Ship Design - Doe you bother?

Hi!
The ONLY time I've put a piece of jevelery on my ship was when I've ran out of hardpoints to fill remaining space on a huge hull with ultimate missile defenses. No jevelery matters for me, because I play 99% of time in strategic (icon) view mode. My ships are machines of death and destruction, not fashion models.

BR, Iztok

The technologies I have available when I need to build a ship will vary from game to game depending on trades, how many research bonus tiles I find, etc... so I design new each game to get the best ship I can build with the techs I have. They aren't pretty - I normally just double click and let the system place components but it only takes a few seconds to design a new ship that way and they work just as well.

This is my opinion exactly. In fact, I wish there was a function to automatically add one of the extra bits if you run out of hardpoints with space left on the hull so I wouldn't have to expend even that much effort in the ship builder.

I've never used jewelry and I don't spend a whole lot of time designing ships but I do insist that my ships be symmetrical and have the engines in the rear and the weapons in the front.

Like most everyone has mentioned I play mostly in icon view but I will zoom in on occasion to take a look at the gee whiz graphics. I do find the ships that the AI builds often funny looking and lopsided. They often remind me of a lobster with one gigantic claw. Actually I find how they move kind of interesting as they rotate to turn corners to go around planets and such. I do appreciate the level of detail involved even though I'm in icon view 99% of the time.

Generally I just design a hull with a few parts, like wings or whatever, and then use that design as the template for all hulls of that size. That's about it for me.

let the system place compontents??

Life without symmetry is hollow. I could never allow the system to place a component and it be placed in a way that no sentient species would choose.   

I also stay in strategic mode most of the time but I know how the ships look. I get a big kick out of the ship designing but it is almost like a separate thing from the game playing.

QFT!

Especially on the larger maps, I'm never leaving icon view.

The design templates are an absolute blessing to me because no, I can't be bothered to make ships look good myself. I appreciate the flexibility and depth of the ship designer, but in practice I'm here to play a strategy game, not use an art tool set.

I go mad over it, sometimes spending hours building my latest, greatest asset to the ever growing navy. I even bother with the little bling things like antennas, lights, banners and such...

Depends on mood for me. A lot of times I just double-click my components on and go. At others I have been known to spend 45 minutes designing my first colony ship before ever taking a turn. Just depends on how creative I feel.

Personally I have very much designed the ship designer from MOO 2. Select a hull size and add weapons and other functional components. Simple and efficient.
Don't get me wrong, the ship editor in GC2 is great. And the new functional components in TA improve it eve further.
However I don't use the personally. I've tried a few times, but unfortunately the hardpoints on most parts are either at the wrong places, too far apart or was too dense.

In addition there's the superb icon view. In fact, I wish I could zoom out even further on large maps. Let some AI governor handle the individual colonies. I want to move fleets between sectors on an epic scale. Forget about solar systems, galactic clusters are the real thing

While I greatly enjoy the strategy aspects of this game if find the added level of customizationW that the ship builder brings to be a fantastic boon to an already deep strategy title.

This is simply because I find it far more engrossing to fight epic battles when the ships involved have a bit of personality and of course a chance to appreciate my own handy work. Quite simply id rather let my imagination take hold, as its far more interesting, to me, to fight over worlds that I've named and with ships I've built, otherwise its just like playing super advanced mine sweeper and the game becomes a war of number instead of an epic struggle for domination.

But hey thats just me right, different stokes and such.

Lol in retrospect you guys are probably much more dangerous opponents then I am seeing as you have your focus.

The ship designer is probably my favorite aspect of the game. I pretty much design ships containing just jewelery and save them as templates, then use these templates exclusively in-game. My ships arn't gigantic or amazing or insanely detailed, but I do very much enjoy using them... Wish Stardock would stop changing jewelery and breaking them, though.

I enjoy messing around in the ship designer, but then I'm a graphics geek. I used to do graphic design for a living. I like the challenge of trying to come up with designs that reflect each race's back-story and personality. For example, all my Iconian designs are intentionally very asymmetrical, and a bit klunky-looking, like they don't know quite what they're doing with their Precursor tech. All my evil race designs look mean and nasty... you'd know you're facing a killer race just by looking at the ships.

Most of that effort is spent on the military ships. The utility craft like colonizers, constructors, freighters and scout/sentries are somewhat individualized according to race, but fairly simple designs. It's more fun to work on the attack ships.

That said, I don't spend nearly as much time and effort as some folks do, based on what I've seen in the sticky posts here showing off ship designs. Aside from the time investment, I'm always a little worried that performance might start taking a hit, if I go too nuts with stacking parts on a hull.

As I have little spare due to having a bub, and whilst the designer is fun, I use it only to adding techs as necessary.

I'm embarrassed to say that my ships really are butt ugly.

I'd be more interested in custom ships if there actually were epic battles in the game. But watching ships float around aimlessly while the computer grinds through dice rolls doesn't appeal to me.

