At times, I'm just researching blindly or on a short near term focus with no long term strategy. For example I might be able to build the Paladin but for one tech, but I dont know what that tech is. Im playing the original dreadlords without any of the expansion packs. ALso sometimes when I custom build the ships, Im building totally useless ships though they have weapons on them, its not reflected in the gameplay. Is there something Im missing here?
The built in ships are pretty useless. Just build the best ship that you can at the moment.
As far as long term strategy it is good to have one. The Spin Control Center requires Total Majesty which is at the end of the Diplomancy branch of the tech tree. There are strategic advantages to gaining a diplomatic advantage over the AI. For one it allows you to get a better deal when tech trading with the AI. I usually make the Diplomancy branch an early priorty and then use the diplomatic advantage thus gained to acquire pretty much all the other techs via trade with the AI. So I quickly rush up the diplomatic branch, build the Spin Control Center to protect me from attack and then take on the AI at my leisure.
Not quite sure what you mean by "I'm building totally useless ships though they have weapons on them, its not reflected in the gameplay". Perhaps it's that your opponents have strong defenses mounted for your particular weapons branch. Each of the three weapons types (beam, gun, missile) has associated defenses. If you have beams and your opponents have strong beam defense your weapons may be useless. If this is the case you can either continue down the same beam path and build ships with stronger beam weapons that overwhelm your opponents defenses or you can switch over to a different weapon type for which your opponent has no defense. But again I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "useless ships" and "not reflected in the gameplay".
I've never had a from-scratch warship that showed weapons in the Shipyard not have those weapons when an instance came out of a Starport.
Actually the ships always work as designed in the shipyard but they don't always "look" like the ship you designed in the shipyard. This can happen when you reuse ship names from one game to the next. For example if you created a Fighter I in a previous game then if you create a different Fighter I in the current game it *may* end up looking like the old design even though in fact it will have all currently designed attack, defense, speed and range values. The reason for this is that the GalCiv2/Ships directory (and GalCiv2/Metaverse/Ships directory if a metaverse game) contain the old designed ship files. To avoid this just delete the contents of these tow directories between games.
