I never really play with the appearence of my ships, but Kyro is right - designing your own ships is crucial.

I remember a post from ages ago where someone said "My first ship looked like Homer Simpson's dream car." That was true of mine, too - don't worry, it will eventually come together for you.

In the meantime, if you're going to use core ships, then at the very least you must take them to the upgrade screen and strip off ALL weapons, defenses, engines, sensors, and life support. Then stick on your best components. The core ships as they are designed are basically a trap - you can't win using them as is.

To be honest you're really better off building your own and having them look terrible than you are using the core ships. If you don't design your own, you're really crippling your potential to compete with and beat the AI.

Finally someone from Stardock has stated publicly that the core ships designs are poor! I can't understand why some players insist on using them; researching techs to unlock them, rather than techs to counter the AIs strengths and exploit its weaknesses for the user's custom ships.

The actual arrangement of items on the ship is completely irrelevant to combat performance--the battles are decided by the attack, defense, and hp values and nothing else. The combat viewer is just eye candy and a blow-by-blow analysis tool for your ships performance.

Designing your own ships is vital because it lets you field new technologies as soon as you get them, in whatever combination is available, and it lets you adapt to the emeny's ships as well. The core ships are few and far between, and very limited in their usefulness since once the AI redesigns to counter them, you've got nothing left.

I never worry much about what my ships looks like, they're gigantic floating piles of metal with gun's. As long as you got stuff, it doesn't matter how you arrange it.I once made a ship that shot it's own dorsal fin every time it attacked. but did i lose any points? NO! (which was wierd) but seriously, the only thing you really need to make cool ships is practice.

A lot of my ships are just cargo hulls with stuff piled on them. Nothing fancy at all. My warships are the stock medium or huge hulls. I don't use any jewelry except on the huge hull and I only put 2 pieces on it. The jewelry is just...well, jewelry. You can go online and get modified hulls and additional jewelry if you want to play with it, but it has no impact on anything other than appearance.

The important thing is the functional components. You really *have* to adjust those based on your current tech levels. I think the core ships are there only because they need to be for novice players, but once you know anything about the game, you design a colony ship before you take your first turn, then other ships for other purposes as you acquire better techs. It doesn't have to be pretty, just has to work.

My bigest problem is I have designed an entire fleet of ships that fits my play style only I can't always remember which techs pop them and there is no way to look at player designed ships that you don't know the techs for, at least I don't know how and if you can PLEASE do tell

I've usually noticed my designs in the research list (of course, they're all almost at the end from constant revamps), honestly can't remember if it lists the techs you need though. I got around this a different way, basically for each hull size when I get a design I really like and want to be able to use in the future, I save a completely empty design as Z-hullsize-count. The drawback is that it utterly explodes your ship list, but since they all start with Z they're all below anything else unless you like using names that start with Z in which case you'll have some sleepy designs (zzz... *ducks flying tomatoes*) and as soon as you get a hull size you have every single hull design available and don't have to worry about researching techs to get the look you want, just the capabilities you want.

As the others have said, don't worry about looks. My early ships were rather ugly; you should have seen my Laser Nose series of fighters. Big honking laser cannon right in the middle of the bow... *sigh* The discovery of resizing was a great boon to me, as well as the discovery that intersecting components don't always look bad. Let's see if I ever figure out how to use the extension mods...

Anyway. Don't feel bad about making a butt-ugly monstrosity of guns and engines. In battle scenes, they have a sort of grace all their own. Just imagine the look on your opponents' faces. "Hah, look at that hunk of-" *wingman is suddenly vaporized by concentrated laser fire* "...Uh-oh."

Isn't there a way to start a game with all techs? One of the game types I think. If you do that, all your old ship designs should be available. Then just modify those into stripped down versions and resave. Voila, now you have all your basic ship designs.

"I've found that I can get good looking ships with only about 6-10 pieces of jewelry and about 10 minutes design time. Once I get one I'm happy with, I save it without any components so it will show up when I get the needed hull tech and I can add whatever functional componants I want."

Same here, I've found a few well placed pieces can produce some fine looking ship. That said on large and even more so huge hulls I can’t help but load them up with jewelry. But then what’s the point of a capital ship if it’s not outlandish? There’s one thing I can’t resist and that’s making the engines as large as possible. That kind of connects with my style of play since I tend to make my ships very fast; it lets them cover a larger area, or in the case of things like transports out run enemy ships.


As for addressing the original post, I don’t know my best advice for designing nice looking ships is to try lots of options see how the different pieces fit and in what combinations they look best. You’ll make a lot of crappy designs at first (I certainly did), but maybe you notice you like how a certain part looks (like how the wings look), so the next ship you make you use that element and kind of design around it. Just give it time, and don’t expect to make the most awesome ships evar.