It looks like colony ships are a special case anyway. The normal ones are a bit better (in terms of how many components they carry) than anything you could design yourself at that tech level. You'd probably have to design your own from scratch anyway.

Link

I always make my Fast colony, and my cheep colony. Then in every game I have them avalible on the first turn.

Yeah, I would have to be one of the people that LOVE this feature. I probably spent half my time playing last night (7 hours total) just playing around in the ship creation page.
But, I could definitely see how people could get tired of it...

One solution for people seems to be, since you can save your designs from game to game... if you just create a base template ship with only Extras, and no extra weapons/modules etc, for each hull type, then each time you load up a game, you can just Upgrade that design with whatever stuff you research and save it under a new name.

As a feature of the game, spending your time designing ships should be avoidable. My feeling is that there is a significant number of players who couldn't care less about making cool ship designs or poring over the list of non-gameplay enhancing modules. There should be a simple way to skip the purely aesthetic aspects of the design process without ending up with a ship that looks like pure ass.

Sometimes I am willing to spend the time, and sometimes I am not. Why should I be forced to spend the time in either case?

The AI designs its own ships, so there must be algorithms already in game for designing new ships from a grocery list of components. The player should be able to choose his list, hit "Auto-design", and have the game spit out 3 or so random designs incorporating all those components. If you don't like them, you can then:

A) edit one of those designs.
B) hit the button again and get 3 new designs.
C) decide you really wanted a nice looking ship this time and do your own.

You can just click on a hull and then click on the modules and press place. How hard is that?

hehe I am one of those that love designing ships

In fact, i went so far as to make a thread where everyone should post their screenshots of their ships

so do it

https://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=162&AID=102080

You can - just not the "core" designs. Furthermore, the game automatically imports previous designs as you research the tech, so you can easily just design each level of colony ship or whatever once and use it in every game.

Personally I feel like I'm getting my $50 worth just playing with the ship designer... I would love for them to allow us to use that independently of the game and just use whatever tech we feel like, so that the ship becomes available as you research different techs.

Another annoying UI problem with the ship building is having to scroll through a long list of obsolete ship components. By obsolete I don't mean older, an obsolete component would be one that is superior in one of the attributes (size, cost, and value) and equal or superior in the remaining ones.

While I agreed at the time, I'm not sure it would be worth the effort now. Because of the rebalancing that took place during the Gamma, there are many components that would never be truely obsolete. The base Hyperdrive engine, which was a classic example of this during the Beta, is now the cheapest engine you'll ever have. Basically, most things get more expensive as they go up in tech. Some things get more cost effective and maybe smaller, but still more expensive, other things get less cost effective and smaller.

We are working on a list of feature to get in for the next few updaates, and I think this feature will make it in (the "copy design" feature), though you can save your designs under a different name, which kinda has the same effect (though you still can't upgrade form Core designs).

Nice to see it finally available. I think it was first suggested in this thread https://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=274&AID=94097 , but I could be wrong.

You can just click on a hull and then click on the modules and press place. How hard is that?

Just putting functional parts on the basic hull looks HORRIBLE though. It doesn't remotely look like a starship. I'd just like to be able to copy the stock ships (that all look great) and change the parts when necessary without having to spend an hour designing my own decent looking ship...that never ends up looking as cool as theirs do anyway.