just use them up. (waste not, want not!)

Once you have upgraded a ship design, it is important that you set all your shipyards, using the governor, that are building the old model to switch to the new model. Due to some miner issues with the current beta, you may need to do this BEFORE you mark the design obsolete.

IV: Ship design tips.

This is the part that lots of other people would probably have better tips than I do, but here are some basic principals:

>Keep it symmetrical. A lopsided ship is usually just silly. (Sometimes it can turn out cool, though)
>Keep the design consistant with the ship's purpose.
>Experiment with similar components. There are a lot of parts that are variations on a similar theme, and some of them might be more suited to your intentions than others are.
>Don't be afraid to delete components, if you decide that they don't look good after all.
>Sometimes hardpoints on opposite sides of a ship don't QUITE line up symmetrically. Such as on the first (human) tiny hull, I tried making an 'X-wing' type design, and found that the port wings were slightly higher than starboard. When you notice this, there are two things you can do. Choose different hardpoints, of place another component outside those hardpoints, and use the points on that.

I am sure other people have many more tips for this section. Please feel free to add them.

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Well done and an interesting read. I've usually settled for throwing my gear on the ship for what I want that class to do and not really paid attention to how it looks (the bowling shoe ugly theory of ship design). But adding in the little details is certainly an option and can be a lot of fun I'd imagine.

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Make sure that if you want the ship to appear in other games at certain you make notes of what techs are required. I usually build a 'Base" hull model for each ship type I want to keep using. I make sure when I save it that it does not have any components equipped. This way it will appear with the Hull as the only requirement. I usually add Base to the end of the Ship name to let me know that is what they are.

If you need to edit the ship characteristics (not the model) outside the game, you can now do this easily as the files are .xml.

They are located in the \My Documents\My Games\GalCiv2\ships folder for single games, and in the My Games\GalCiv2\Metaverse\ships for Metaverse games.

The ships consist of two files, a *.shipcfg file (this one contains the model data for the graphic design) and a *.xml file which contains the ship characteristics. User shipcfg file begin with S0_UD_"shipname", the XML file will just be the 'shipname'.xml.

The XML files are where you can change things like tech requirements. You can edit the shipcfg files to add jewelry and such, but I would not recommend it unless you are feeling lucky. Use the Shipbuilder instead.

To edit the XML ship files, you can use any text editor, such as notepad. I personally use the free version of XMLSpy because it highlights the code in different colors, making it easier to spot errors and to edit. There are lots of other free XML editors out there - do a web search to find one you like.

When you open an XML file you will see something similar to this - (this is not exact, as the forum will not let me paste code correctly. I have substituted hyphens '-" for the greater than '>' or less than '<' characters you will see in the actual file.

-?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?-
-GC2Ships-
-Ship Name="Gator"-
-Ability-Troops-/Ability-
-Component-CargoHull0-/Component-
-Component-TroopsModule-/Component-
-Component-ImpulseDrive2-/Component-
-Component-ImpulseDrive2-/Component-
-Component-GeneralSupport-/Component-
-Component-Sensors0-/Component-
-Component-Impulsedrive-/Component-
-Description-Fast Transport-/Description-
-DisplayName-Gator-/DisplayName-
-Model-UD_Gator0-/Model-
-Tech_Requirement-Planetary Invasion-/Tech_Requirement-
-Tech_Requirement-Impulse Drive Mark II-/Tech_Requirement-
-Tech_Requirement-Basic Life Support-/Tech_Requirement-
-Tech_Requirement-ImpulseDrive-/Tech_Requirement-
-UserDefined-1-/UserDefined-
-/Ship-
-/GC2Ships-

Looks confusing, but it is not that bad. Each line means something.

Ship Name – this is the name of the ship the game sees.
Ability – Lists any special ability the ship has such as Trade, or Survey.
Component –Objects that are equipped on the ship.
Description – What you see in the description line in the Shipbuilder or Shipyard
Display Name – The name you see displayed in the Shipyard or Shipbuilder
Model-UD – The Shipcfg file to be used as the model. What the ship looks like.
Tech Requirement - Techs that are required before the ship will appear in the game
UserDefined – not sure, but I think this means the race of the ship.

You can modify any of this stuff to fix some issues, or change your description in the game without going through the shipyard. Be careful editing this, as you must have everything right – not sure what would happen if you had a ship appearing with a component before that component was researched; if you point it to the wrong Model file the ship will simply not appear.

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I want to add that on Altarian cargo hulls, it can be impossible to be symmetrical and stylish at the same time, unless you spend an extremely long time doing so. For these designs, it's best to have the thin, twin-connected style, as opposed to that huge ugly looking wide hull, and offset the trade or construction module with collecters edition mast towers (which also look good on huge hulls), but for the colony designs the wide hull can work nicely.

Excellent guide, one which has been asked for a fair few times, is there any chance of an avatar stickying this?

