brakisbrak

Join Date 06/2013

I don't like designing ships

really

OK, thanks to one really nice poster, I have learned how to get my ships started around my little galaxy and have even colonized a couple of worlds. But here's the rub. I'm big on researching technology. It always served me well in Space Empires III (which I played until my eyes bled). That means that the ingredients for building new ships change all the time, so I have to keep designing new ships. In SEIII, I could just pick a hull, toss in some engines, pick whatever cargo or whatever else went with the ship and poof! it was done. The game did the designing for me. In GCII, I'm wasting an inordinate amount of time trying to rotate the ship so that I can stick things in exact positions. You know what? I don't really care what my ships look like. I much prefer the SEIII method. Have I made a mistake in investing money (and more importantly time) into this game? I don't want to design ships. I realize that if I do it once, then I can save them and reuse them, but I'm not really into this ship design interface. Is there an easier way? Thanks for any input.

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DivineWrath

Join Date 05/2006

+135

I play a lot of Twilight of the Arnor (the second expansion). I don't usually design my own ships now a days. I let the game design ships for me (which uses available technologies). Mind you the ships designed may or may not be as good as what you could design. What they do design usually suffices.

I have double checked, and this ship design feature appears to be only present in the TA expansion (neither DL or DA seems to have it).

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Anyways, I'm wondering. Are you redesigning your ships every time you get a new ship part? Back in the day when you had to design your own ships, I found that tedious. As such, I only redesign my ships when I feel that I would get a meaningful improvement over what I have at the time. I also only bother to use parts unlocked by the last tech of a generation.

For instance, I don't bother building ships using Lasers 3 and Deflectors 2, I use Lasers 5 and Deflectors 4. The next batch of techs are Particle Beams 1 and Shields 1, which I skip because I would rather have Particle Beams 3 and Shields 3.

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Adding to what DivineWrath mentioned, if you really don´t care about how your ships look, then don´t try to put every part where it belongs. Don´t rotate them to put engines in the rear, for instance... put them right next to the weapons in the front of the ship. That way you´ll save a lot of time.

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Another shortcut in designing that sounds roughly similar to what you propose: if you don't particularly care about the placement of your new shiney laser or other improvement, you can just doubleclick it in the list, and the shipbuilder will randomly attach it to one of the red dots on the hull.

So for instance, you could "upgrade" an already existing design and decide you want to include an Ion Engine and twolaser 5's (provided they fit): doubleclick the Ion Engine, doubleclick the laser5 component twice, and there you are. You can then see if there is any remaining room that you might want to use. You can also just do this with bare hulls (some of them look 'complete' enough to function as aesthetic hulls even).

Doubleclick a few times on the functional components you want, save and you're ready to go... (provided you have enough room).

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erischild

Join Date 01/2012

+136

My answer:

At early technology stages, let the game design ships. After a while of that you are going to get to a point that you can equip a ship better than they do for your purposes.

I created one "this looks good to me" ship design without functioning parts for each hull size. When I am convinced the automatic designs aren't good enough, I pull up and upgrade the appropriate predesigned ship of the right size, throw in a bunch of engines, weapons and such, give it a name like 2-2 small attack so I know how big it is, and let that be the main ship for a while. Only after collecting a significant amount of further tech do I go in and upgrade the same or another blank ship again to get to something like 12-15 m attack.

This way, I design to my needs, but don't spend forever at the shipyards.

If I am being really lazy, I note that this method has left a whole lot of leftover designs with various ranking based names. I can just pick the highest one available and it tends to represent the same decisions I made before with the present tech choices available. That is an interesting shortcut.

If you build complex fleets of differing ship types, this won't be near as helpful.

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MarvinKosh

Join Date 08/2005

+87

Something to also bear in mind is that if you take a very similar approach to research each game, you can check the 'Save ship designs to hard drive' box in the game options and then when the right technologies are researched and necessary miniaturisation ability is reached, the ship design will be available.

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Thanks a million, y'all! I don't know why I didn't ever try double-clicking, but that has saved me a ton of hassle and frustration. My ships are ugly, but they function. I got this game to bring me out of a funk. Y'all are making it really enjoyable. I appreciate it. Good gaming to all!

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