Why I Hate the Ship Builder...

Sweet.

The funny thing is as we developed the game we kept saying, eventualy this wont be fun and you will just slam stuff togeather. But months and months later I still labor over getting my ships just right. I guess that means I was wrong, becuse its still fun.

I also think as more extras become avalible online it will get even better.

I still dont have the game (hurry gamestop!!).. so if this question is offbase, feel free to ignore it completely.

But, ive seen some posts here where people complain about how deep the builder is and how it takes up too much game time.. and I was just curious if yall intended to streamline the engine in the future(through patches) to speed up the process?

The ships are easy to make--putting them together is fairly intuitive. I got the hang of it after just a couple of minutes. It's just very easy to get caught up in adding all the little "extras" and making it look uber-cool.

I enjoy building special ships, but I really wish I could copy old ships and just upgrade the engines on them or something when I want to instead of having to always start over from scratch. Or be able to build just the cosmetics of ships and save them to use later and add functional parts to them later whenver you want.

I am usually NOT eager to spend an hour making a decent looking colony ship just to make it go 1 parsec faster a turn, but I don't want crappy looking ships or just functional parts slapped on the default hull module either.

yeah there was a time when i took round 15 minutes designing a colony ship not beucase it was hard but because it was so fun and easy to do that i just couldnt stop

needless to sya it was one really cool looking colony ship when all was said and done

Soulfire - you have seen the "Upgrade" button in the ship design list screen right (at the bottom)?

The shipbuilder reminded me of City of Heroes, I spent more time designing my ship than actually playing so far. This by far is one the most fantastic features I love. Dont get me wrong, nothing wrong with the game itself, but I was very surprised by how much could be modded, I was expecting a wing some small addons but nothing like this.

On a side note, I noticed that my 'created scout' had less distance than the games standard unit, do the prebuilt ones have some hidden bonus as I dont see anything more added to them.

Soulfire - you have seen the "Upgrade" button in the ship design list screen right (at the bottom)?

There is also a save feature for ship designs that I noticed but havent really started the game yet as by the time it was d/l'ed I was too tired to mess with it too much but I did give a shoyt to the designer..

Yea, great feature Stardock! With all the structures, and parts and haul design, I was able to build a replica of the ID4 Mothership, and called it the "Vampire" It's terrorfying, and super tough, the bad thing is their super expensive, but worth it. I got to see my ship in action, and it kicks AI butt. I spent an entire hour, just designing one ship, and I would of done more, but It was a school night and I had limited time! Now my excuse for not getting to bed on time, is, "I'm not in bed on time, because I just can't stop designing these super cool ships!" It's worst then Pringles potatoe chips! One you start, you just can't stop! Thanks again for this wonderful tool. I pre-ordered so i can't wait to get even more ship parts and components later!!

Soulfire - you have seen the "Upgrade" button in the ship design list screen right (at the bottom)?

I guess at least this will work for ships you design, but I wish you could use it on the stock ships too. This will help though, thank you.

no sound at all...whats up with that????????????????????

Indeed, when I first went to build a custom ship and started playing with the options, I had the same sense of "this is so awesome I will spend as much time here as the real game" that I did with the City of Heroes costume creator (yes, I love customization).

I do wish we could save ship designs to a file to retrieve them later, and even trade them, even if it meant removing all modules/engines/etc.

I also would like to have some control over the color after the start of the game, even if it's a limited palette based on our initial selections (so if we started with blue we could include light or dark blue, but not orange).

Finally, I seem to be having trouble getting the hardpoints to rotate the way I want, but that may just be me.

Still, this is an awesome feature that I can't recall seeing to nearly this extent in any other game. Great job!

I'm having a problem with the ship builder. I'm just trying to build a small fighter but it won't let me save. After I give up and start doing something it asks me to save it and give a description, then crashes. I'm going to mess around with it some more and see if I can figure out the problem.

I agree with the people talking about it having room for expansion - more modules and such would be awesome, as would some control over color scheme while in-game.

Personally I'd LOVE to have a ship-builder option at the main menu where I could design ships for later use, either just the no-tech stuff (and I'd have to put in modules in-game) or just not get access to the ships until you've researched the appropriate tech.

I'd also love to be able to transparently trade ships with people (by which I mean do it from within the game interface, not have to hit a website or have to pull out the actual files and email them).

And for the few people who actually don't like the shipbuilder - you dont actually have to spend any time on it. All that fancy visual stuff has no effect on gameplay, so you can just take a core hull and throw whatever parts you want on it if you don't want to play with it.

I'm having a problem with the ship builder. I'm just trying to build a small fighter but it won't let me save. After I give up and start doing something it asks me to save it and give a description, then crashes. I'm going to mess around with it some more and see if I can figure out the problem.

I had that problem too but I found if I redo the name it worked, Either there exists a stock ship with same name or it has some name filter bug, but it only let me save when changed the name.

You can definitely spend a lot of time dinking with ship design and it's a ton of fun, but at the same time you can just slap parts together if you don't want to spend the time. Grab your hull throw a few engines on, add whatever other components you need and done. The time factor creeps in when you start playing with all the fun extras (visual enhancements only) and/or resizing components for effect, etc.

I'm having a problem with the ship builder. I'm just trying to build a small fighter but it won't let me save. After I give up and start doing something it asks me to save it and give a description, then crashes. I'm going to mess around with it some more and see if I can figure out the problem.

This can also happen if you enter the ship building screen from anywhere other than the main map screen. There's a bug with the save dialog not opening in the correct location if you hop to ship building from other subscreens, like the planet management screen. If you notice the save dialog showing up after you close the design screen, say if you got there from the planet management screen, then you've been bitten by the bug.

Personally I'd LOVE to have a ship-builder option at the main menu where I could design ships for later use, either just the no-tech stuff (and I'd have to put in modules in-game) or just not get access to the ships until you've researched the appropriate tech.

+1 on that.

I could spend so much time designing ships, that I'd probably be doing that instead of playing the game most of the time. A "stand-alone" ship builder would be phenominal.

And for the few people who actually don't like the shipbuilder - you dont actually have to spend any time on it. All that fancy visual stuff has no effect on gameplay, so you can just take a core hull and throw whatever parts you want on it if you don't want to play with it.

Exactly, you don't even have to place the parts, the game will do a best guess as where to place it. And if you turn off Fleet Battles and crank the amount of zoom needed to trigger tactical mode all the way to one end, you'll never see the ships anyway, if the results bother you.