Custom designs suggestion

[WiZz]

Okay, AI currently is almost a complete idiot in the completing of ship designs. Not enough reactors - low hyper speed, weird weapon choices - low strength etc. I don't know how difficult it will be for developers to fix this mess.
So I have a suggestion. What if all ship designs could be exported into some sort of an editable file where we can set manually all needed components. Some sort of a text file with a full list of components. Even detailed designs for each tech tier (like fission reactor and gerax drive for tier 1 etc). On first look it will be a huge amount of possible combinations but it will be finite amount. It could be done with help of community in relatively short time.

[Redgate]

might be helpful if u posted some examples of bad ai designs that u are seeing

[WiZz]

Already posted as bugs.
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 6&t=384712
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 6&t=384647

From latest games, most of issues is negative energy balance = low hyper speed
Ackdarians designs
Too much fuel cells, not enough reactors

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Not enough normal bays or just remove damage control unit

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Troop transport without weapons (not the biggest issue, design is fine)

20220612092618_1.jpg (283.61 KiB) Viewed 498 times

Not enough reactors, remove weapons - it's useless for tankers

20220612092630_1.jpg (276.42 KiB) Viewed 498 times

Zenox designs
Game refuses to swap laser cannon for maxos blaster

Same

Issues from observations
The game ignores all PD-systems except multi-beam. Maybe something wrong with other PD-systems or wrong priorities, dunno.
The game doesn't upgrade weapons on your ships if you choose to research 'wrong' (not your race preferable) line. Example. You are ackdarians. You decide to go into beam tech and got high level. Autodesigner will put on your ships railguns even if they are low level.

[LoBlo]

Nice critique.

I think that the devs need to shift focus now. The game is stable enough and newcomers like myself aren't having a lot of problems. I rarely get a crash. There's sometimes a slight game slowing for 10 seconds or so, but its minor compared to the overall game experience.

Its time for DW2 to start optimizing the gameplay itself as the focus of development. AI strategy and design is a good focus.

[WiZz]

Here a few examples of poor AI designs for pirates.
#1 - low energy balance and slow hyper. Could be easily fixed by an additional reactor and -1 fuel cell

20220615212249_1.jpg (242.19 KiB) Viewed 421 times

#2 - energy balance is so low that the ship even can't fire from all weapons effectively. - ion shield + 1 reactor will fix it.

20220615212237_1.jpg (248.53 KiB) Viewed 421 times

[AKicebear]

I think the next step should be modding support, which then will allow more people to start projects addressing some of the issues with the game, while the devs focus on what mods can't do. By that I mean:
- an in game platform to discover, install and update multiple mods
- integrating Harmony as discussed a few months ago
- de obfuscation of relevant code
- releasing a few example mods that change functionality, not just numeric values