QWAD

Join Date 02/2006

Ship Design Management.

I thought I would point out a few things I do to keep all my ship designs in order and dodge a few bugs.

When I design a new ship I always make a prototype. This means I make a ship that is only a hull and extras.
When I wish to make a production run ship I "upgrade" the prototype, change the name, and add weapons and engines etc.
This should help avoid an elusive bug involving upgrading ships and being unable to change them or unable to remove certain parts. It also meens no more removing old parts should you choose to upgrade a fully equiped ship.
Also your prototype designs will be visible as soon as you get the hull tech; the best reason to do this!

I also label the ships in a way that is easy to track on the list.

A-NAME-M[x]
The first letter is A-E. Each letter represents a hull type from Huge to tiny. I use U for Constructors and Transports.
The next is simply some fancy name for the ship and the last indicates its Mark.

A-X-NAME
This is the Prototype listing. It obviously forces the prototypes lower down the list.

Until the game has a better way of organizing the ship designs, I have to take advantage of alphabetical listings.

Another tip is to not upgrade a design that is currently in use and override it. Remember to change the name.
If you do this, you avoid an annoying bug where the ships of the current design lose their icon graphic when selected. I prefer to manually upgrade them to a new separate design and obsolete the old design to avoid any trouble.

Anyone notice how the game keeps track of all designed ships even when you obsolete them. You can see this on the quick build menu*. There should be an option to toggle visibility of obsolete designs on or off for that screen and the shipyard. I used to upgrade ships and overwrite the old ones. On the quick build menu it would show about 10 designs with all the same name! It is very annoying.
I'm not sure if deleting designs removes it completely or not. It seems like the quick build menu is showing the contents of some data structure that wasn't cleared properly when the design was obsoleted from the shipyard. I am guessing it's a bug. Another reason to make sure you name your ships well until these bugs are ironed out.

*The quick build menu is the menu you see when you change ship production from the colony screen or from the galactic view on the tool bar, when you click build ship.

Just a couple cents.

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Thanks for the tips, QWAD. I've also gotten in the habbit of making a prototype for a ship, then slowly adding on as the ships get more advanced. Keeps a nice uniform astetic to each game.

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I'm not sure if deleting designs removes it completely or not. It seems like the quick build menu is showing the contents of some data structure that wasn't cleared properly when the design was obsoleted from the shipyard. I am guessing it's a bug. Another reason to make sure you name your ships well until these bugs are ironed out.

It does not remove it completely, you have to manually go in and delete the ship yourself if you want it gone for good.

What I'd like is a check for minimum tech needed for a ship. Lets say you start a game using missiles only, you design your ships, and get far up the missile tech tree. Now, your main foe in the game develops strong defenses rendering your missile fleet largely useless. So you start researching mass drivers and upgrade your fleet, removing all missiles and exchanging them for mass drivers.

Now you'd assume the next time you start a game, to get those later upgraded ships that have ONLY mass drivers installed you'd have to research the mass drivers, engines and hull size (maybe miniaturization too). However, I've found that to 'Unlock' the design I have to also get to the same level in missiles as I had in the last game even though the ships doesn't have a single one on it.

I didn't make prototypes before I ran into this problem, had to delete all my ship designs as I could never get up to them again and like you guys I'm making prototypes now too.

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Hm... I'm liking the prototype design idea. I haven't spent too terribly much time in the ship designer, as I only started building a few yesterday, but I was running into the problems you mentioned when I tried to upgrade them with different engines.

It'll be much easier to just take the prototype hull and asthetics, and build anew from there, with engines and weapons and the like.

Thanks!

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I use a different naming scheme. While i considered using something similar to keep things tidy, i just don't like it. I use abbrevations such as AF for Attack Fighter, which is obviously an offensive combat oriented fighter. Or FRCr for Fast-Response Cruiser, which puts emphasis on engines and speed but cuts back on the armor and a little on the weapons.

