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Does anybody use them? I never see them mentioned so I'm curious how many players utilize them and how.

They were made obsolete when Shadows was released sadly, much better than Design Templates IMHO

Darkspire

In some ways there were better, but in many ways the templates are better.

Optimized designs work great for those that like to do manually designs, as you can get your ships exactly like you want them, however, the AI seems to handle the template design much better in the end.

Optimized designs work great for those that like to do manually designs, as you can get your ships exactly like you want them, however, the AI seems to handle the template design much better in the end.

Must admit the templates are great for when you want to use Caslon reactors for the private ships and Hydrogen types for the state ones, how the templates are so good at figuring out the engine to power ratio, how wonderful they are in building within a confined design size with maximum efficiency, how I am always amazed at the fact they always build to the right size and never go over construction size limits ... etc etc etc [8|]

Darkspire

ORIGINAL: Darkspire

They were made obsolete when Shadows was released sadly, much better than Design Templates IMHO

Darkspire

What do you mean, obsolete? They still work fine if you have ship design automated but remove the tick from the corresponding ship type. I even have AI empires running them with no issues (that is actually the main reason I made this thread, because I'm thinking about making optimized designs for all the races for extra fluff and better AI ships).

What are optimized designs? What are these design templates? I can't find the option for them. I haven't had automated ship design in ages. Confused.

ORIGINAL: Plant

What are optimized designs? What are these design templates? I can't find the option for them. I haven't had automated ship design in ages. Confused.

Optimized designs were introduced in a patch for Legends, you save your manually created designs to a folder and the AI would use them instead of automatic designs. Shadows introduced design templates which are just a bunch of text files detailing the amount of different components the AI uses in its designs, i.e. boskar cruiser uses 10 torpedo components or some such.

I use optimised designs on some races. Since Shadows I've found you have to have enough designs to cover tech levels down to pre-warp as the game only loads the designs for each ship type if it can find a viable design at the start of the game. It's a little bit fiddly and I've also found that the AI doesn't do a great job of upgrading older ships, but it does seem to build new ships to the latest design and mostly I'm happy with it. However if you want to have designs for all ship and base types, that is a lot of work.

It does mean the AI will run a solid design at every tech level rather than the more rigid template set up (e.g. pre-warp ships will have a lot more engines) and of course you can use a different ship image at high tech levels to give your empires advancement a visual reference.

ORIGINAL: Fenrisfil

I use optimised designs on some races. Since Shadows I've found you have to have enough designs to cover tech levels down to pre-warp as the game only loads the designs for each ship type if it can find a viable design at the start of the game.

So you're saying the AI only loads them if it can find a buildable destroyer/cruiser/capital etc at pre-warp levels? In my tests it seems to work just fine so long as you uncheck the ship type in the race policy but it would always overwrite them if you left it checked. Is that due to the lack of pre-warp models?

Ok, now I am interested. Maybe I will make "design templates" of my own and paste them here.

ORIGINAL: Deathball

So you're saying the AI only loads them if it can find a buildable destroyer/cruiser/capital etc at pre-warp levels? In my tests it seems to work just fine so long as you uncheck the ship type in the race policy but it would always overwrite them if you left it checked. Is that due to the lack of pre-warp models?

Not quite. If you start at pre-warp and you don't have viable optimised designs for a ship class, then the game won't see any of your other designs for that class. The same applies for any tech level, if there isn't a viable ship at the start of the game then nothing will load. However if you only ever play from the old (not quite tech 1) starting point and not pre-warp then you don't need those pre-warp designs.

Back in Legends I used to create a lot of top level optimised designs (5-7), but when Shadows came out I found that when I did that the designs wouldn't load. So now I only do it for a few races and do it right down to pre-warp to cover any possible game start (and also untick the upgrade boxes for each optimised class in the policy).

Looked at the design templates. Decided that its only purpose is to make an interesting universe.
It cannot be used to make effective ships for the AI, for all the different tech levels.