Dealing with multiple designs of the same role

[Aquitaine]

I think I know the answer to this but want to make sure I'm not missing something.

I have two cruiser designs. One is a gunboat for pewpew and the other is an assault ship for taking things over. Mostly I want gunboats.

Is there any way to tell the game that I only want assault ships to retrofit to newer assault ships and not to gunboats, and vice versa? By default it just retrofits everything to whatever is newer and I have to go in and manually override retrofit orders for my assault ships.

[Bingeling]

Retrofit in the ship list. It allows you to pick what to retrofit to, and you can sort them (firepower/maintenance), and multi select (shift click). You only get the choice of design if you have only cruisers selected.

If they are in separate fleets, it is probably easier and more controlled to sort by fleet...

[Aquitaine]

I know I can retrofit manually from the ship list. My question is whether I can tell automated fleets to follow an upgrade chain rather than having to intervene in every instance.

[Bingeling]

Auto retrofits (and default retrofit orders) always pick the latest, buildable, unobsolete design.

The easy way of doing it is to not run two types of cruisers, but use another class for one of them. Like the escort class. Be aware if you let the AI decide purchases, though.

[Hannable]

There's no way to completely automate retrofitting if you're running two types of the same class.

I usually don't automate retrofitting and do it myself anyway. The reason is because the automation once put half of my fleet in drydock when the damn Shakturi arrived, and they rolled right over me because I was at 50% strength.

I still say that my dock workers were in cahoots with the Shakturi on that decision ... awfully convenient that so many of my ships were down when they arrived, hmmmm?

I'll often just select a fleet and order it to move into deep space just a little distance from where it's stationed, then order each ship to retrofit - the retrofit choices will show up in the menu so you can choose which model you want that ship to retrofit to.

It's a bit more work, but not much more ... and it's useful if you don't want to get caught flatfooted in drydock.

[Unforeseen]

I got pretty frustrated when i first learned how retrofit worked in this type of situation. I had two cruiser designs, a Light Cruiser and a Heavy Cruiser. The light cruiser was quite a bit smaller and less expensive than it's counterpart...when i retrofitted them they turned into Heavy Cruisers and i was ridiculously broke.