Matrix Games Forums

Hello fans,

I've been playing DW for quite a while but there's one thing I haven't figured out : How does auto-retrofit works.

In the design screen, I have all my designs on auto-retrofit. It seems to work out for private ships and bases, but my military ships and fleet won't auto-retrofit.

What am I missing?

You also need to turn on design automation in the empire policy, and check the "Prompt for Retrofit" option. Then you should get occasional prompts in response to completed research projects.

Beware though, even though the prompt will claim to be specific to a component ("We have completed research on xyz"), selecting "Retrofit" will update all ships and bases to the newest design, which may differ from the current one in many more aspects.

Thank you for the answer Nikratio.

I have "Fully automate ship Design" on, as well as "Prompt for Auto-Retrofit when new tech becomes available" checked... yet there is no automatic retrofitting going on.
I tried switching "Fully automate Research" but still no luck. Auto-Retrofitting won't work.
I finally tried to activate the "Construction advisor" and finally got the auto-Retrofitting working.

Apparently, auto-retroffiting is linked to Construction advisor... This is really confusing. [&:]
Switching research and auto-design off still triggered the popups, makes no sense does it?

The prompt to retrofit is the AI adviser. It is what the AI would do, and what it will suggest. It is usually a bad idea to accept this beyond the very early stages of a game, since everyone may head for retrofit at once. It will also potentially have the AI upgrade the size of your spaceports.

The retrofit on/off is whether to include the ships of the design in the AI suggestion, and whether to automatically upgrade ships to new designs.

It should also decide whether ships of that designs are told to retrofit (or refuel) if a fleet they are members of is told to retrofit (or you select the ship with other ships in the ship list and tell all of them to retrofit). If you have "special designs" for a few ships, like a specialist exploration ship, make sure to turn off automatic retrofit on that design.

If you want to "retrofit all", try to open the ship list, make sure it is not filtered, press ctrl-a to select all, then press retrofit. It should do pretty much the same as accepting an AI suggested retrofit (with the added benefit that your small spaceport will remain small even if there is a large population on the planet).

I use the ship list to do things like "retrofit all spaceports and defensive bases" and "retrofit non-fleeted military ships". Control-click, shift-click and ctrl-a are useful windows shortcuts working in the ship list.

From experience, I believe that for auto-retroffiting, the new maintenance cost should fit the cashflow. If you have money to retrofit but have negative cashflow, military ships won't retrofit.

I like to manual design my military but I let retrofitting (and most ships) automated. So, if you don't want to open ships & bases and manually choose to retrofit, raise taxes to have positive cashflow and let the AI work

An added benefit of manual retrofit by ship list, is that you will actually see what the cost is. It can be significant. And as you say, if you are short of cash, only some will retrofit.

Thank you for all these answers.

I'll do it manually from the ship list like Bingeling suggested.