Late feature request

[feygan]

Was playing last night and one thing occured to me as far as shipsets go, there simply isn't enough ship models in any given family for me to be happy as a lover of variety.

To clarify this a little I like to use a dedicated carrier ship for my fighter/bombers, and back it up with ships geared for hard close fighting with beams, then a third as a stand off missle gunboat. I realise that I can simply designate one to be a capital, cruiser, destroyer etc. However I sometimes like to have a large carrier capital ship, and throw in there a large toe to toe capital battlship to, there lies the problem as now I have to essentially different ships that now look identical with the ship model.

I'm well aware of the ability to open the drop down picture box to select another ship model of any kind, and often make a family shipset with nothing but "extras" inside it that no other race uses yet I can still select ships from it for my own personal variety. This causes the problem then though of effectively loosing one race shipset and forcing two other races to have identical ships.

What I would suggest if it is feasible is that inside each family there is a requirement to have 1x frigate, 1x destroyer 1x colony ship etc etc etc, but also allow us to have a "frigate2, destroyer3." and so on. This would mean each shipset is essentially unlimited in how many models it can hold, the player can freely select new shiny ships to their own delight, and the game still can have one unique shipset for each and ever empire race in the game.

As an extention to this depending on how cpu demanding it would be for lots of different ship models, there could also be a random factor for the AI when building ships. So if I put in frigate1, frigate2, frigate3 then the AI will give each one a 33% chance to be used whenever it makes a new frigate design.

If that is beyond the game scope would it at least be possible to allow the game to recognise "frigate2" etc as viable ship models just so I can keep all my ships in one place and not sacrifice other family positions?

[2guncohen]

I would like this very much  [:D]

[Data]

feygan, it's not too late for this as it has been requested before so Elliot surely knows about it already.

[J HG T]

We concur.
I'm one of those people who have multiple different destroyers, cruisers and caps. Usually it's pure combat battleships, missile/torpedo boats, carriers, fast PD/flak ships and, when using capitals, supporting capital ships equipped with all possible fleet modules.

+10 for this idea.

[tjhkkr]

Hey Feygan,

I do not remember which post this was on, but the idea came from the Romulan who had the bad taste to flush all of his Romulan Ale out the emergency disposal tubes... [:D]

Seriously, IGard had the brilliant idea of putting up a second family ship set that is NOT assigned to a race... and when you got to the ship design screen, you use images from that set as well...
It does not change your request to Elliot, but it does give you a workaround if he cannot do it this time...

[Kalthaniell]

Yup, I fully support that idea. Making two or three new ships for each size category is probably out of the question at this point, but making the game recognize alternative ship images if they are present in the family folder seems quite possible. The drawback is that it would most likely lengthen the game loading time....

[SpectralFremen]

Ability to create custom classes. That would be sweet [;)]