I also add a numerical value to denote the version of the ship. For example; AF-101 is pretty much a fighter with a single laser

That while a AFr-303 would be the third version of an attack frigate.

- The first number denotes hull size (1 = tiny, 2 = small, 3 = medium, etc)
- The second number denotes the type of vessel ( 0 = Attack vessel, 1 = Fast-Response vessel, 2 = Defensive vessel, etc)
- The third number denotes the version of a ship (Mk. I/II/III/IV/etc)

It can be a bit confusing, but i've used this naming scheme since the beginning of my strategy game addiction

Once you got the naming scheme in your head, it's extremely easy to pick them out of a list.

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Good tips QWAD.

I enjoy being able to design my own ships, at first most of them looked like Homer Simpson's Dream Car, now they are staring to look a lot better.

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I spent a few hours making my own ships and I think they are pretty neat but the problem I have is that I cannot move them between Games. It looks like I can only use them in the game that I designed them in, is there somthing I am missing and if so how do you ships between games?

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It looks like I can only use them in the game that I designed them in, is there somthing I am missing and if so how do you ships between games?

I second that question.

Obviously the ships are stored and it should be possible to transfer them over to a new game?

Also, is it possible for the CORE ships to be converted to PLAYER-made, so you could upgrade them without having to duplicate the whole design, if you like it?

Also a reverse thing. If there are ships you ALWAYS use, could you use them as CORE ships? (ex. I have a FAST version for scout, constructor and colony ship, which are available within a few turns and I usually use them instead of the core ones)

Cheers.

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Thanks for the tips. Definitely the way to go.

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If you make prototypes of the ships with absolutely nothing on them do they become available as you progress up the ladder or are they availabel from the start of a new game? At the present time I have made one small ship and found that it is easier to upgrade the design and have the ship available in one week/turn.

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The most agravating problem I have is when I upgrade a ship, the name of the ship doesn't change so it's difficult to identify the actual class of the ship.

I've noticed that whenever a ship is built, a unique Ship Id is appended to the class name of the ship (i.e. Enterprise 1232). Would it be possible to have the class name of the ship change but preserve the Ship Id. (Enterprise 1232 Changes to Defiant 1232) when upgrading a ship?

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I do something similar but I don't bother with prototypes that don't have anything on them though it is a novel ideal and I may start. Basically it has to do with my naming convention. First I just pick a name say Viper. This is followed by what weapons, defenses, and engines a ship has. So say I have beam, armor and warp drive. The name I give it is Viper-BAW. This allows me scan the names and select the ship I need withouth having to click each one to get it's stats to appear. Now if tech allows me to improve this ship I start to put a version at the end like Viper-BAW 2.

I do the same for colony ships, constructors, and freighters though they are usually just named CS, CoN, and FR. Also I make a command and control ship as soon as I can to replace the slow and unable to survey scouts. This is usually designated CnC with at least 2 engines and as many sensors and logistics I can fit along with the survey module. For these I usually just put the engine speed in the name so like CS-7 for 7 parsecs / wk.

At some point I think I'm going to get some spare time (yeah right) and build a manager type program for these things. There have been a few times where I've just wiped the ship folder completely along with the saves in order to start over. There has got to be a better way to keep track of these things over several games.

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I agree with this. There should be an easy way for you to create and load the cosmetic design (no component addons), and you wouldn't have to do it ingame, but could do it for all races right from the meny. You'd then give it a short basic name. Scout, freighter (FR), or whatever nomenclature you prefer.

Then in the game, these designs will become available when you get the new basic hulls, and you could then easily addon the components, and add to the basename the new ship design name. Easy to keep track on, and you'd also get to use all the cool designs you've made more easily.

My five cents.

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If you are trying to force prototypes down the list why do A-X-NAME. Wouldn't X-A-NAME make more sense? Then all prototypes would be in order of size at the bottom instead of interspersed throughout the overall list.

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