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Hi.
I bought the game basically because you can design the looks of your own starships, I've been looking for a game like this ever since I played the first civilization, it's just too cool to create your own unique looking units without having to spending any time at all in a 3D modeler.
Here is some tips for using and managing your ship designs if you have a lot of them. You can also download my Imperial fleet shipset from the libaray which contains 28 ship hulls. I hope this thread stays for discussing ways to use the designer 
* Separate hull designs from ship designs.
In ship designer you can make ships without any functioning components. This is perfect for making ship hulls, I save these empty designs first before loading it up with anything. The advantage of saving your ships this way is that these hulls will appear in each of your GC2 campaign as soon as the necessary hull tech has been researched. Otherwise, you would have to wait for all the tech used by the onboard equipments (weapons, engines etc) to be researched before you will see this design.
* Hull naming.
Don't know about you, I now have some 60 hull designs in my game. Luckily I named them so that they all start with a letter 'z', the ship designer lists designs alphabetically so this way, all of these empty hulls will be listed below all your functional ship designs.
* Where the designs are stored.
GC2 stores all the ship designs in My Documents/My Games/GalCiv2/Ships. If you started a Metaverse game, the ships are stored in My Documents/My Games/GalCiv2/Metaverse/Ships.
* Managing ship designs.
I design very task specific ships in my games. If you do this too, then you may not want your ship designs from previous game sessions to reappear, since the situation changes and you may need to design something different. You will spend a lot of time clicking on 'delete' and 'obsolete', but here is an easier way:
I created a new directory in My Documents/My Games/Gal Civ2 called 'Imperial Warship Hulls', where I store all my empty hull designs plus a colonizer and a constructer with upgraded ion engines. Before starting a new game, I would delete everything in /ships or /metaverse/ships and copy the files from /Imperial Warship Hulls over. This way I only get empty hulls for each new game plus a colonizer and a constructer which usually usually end up having the same design from game to game.
If I have created new hulls during a game, I'll just copy the hull designs to my 'imperial warship hulls' directory.
* Finally, a tip on ship design.
After making so many hulls, I think the coolest are the ones that gives you an unique thumbnail on the campaign map, so you can tell what ship it is without reading the (rather hard to read) text description. So here is the tip: The shape, outline of the shape in this regard would be more important than little details.
I'm making a version 3 of my imperial warship shipset with this in mind, so hopefully then I can share with you guys a shipset that is a consistent in design and yet have unique thumbnails.
That's all I can think of for now. And I have a question myself: How do you design ship hulls for the AI's to use? Some of them looks fine but many looks quite silly and I would like to replace them with something more like a...starship.
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