Suggestion: Give ship designs a designated successor

[cyrusol]

One of this game's strengths is that it actually makes sense having many different ships doing different things because of what the different components offer.

One of its flaws is that you cannot easily have multiple active designs of one ship role (for example multiple variants of cruisers) side by side. If you press the button to retrofit all ships to the latest design in a fleet the potentially mix of wildly different designs turns all into just the same, newest design for all ships of that role (i.e. all cruisers will turn into the same variant).

An example: spaceports. Right now I cannot have multiple lines of spaceports. No matter the size, they will always retrofit automatically into the latest one if automatic retrofit is enabled in the design overview even if it is of a different size (smaller or bigger). But I might not want to have the biggest starbase everywhere, sometimes I might want to give tiny, unimportant worlds just the smallest one for the medical center, recreation center etc. and not for actual protection.

I believe that a designated successor could solve this.

Anosther example: I could also have a line of designs for a command cruiser where I have components for fleet targeting and fleet countermeasures and another line of designs for (heavy) cruisers where I go don't have any of the fleet support components but more weapons. Then the ships would only upgrade to a new version within the same line.

For that the "Upgrade" button in the design overview should automatically set the successor of the design you upgrade from to the design you upgrade towards.

Likewise the "Copy As New" button should not do that. Nor should creating a completely new design.

When creating/editing a design it should be possible to manually select/change the successor, perhaps right below where you set the name in the top right corner. It should also be possible to deselect any successor so that this marks it as state of the art and that the retrofit all button in a fleet will not change it to something else.

Maybe in order to prevent people asking why their ships won't upgrade in existing saves or because they never use the upgrade button and just manually keep only one of the designs active the behavior should not change if only one design for a role is active. Meaning that even if your v2 of a frigate does not have the v3 as a designated successor, as long as that v3 design is the only one that's active the retrofit buttons should still consider it the "default" successor and retrofit into the v3 one.

Also it should of course be possible to manually switch to another line of designs. Like, the menu for manually retrofitting my small spaceport should still show up the medium. Nothing should change in this regard.

I cannot overstate how much I would wish for this feature. If I want to play with multiple active designs for the same role right now my only option is to never use the button to retrofit all ships in a fleet and also disable automatic retrofitting in the design overview for all the roles that have multiple active designs. Right now players would be wise to only ever have one active design of cruisers, one active design of spaceports and so on in order to not make the micro too cumbersome for themselves.

[Jorgen_CAB]

From what we have heard they do intend for us to have multiple ships active and able to automatically update them in some future update. This was something they simply had no time to implement for the games launch.

I agree that it is quite cumbersome to upgrade the various ships manually. You automatically switch the ships to manual too, so not only do you have to select the refit button to refit the ship you also have to set them back to automated too, this is quite annoying.

I also would like to see the AI able to handle more specialised ship types as well in the future so it is not only the player that gets to design more effective fleets and ship types.