mass drivers > Lasers

Ignore the core ships; they are poor designs, lacking in speed. Design your own custom ships utilizing your latest technology.

Most people create the ships they need.

For instance, I want a defender. I'm going to produce it on the planets, so it doesn't need engines, but I want a little defense.

I just select 'new' ship, a hull, click over to defenses, double click on the defense item I want and it's auto placed... it doesn't have to be pretty.

Then it's over to weapons. Again, double click on what I want and keep clicking until the hull is full. The system auto-places the weapons on the hull for me, it takes almost no time.

Save it to a name like 'temp1 defend' and start my planets producing my new design.

Suppose I've got a defender with a laser. I've got much better mass drivers now, and I'm using 'tiny' hulls.

I create a new tiny hulled ship and call it 'defend mass1' or something.

Then I select one of my old defender ships, one with a laser. I click the 'upgrade' button, and on the upgrade screen is a VERY useful button... upgrade all ships of this type.

It's in the upper left. Click it on, and find out how much it's going to cost you.

Then I select it, and within a week or two, all my defender ships are now 'defend mass1' ships. You can only (I think) upgrade the same size hull, so if you want to upgrade from a tiny hull to a medium, you are going to have to make new ships.

Upgrading all my defenders at once is a very powerful tool.


My advice?

Stop using the premade ship designs.

It's been said before. To improve your game, you have to improve your first 20 turns.

To improve your first 20 turns, you MUST design more effective colony ships. Then as the game progresses you'll be producing ships that need to be tailored to the specific threats you face and the technologies you have to counter those threats.

So don't be afraid of the ship editor! Sure, you can spend half your life getting the perfect weapons placement, the right kind of leading wedge jewelry. Bah. Double click, let the computer slap the items you want onto the hull, and move on.

It's easier than you think.

Design your own custom ships from the Shipyard (the icon on the bottom-right-hand side of the screen). Once you have researched the appropriate technology, you can create any kind of ship with any kind or combination of weapons and defenses.

You can rapidly design ships using the method Thonnaral described above. Go into the Shipyard later and make pretty ships when you have time.

You can upgrade ships, but there are certain limits as to what can be upgraded to what - and not just hull size. It also depends on what weapons/defenses you have and how many (a Defender won't be able to later upgrade to a ship with multiple Black Hole Guns, I think)

I agree with what was said above.

Also, to get the most bang out of your research you should specialize in one weapon type early on. Then in the later game stages when your enemies have defenses for this weapon type, either research your own defenses to their weapons, or branch out into a second weapon type.