Yea id tend to agree with that statement, the epic part i kinda fill in myself using the pics and a bit of imagination greese. Otherwise, if the dev's just added movement scripts that cause the ships of various sizes to maneuver differently it should add allot to the combat viewer. For instance, fighter sized ships move like fighter aircraft while the other larger vessels are more ponderous. For a more accurate idea of what I mean consider how the ships from Sierras Homeworld moved, specifically the fighter craft, they did a fantastic job simulating large squadron vs squadron dog fights.

It depends on my mood. There are times when I start up a Battle of the Gods game purely to design a template and save it for "real game" use. I can use up entire 2 or 3 hour sessions just designing ships.

The main difficulty and artistry of designing templates is in hardpoint management. The editor essentially allows you to place any component anywhere, you just need to get the hardpoint in the right place in the right orientation.

Some of the longest sessions I've spent designing don't use a heck of a lot of parts - it's getting the parts in exactly the right place that's usually the challenge.

I design a base cargo hull 'utility chassis' template for each ship style, and bolt on the necessary modules to that chassis template whenever I need a constructor/miner/transport/surveyor.

For miniaturized utility ships, I simply take a tiny hull and bolt on the required module.

For warships, I create 1 heavy fighter template, 1 frigate template, and 1 dreadnought template on each ship style and then bolt on weaponry etc. whenever I design a warship.

I always make sure engines are in the back, weapons in the front and bolted on logically, and defense/life support modules are made invisible.

Whatever pops up into mind, i'll go for the nearest feeling of destructive gizmos as much as possible. I don't actually USE it often, just a few times to enhance with new stuff and better weaponry as they come along... may also sprinkle a couple of cue-wing-like-boosting-components to make it stand out form the pack when necessary. But, that's more for aesthetic than actual potential at war.

I mainly design any within a single framework & goal - eventual development of the X-Worlds fleets which will require good skills at shipyard handling; as i do agree, also, that placing components can get tedious if not outright annoying.
3D representation is a matter of perception while the mechanics provided by ship-parts to attach on a specific location (as in red-dots hovering and quite hard to clearly determine) are conditional to the cpu-evaluation status on my real intentions. If i don't get TO *THE* spot in reasonable time, frustration, double-click and bye. Point being, the deception outweighs the function itself.
Thus, a slow endeavor that requires patience.

In a game though, i won't be bothered by spectacular attempts at the nifty swell ultra-combat graphics... since i prefer strategy and tactics to great looking spaceships. Besides, i get no texturing. Old-card, but interface speed DOES matter in many places. Including the flashy travelers.

Gimme slick planets though, as it's probably why i'm soooooo intense on fixing the X-Worlds set of Homeworlds.

- Zyxpsilon.

I've found that since I started playing the beta I'm using the ship designer less, simply because I'm so much more into enjoying the personality of each race. I expect that when the custom races are back I'll get right back into it though, as I like to roleplay my custom races and feel that they deserve fitting ships that look different from whichever style I'm based on. It helps me develop their personality, which in turn affects my strategies. With the standard races, I'm happy to use template designs for the most part, as the ships already "fit" and often look better than I could design, so I tend just to take one of the templates, give it a name, and refit it as is necessary.
I almost always design my own Large+ hulled ships though. After putting all that effort into researching the larger sizes, I want my reign of galactic terror to look just right.

I also individually name my ships, although I tend to only do this to the larger warships, the most experienced ships, or ones that have developed their own story through the vicissitudes of war (like the KSS Distraction, which shepherded several retreating troop transports through the Yor interdiction field after a grossly bungled invasion attempt, repeatedly intercepting attacks until I got my superior speed back).

Actually Designing ships is one of the most enjoyable parts of the game IMO, But I think it's just a matter of taste you either enjoy it or you don't. I wouldn't like GC2 half as much without the user designed ships.

I never really spend alot of time in the design phase, I normally just pick a template, place the guns, and move on. Like so many others I also play from a far out zoom most of the time, so as long as my designs are not as bruteforce as the computers, then I am happy. I have also disabled the cinematic fleet combats, because frankly I hate that bit of the game...The grafics are just to annoying.

The day when we get some more grafical battles, that has ships getting cut in two by doom rays, and missiles getting blasted out of the sky by the turrents etc. etc. etc. Then I would proberly make cool designs all night long just to watch those movies! I would not expect state of the art shader support or fancy lighting, just some more visual battles, fleets moving so they look like a fleet, and proper weapon animations, and most of all, some more action!

Oddly, I use it more because of that. I'm designing a unique style for each race.

I imagine in time I'll do this - I'd certainly like to get better at making ships, but I'm just getting too much of a kick out of messing around with the new tech trees and tend to skip ship design beyond the minimum at the moment. That said, in my current game with the Drengin I'm scratch-building all my warships, as I'm playing a rather unbalanced game research-wise and want my ships to look rather unsafe, as if they're being hastily cobbled together for yet another ill-planned war. Which they usually are.

When custom races are in TA though, I plan to put a whole lot of effort into getting the perfect combination of look and playing style - I had a race in DA who used gigantic organic ships like the Leviathans in Farscape (but with guns) who are crying out for an edited tech tree with the Iconian hull upgrades...