Streamlining Ship Design

[hawkunit]

Hey Gang,

My first post -- thanks for having me on the forums and for the wealth of useful information that is already available here. Having watched several videos of Larry Monte and also searched the boards, I still find myself a little confused by the interface with respect to ship design retrofitting etc.

I've found a few good threads that provide tips to mitigate some of the pain of manual ship design -- which seems to be essential for effective gameplay -- but as of right now I find myself spending entirely too much time dicking with moving components back and forth. Some things I've picked up on the forums are that players will

1) only upgrade their designs after collecting at least a handful of techs
2) only upgrade specific craft manually i.e. warships, mining stations, etc (ultimately it seems like EVERYTHING should be player created if you truly want to min-max your game)
3) consider playing with inflated upgrade costs

The reason for my post is to help add to the above list and also to get a little clarification on the design screen -- specifically what is the most efficient way to update designs and then retrofit the fleets? To be even more specific, what is the best configuration of RETROFIT (auto vs manual) and UPGRADE (auto vs manual) and is it useful to use the AUTO-UPGRADE button? Is there a way to update all ships without having to go through several iterations of sorting through the ships menu? Is it worthwhile to use SAVE SELECTED DESIGNS or LOAD DESIGNS? I feel like the biggest obstacle to enjoying the game to its fullest is getting a handle on this process. It has, in fact, already gotten me into trouble a few times in the sense that the AI updated a few of my designs for me, stripping them of essential components like research labs, which I didn't figure out until the empire started to fall behind. That reminds me -- is it better to COPY AS NEW and simply have your own template to work with or MANUALLY UPGRADE one of the AI designs. I've noticed if I use the latter option I seem to accumulate a lot of different Mks and iterations of the same ship which can be confusing.

Thanks for your thoughts; hoping to be a contributing member of the community down the road!

[grst0801]

I find that it's best to min-max at the very beginning of the game and save those designs, then import them once you start a new game and retrofit everything. If you have a specific way of teching (for example I always research star fighters for my first weapons tech so I can get fighter modules on my bases and mining stations) you can design all of your bases and ships with that in mind and save those too, so you can quickly import and retrofit. I find that the ai doesn't retrofit quickly enough when it comes to bases and ships so I do it manually on everything except for private ships. The ai will also upgrade piecemeal instead of doing a fleet at a time so I have to deal with different ships of different capabilities everywhere.

[Gregorovitch55]

I'm new to DW, only 120 hours under my belt, but these things I've come across might be useful to you:

1. If you let the AI make some fleets it wants by giving it some ships at setting them to auto you need to follow what it expects from escort, frigate, destroyer etc designs or it won't know what to do with them. If you don't, and I now don't, you can design your own ships for specific roles such as a tank, a missile boat, a boarder and so on and forget about the predefined ship roles the game has.

2. A lot of techs, most of them in fact, have a series of improvements following on from initial unlock. You ships and bases get these upgrades for free if they have the base component installed, so a reasonable approach is to grab a series of new unlock techs (a particular shield, torpedo and engine type for example) then upgrade your designs with these and retrofit. This way you can research a large list of improvements that further enhance your fleets without needing to retrofit further.

3. An easy way to build a new design is to use the copy button on an existing one and edit it, although you've probably noticed that from Larry's videos.

4. Another really good tip from Larry i find is to use the Auto upgrade selected designs button then hit edit (which you can do 'cos no ships of that design have been built yet) to teak to taste. The usefulness of this as a beginner i find is that certain things that you've forgotten you've researched or don't understand the significance of yet get automatically added or upgraded in the design for you which you might otherwise easily miss. Good for learning about things.

[Andy06r]

ORIGINAL: Gregorovitch55

1. If you let the AI make some fleets it wants by giving it some ships at setting them to auto you need to follow what it expects from escort, frigate, destroyer etc designs or it won't know what to do with them. If you don't, and I now don't, you can design your own ships for specific roles such as a tank, a missile boat, a boarder and so on and forget about the predefined ship roles the game has.

You could always design new Destroyers and cruisers rather than reuse the escort template to not confuse the AI.