Ship designs from old games

Just click obsolete, I guess.

I know you can do that, but what I'm asking is whether there is a overall thing I can do rather than having to constantly obselete them

Go to the "ships" folder in your My Documents File.
Delete all the ship files.

Short answer: No

I have brought this up before with no tangible result.

another useless way to avoid this is to creat a new installation of the game, and if your running windows XP or higher creat a new windows profile, so when you start a new game on your new installation of galcivII there will be no more of those annoying ship designs and you'll still have the old ones on your older file, and once you've done your new game just move your ship designs to the older file, so you always have your designs and always have a game to start from scratch.

The brute force way to "save" your ship designs for an old (but still being played) game without having them show up in your new game is to move the "old" ship design files from the ships folder under MyDocuments, and when you want to play this "old" game, move them back.

There is no in-game way to do this except by "obsoleting" them when they show up in your current game, which as you said you already know about.

Another annoying thing that happens to me, is that I design a new ship and name it and then I get the message that it already exists.
Yet I cannot see the name on my list anywhere.
What is going on ?

Yet I cannot see the name on my list anywhere. What is going on ?

You most likely have a ship by that name using a different hull style, or requiring tech you haven't researched yet.

Thanks Kryo.
Hull style I think would be it.

I think you can just delete your old ships, the game keeps a copy of your ships in the save file. As far as I can tell, the files are only used to transfer ships between games. The easiest thing to do is make a batch file that clears the contents of the ships directory before launching the program, this will keep each game separate and your old games will still work.

do u reckon if it could be included as an option in a future update?

I've gotten around this by creating a stripped template frame design for each chassis with no tech on them at all. When they become available, I create a design that meets the critera of my current game, then I upgrade it with the same name every game, ensuring that I always overwrite the old higher powered design with the new one applicable to the current game.

My Small frame ships are always Strike Corvettes.
My Medium frame ships are always Strike Cruisers.
My Large frame ships are always Leviathans.
My Huge frame ships are always Devastators.

I've also got Fast Colony Ships with an additional engine I use for my opening game.

Hey STARDOCK, I'll be another one requesting a toggle option to turn off the saving of ships from previous games. The feature doesn't help. The more games you play, the worse the shipyards get. Nice idea, poor execution.

Wahey, somebody agrees with me!

From the main menu, options, then uncheck "save ship designs to hard drive", when you exit back to desktop the designs are gone. If you start a new game without quitting back to desktop first, the designs are still present.

This problem of crouded shipyards drives me crazy too.

Yea removing the saved ships to another folder, then bring them back for old games is the simplest solution.

Also saving over current designs which is very foolishly "not recomended" is definately an essential thing to keep shipyards clean and tidy.

I like my shipyard list to contain as few ships as possible.... needless to say, all the standard ships get obseleted as soon as they appear!! hehehe

Yea removing the saved ships to another folder, then bring them back for old games is the simplest solution.

No need to manually bring them back for an old save - the designs themselves are actually in the save game file.

No need to manually bring them back for an old save - the designs themselves are actually in the save game file.

good tip, that will save me some stuffing around time, thx