The problem with maxxing out a hull is the cost to make that ship. You can go into a starting game of GC2, in beta 1, and using the freighter hull, design a seriously deadly battleship. But you won't be able to build it. It would take too long to build. You need the industry base to build costly ships. And to get that industry base, you have to first build up your worlds.

Stardock has already stated that they don't want to see modules not allowed on any hull that has the room for those modules. A better solution to this is to increase the gap in ship HP between the cargo hull and regular hulls. Already, a cargo hull only has 10 HP. You can go crazy adding weapons and defenses to that hull, but with that few HP, it won't take many combats where the opposing ship survives your first salvo to kill you.

Jack, how long did it take you? I've noticed that the AI in Beta 1 doesn't start building any "combat ships" until I have comlpeted a few of my own. If I use purely armed freighters, they still won't build any combat ships. I am guessing the freighter is not setting off a "compete on military graph" decision.

Also, right now, ship maintenence cost isn't actually implemented. However, a maxed out freighter would have a significant maintainence cost. Did you check what your final design cost? If it's high enough, and you've spent your time building that instead of colonizing, I wonder if you'd have the money to keep your hyped up freighter?

Lucky Jack, as I said, the maintenance cost isn't activated in the game. But in the ship design screen, it does show you the cost of maintaining just one ship. Troop pods and colony pods do have a basic cost to them. Everything but jewelry has a basic cost. I've built medium sized combat ships that had a listed cost of over 200 BC per turn, and armed freighters that had a listed maintenence cost of 300 BC per turn, AIR. Next time you are in the ship design screen, keep an eye on how that number just goes up and up. When those costs are carried over/turned on in the beta, there's going to be a huge impact.

Historically, privateers and Q ships have long roamed the high seas. The main difference between the two depends on if the ship carries its weaponry openly (privateer/armed merchant) or hidden (Q Ship). Q ships were used extensively in WW1, and saw a fair amount of action in the early part of WW2, AIR.

I certainly see no reason to explode players from strapping whatever amount of weaponry they want on a freighter hull. The freedom you have to design things your way, the better your gaming experience will be.

i reckon some add-ons (eg armour, life support) should be a % of hull space. it may be then that if you armor a cargo chassis, you won't have any room left for a colony pod.....

Actually, it would be easy to do "one shot" weapons. SMAC allowed for the creation of custom cruise and ICBM missiles. That worked fine for the player. The AI used pre-designed units, so that was never an issue for the AI.

For GC, imagine that a pre-requisite to get "basic missile hull" is a certain level (probably moderate) of computer tech (for the AI nav and targetting systems), a basic weapon tech (to create the up-sized version of the normal missile warheads), and a basic level of range. Now, you have a one-shot weapon hull. You can decide on just how big it is by picking its max damage (up to your theoretical limit based on your current weaponry tech), and decide how fast you want it to go in one turn (put on amount of engines you want). Done. It's cheap, because it has so little else. As your techs advance, your potential design max goes up. But as you make bigger and faster missiles, your cost of maintaining them goes up. There is no reason that a defensive culture couldn't have a large collection of one shot missiles stationed at their planets and star bases, with a small collection of actual ships to hold their territory. Just a matter of getting the military graph right... as a one shot weapon, it shouldn't yeild that huge spiking that AMMs gave in GC1. It should instead count the equivalent of its max average killing ability (count as one ship, with strength of the average of its damage). After all, you can overcome a dug in enemy with lots of one shot killers by simply flooding it with cheap ships.

Just a matter of getting the balance right. And teaching the AI to actually use them. GC1's AI didn't really utilize them.