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You may also want to metion that there is no limit to parts intersecting, other than the resultant poly count.

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Wow.. Nice guide. I agree with pretty much everything in there too. Though I'll note that I never do the pre-planning part. I just get the general idea in my head and go about making something that expresses it pretty nicely.

For instance my Sovereign class Light Cruisier: I wanted a long kind've modern naval look with a very strong starship apperance. As seen below.

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Franco fx

Join Date 04/2003

+59

Excellent guide

From my personal point of view, I believe it pays to strive for symmetry. I am also reminded of the mother's advice to her daughter dressing up. Put on all the jewelry that you want to wear but before going out in public take one item off.

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I wish I had the ability to design the ship though while not in a game situation.

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I was trying to use the extra's last night one a ship but the 'place' button would never light up. I wanted to add a green light to a new ship, but it would not let me. What is the magic key to getting these things to 'place'?

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Hey, thanks for the replies.

You just have to hover around until you get it onto the hardpoint. When many are close together, it can be difficult. Unfortunately, it will probably amount to much trial and error in such situations. Sometimes your curser has to be a little above or below the hardpoint, rather then pointing right at it.

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Nice cruiser... I've been going for the "simple" look (mainly because I find it annoying to try to add too many pieces to a hull) I've used the voyageresque medium hull with the large U shaped component --mounted on the bottom so that it points up allong with some basic "nasels" and pretty lights to make my basic attack vessel... its nice looking but not a design master piece... I've been hoping that Brad will include animated parts in the future, mainly so that I can create a B5 type destroyer --the static models just don't have the right feel...

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I am much more pragmatic. I name my ships like 'sm 2m 1sh lr fighter' which means it is a small ship with 2 missle attack, 1 point of shields, and is a long range fighter. I started out with the 'v2, v3, etc...' but could never remember what was what. This way I can quickly grab a ship with the specs I need without thinking about it. It keeps my mind on the more important things.

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Nice guide. I wish I had more time to play. Since I don't, I just pump the necesities on the hull and go. The result is a bunch of ugly plain ships, but it takes 45 seconds to make the ship. I would like to design ships but it slows the game down to much.

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My $0.02 about ship naming:

I approach this from a pretty utilitarian standpoint. I name all combat (non-cargo hull) ships with names like

3 B-01
7 D-03
9 C-07 Beam
9 C-07 Anti-Drengi
or, generally,
(Speed) (Hulltype)-(Generation/Technology level) (extra info)

Where Speed is the speed displayed in the ship designer (1 base speed + engines);
Hulltype is A for Tiny, B for Small, C for Medium, D for Large, and E for Huge;
Technology level is a counter that starts at 01 and is incremented each time newly acquired technology moves me to build a ship better than the previous generation;
and extra information can be added at the end to distinguish two ships that have the same speed, hulltype, and technology level (such as you may build if simultaneously fighting two enemies, both dangerous, who use different weapons or defense).

Note that if you are building up-to-date ships on your planets, every ship being built at any given time should have the same "technology level." For example, if I don't research medium hulls until after I've already built three generations of Small hulled ships, then my first generation of medium hull ships would be technology level 3 (or 4, if the Small hulled 3rd generation ship was outdated).
That is, at any given time I would be building something like
2 B-01
4 B-02
4 B-03
4 B-03 and 6 C-03
or later
7 B-10, 7 C-10, 4 D-10, and 13 D-10
but at all times building ships with same technology level (except perhaps in rare circumstances)

Why I've found this system useful:
-It tells me the speed of the ship in the name, useful for assembling fleets that minimize "wasted" speed
-It allows me to see at a glance how outdated the technology on a ship is, useful when assembling fleets and choosing which of your veterans should be upgraded next
-Hull type makes in the name is useful for dealing with logistics
-It's quick. The names aren't cool or fun or imaginative, and that's a downside for a lot of people, but you gotta admit it's quick. I imagine if one wanted to, you could name your ship something like '7 B-03 Raptor'.

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Bump for new user with question to find this

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Hello,

I tried to make gun towers on my ships with poor results (in style with WWII battleships). I tried using polyspheres and other halfspeheres and place a weapon on top of it but it always end up looking stupid. Is there some way to "sink" half of the weapon into another object, so that only a fraction of the weapon is visible?

I am tired of always attaching the guns to the hull...

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What's up with this small pylons jutting out from hard points? I tried to make a scout that looked like the default scout but that small part that juts out from the wing hardpoint made my wing look detached from the main body of the ship.

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This has been asked before i’m sure. But how in PX’s name can I mirror the bend wings?

Thanks

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When you design ships, do you focus appearance on form or function??

That is for example, though a colony ship might look better with fins jutting from its bottom, functionally it might be better to put some doofy looking leg-gear on it.

I'm very new at this and am having trouble with "themes" specifically with how Cargo-Vessel's should look.

Love this thread.

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