Look at Sots 2, DWs, Stardrive, and a cosmetic side too. (yes lots of money and time to make but so good) 

Follow up to my last post. I remember building Star Trek ships with 50-piece engines. Sometimes the whole ships themselves required literally hundreds of pieces.

Adding models to GCII only really required you to add the null points and get the model into DirectX format. The XML to hook it up was trivial boilerplate. For adding new models, that's actually easier than TES modding.

I would like to see a way to make the final design products look more organic, flowing curves. I cant recall how many hours i've spent trying to make two mating surfaces look good at their joining point. There were also a lot of designs that I never was happy with and ended up scrapping because I just could not get the look I was going for.

That said I like the ability for ship design that was available in GC2:TOA and don't want to see that flexibility vanish.

The freedom to place hull elements everywhere or to completly design new ships from scratch is a nice feature, but one I never used. I want to create a warship with the proper mix of defenses, weapons, drives... I found it somehow disturbing that it didn't matter where to put your systems. 

I find the way ships are designed in stardrive very good. I didn't play it because it is RTS, but the ship designer looked promising. Of course, it would be very hard to allow the degree of hull design like in GCII and to compute weapon angles, shield covering etc. correctly.

The AI could use predefined hulls (the shapes), so you'd "only" have to take the firing angles etc. into account. Or the AI completly ignores ship design and uses predefined ship types. The drawback would be that sooner or later, one would now all strengths and weaknesses of those fix desgins, so it would be very easy to counter then.

That was already possible in GalCiv 2. Go to the Interface tab in the Options menu, and disable "Remove Functional Components when Upgrading a Ship Design".

.... really that simple wow I feel stupid

I've been going back and (finally) playing GalCiv2 ultimate edition in-depth.

- The freedom to put anything/anywhere is useful and I would like to retain that.  Maybe I want to put the engines on the bottom for some strange reason, or pointing in random directions. 

- The ability to hook pieces together like lego-bricks was a big plus in GC2 for me.  I didn't have to fiddle with getting things exactly right and it mostly just worked.  I would like to see more pieces and more varied styles and generic pieces in the new game.  Maybe even "art" packs that can be bought for $1-$3 to expand what you have.

- Weapon and defensive systems could be interesting if they were positional, but that might be too much micromanagement.

- One nice-to-have feature would be some sort of "this is how big your ship is, measured in meters from bow to stern".  It was hard in GC2 to get a feel for how big the ship I was designing was turning out to be.

- A way to scale the entire model up/down rather then part by part.  I made a really cool design, but it's about 2x too large or too small, now what?

- A 3D pop-up window that lets me zoom in, rotate, and closely examine a ship part before I bring it into the canvas to place on the existing ship.  In GC2 it was difficult to find out which modules looked like engines and which ones looked like cockpits.  Or how big the various items were at the default scaling size.