DW's got me thinking... Best/worst ship design screens ever??

[Texashawk]

So I was thinking about DW's ship design screen - most people seem to tolerate it, few really love it - and it got me to thinking about my personal favorite and least favorite ship design screens/systems. I'd be interested to hear yours as well!

FAVORITE - Imperium Galactica II (cool looks); Stars! (functionality)
LEAST FAVORITE - MOO3. By a metric mile. Yeesh.

Thoughts?

[adecoy95]

i like any game that even remotely attempts to let you make custom units, so i cant pick a best.

warzone 2100 had a pretty poor customization for its units, mainly because of how imbalanced it was (everyone built yellow heavy turret tanks), other than that it was fine, and i still played that game tons

really tho, with as few of games actually lets you do this, i just cant pick a best or a worst

[lordxorn]

MOO2!! by far the best, not too mention cool mix of variety.

Worse hmm, space empires I never really likes. Just so bland.

A honorable mention would be the MAX series especially MAX2, because if I am not mistaken you could upgrade your units almost indefinitely making really powerful super units. However, it was hard to do.

[Litjan]

I think Galactic Civilizations II deserves a mention - especially for the aesthetic point. The way the ship looks did nothing for the properties, but I liked the way of creating mean or functional looking ships nonetheless. Too bad that it was hard to see that design on the map, later on - as the ships were mostly too small to discern. And the tactical combat really isn´t worth talking about, either.

[ASHBERY76]

SOTS has a functional and fast design screen which is efficient.

GC2 looks like a lego set with cheesy toy ships.

[Wade1000]

ORIGINAL: ASHBERY76

GC2 looks like a lego set with cheesy toy ships.

Oh my god, agreed!

[J HG T]

ORIGINAL: ASHBERY76

SOTS has a functional and fast design screen which is efficient.

GC2 looks like a lego set with cheesy toy ships.

Agreed and agreed. I played GC2 years ago and liked it. Got SoTS some time ago and I really need to play more of it when possible.

I really like the DWs system of ship-design so it's my "best" choice at the moment. It's not perfect but it allows to make really diverse designs and customize all your bases and civil ships. Also the expansion will bring some new stuff to the table, which is great.

[Carewolf]

For something that can compete with Distant Worlds in functionality, it has to be Space Empires V. It is not a very easy interface, but solves the problems that DW currently has (especially by filling out all the basic requirements).

DW is awesome in its functionality, but absolutely retarded in its design. It is way way to cumbersome and annoying to use. It can be done much simpler without losing a single bit of player control.

[s20dan]

I liked the space empires 5 system too Carewolf.

 But I dont see any problems with Distant world's customisation system. It reminds me a lot of MOO2, which is a good thing, although there is less variety in components.

 I also happen to really like the ship customisation in Star Ruler.

[Carewolf]

I don't like the ship design screen in star ruler. It is even harder to use than DWs. It got an advantage in coolness of scale, but there is nothing showing what scale means or how big it really is, and the rest of the design screen is still confusing (it wins a little in collapsing categories, DW could use that).

It leads me to a point though, because in my mind star ruler and DW both share the same weakness. Design is like all parts of the game supposed to be fun, a mini game of sorts. I dislike time-sinks, and stuff like adding the minimum number of life-support, crew quarters and reactors and stuff is not fun or even interesting. It might be intersting to add more than the minimum for your own specific strategy, and adding all the special capabilities are fun, but adding the minimum is not. If DW knows enough about the minimum to warn you when you haven't yet added it, THEN WHY ISN'T IT ADDING IT FOR US? Just do it

[Deomrve]

I liked SEIV the best, each hull or class of hull had a certain size and you could not exceed it. you just placed the components that you wanted, named it and you were done. DW's good and it's a lot like SEIV, but it blurs the line between classes. SOTS is just a clone of Spaceward Ho! which was released in 1993 I think. The worst in my opinion is GalCiv 2, adding all the non-essential components just dragged the ship building part out to the point where it took you out of the game. It took longer to design a ship in GalCiv 2 than to play a turn.

[Data]

MOO2 as the coolest but DW as the most informative in ship performance impact...these two games rule side by side

[BigWolfChris]

DW component handling still needs improvement
Having to click 60 times to change shields is annoying (30 to remove the old ones, 30 to add the new ones)
Also wouldn't mind the ability to self-obsolete components like ship designs

[gmot]

I also do "upgrade as new" (think that's what the label is) and that will replace all the shield (or whatever) components with the newest version. But I agree the ship design UI is cumbersome and it takes too long to make simple changes to a design - how about some drag and drop functionality? Hopefully some attention will be given to this by Codeforce.

[James009]

Distant Worlds would be among the best with a re-designed ship design with more variety in components, image variation, and size. If it was easier to read and organize it'd be fantastic.

MOO2 was probably my favorite although it really limited you to only so many ships per class. I loved all the variety and functionality of the equipment it provided. I miss the weapon variety and modifications, sub-systems, troops, and research labs. If that stuff could be added to DW I'd be very happy.

Gal Civ 2 gets an honorable mention for the deep customization options... except I kinda hated the ship combat, the games weakest feature.

[EisenHammer]

The best MOO2.
The worst MOO3.

[caerr]

ORIGINAL: EisenHammer

The best MOO2.
The worst MOO3.

Funny how that goes. I remember being sooo excited to play MOO3 and then the first time I ran the game I felt my stomach turn just by looking at the main menu. The rest of the game wasn't any different.

[BigWolfChris]

ORIGINAL: gmot

I also do "upgrade as new" (think that's what the label is) and that will replace all the shield (or whatever) components with the newest version. But I agree the ship design UI is cumbersome and it takes too long to make simple changes to a design - how about some drag and drop functionality? Hopefully some attention will be given to this by Codeforce.

I refuse to let the AI touch my designs since they will simply screw them up
I don't always use the latest and (not-always) greatest, which auto-upgrading and AI designing does
I also use different reactor types, Caslon for Civilian, Hydrogen for Military, AI upgrading will not take this into account, thus ruining that aspect

[gmot]

I suppose the devs could add more fine-tuning to the automation for ship design, but it sounds like you like full control over that kind of thing so it wouldn't be granular enough in any case.
So enhancing the UI would be key. I like the end product when I design my own ships, but I have to say I don't really enjoy the process of ship design in DW. If that makes sense.

[BigWolfChris]

Makes sense to me

I think one simple way of doing it would be
If you double click, it adds a single component like now
But if you drag and drop, a pop-up box crops up that allows to choose how many of that component you would like