upgrade and design questions

[kafka]

great game, I really love it and can't stop playing it, congrats to Elliot.
I have two questions about the upgrade system. I know that I only have control over military 'state owned' units. Now I'm able to upgrade space ports but not research stations though they are state owned. Is this intended or do I do something wrong?
Second question regarding designs and upgrades: I designed two escort class ships and two frigate ones, each with a slighly different purpose, slower and heavier armoured ones for escort missions ans faster and lighter armoured for intercepting missions. I, too, designed two defense base classes, a smaller and cheaper one for new colonies and a big expensive one for developped ones.
Now, teh upgrade system works for bases, since I'am able to upgrade a base to the new version, but it does seem to work for ships. Is only a single design per role allowed so that If I have more designs all class units are upgraded to the one which the systems regards as the latest version?

[sbach2o]

I actually could upgrade research stations, although I had to find out that the upgraded designs aren't used by automated selection of projects for automated constructors. I think this is a sort of bug.

I will have to tinker with it to have these updated designs build manually....

Okay i was getting hung up on the word 'Update', and what you are refering to is the in-game 'retrofit' option. I agree, being able to do this with (at least) your Research Bases would be very desireable.

Second question regarding designs and upgrades: I designed two escort class ships and two frigate ones, each with a slighly different purpose, slower and heavier armoured ones for escort missions ans faster and lighter armoured for intercepting missions. I, too, designed two defense base classes, a smaller and cheaper one for new colonies and a big expensive one for developped ones.

This is a toughy. I also sometimes like to have several kinds of designs within a class, and I want all of these available at the right-click build menus and for upgrade. Most of the time I have only one of these in the respective menus which is really annoying.

I think the build and retrofit menus aren't just filtered by removing 'obsolete' designs but also only show those which are presented unter 'Show latest only' in the ship designs dialog. And to see two or more kinds of designs of a ship class there, they probably must have been designed at about the same time? Just speculating, I haven't figured this out, yet. I know (or think I know) I had two Destroyer designs available at one time, the very start of my game. For some reason I cannot replicate this.

[tuser]

The interface is a little clumsy. If you use "Upgrade" it automatically marks the old design obsolete. On the design screen, you can deselect "Hide obsolete" and edit the old design (remove the obsolete mark). That will make it possible to build the old design, but the design screen by default will only show the latest design anyway which is.. confusing.

[sbach2o]

ORIGINAL: tuser

The interface is a little clumsy. If you use "Upgrade" it automatically marks the old design obsolete. On the design screen, you can deselect "Hide obsolete" and edit the old design (remove the obsolete mark). That will make it possible to build the old design, but the design screen by default will only show the latest design anyway which is.. confusing.

Note, that "Hide obsolete" isn't called that (if I remember correctly), and doesn't do that. It really is more to the tune of "Show me only the latest design(s) of a class". It filters much more strictly than removing designs labeled "obsolete".

I do not remember the exact labling of this option, though.

[kafka]

ORIGINAL: tuser

The interface is a little clumsy. If you use "Upgrade" it automatically marks the old design obsolete. On the design screen, you can deselect "Hide obsolete" and edit the old design (remove the obsolete mark). That will make it possible to build the old design, but the design screen by default will only show the latest design anyway which is.. confusing.

Yes, that's exactly what I did. Since the upgrade system automatically marks old designs as obsolete I did remove the obsolete mark. So I can actually build the 'old' version but if I want to retrofit it I'm only offered one design, namely the latest one. So, If I want to have multiple valid designs for one role, i.e. frigate, removing the obsolete marks enables you to build them but retrofitting offers only just one version. So, at the moment, we seem to be pratically limited
to only one design per role.

[Gertjan]

Another reason why ship desigigning (in combination with automation AI, e.g. Ai doesnt use armor and makes other strange choices) should be improved. I hope Erik and Elliot do this soon after the bug patch is released this weekend. I dont like ship designing so much myself. I understand why others might like it though.