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I usually manually design the state ships, and I just can't figure out the point of the bigger construction, exploration and colony ships. Sure, I can give them a little more defensive capability, but they rarely see combat and it doesn't seem to be worth the significantly increased upkeep cost. Researching the techs feels like downgrading: your ships now do the same job for twice the cost. The biggest colony ships also take a very long time to build, but their only advantage seems to be a few more million colonists through passenger compartments. Usually I end up deprecating the designs and keep the smaller version.

Or is there something I'm missing here?

Whatever extra time it takes for colony ship to complete - is still shorter than time it takes to grow those extra colonists on site (even accounting for possible immigration during extra construction period).

Exploration - More fuel cells

Construction - Easier to escape monsters/enemies + more fuel cells for extra range

Colony ship - "a few million colonists" can actually save you a bunch of money. Every extra colonist exponentially decreases the amount of time you have to wait for a colony to turn profitable, which is a far bigger cost than building the ship for a few more days

You can build colony ships with two colony modules too. And more fuel for state ships is really necessary in large galaxies, and also leads to less downtime from refueling trips.

The really weird behavior is that colonization modules act like up-scaled passenger transports, rather than their own separate thing. Case in-point, colony ships are only consumed settling an uncolonized/independent world, not when you unload them. This means if you want to make more micro-intensive actions, you can have small colony ship establish a colony which have a single module, and then have large colony ships packed with modules unload population into the colony to make it profitable much faster. Since the large colony ships aren't consumed you don't need to pay the upfront cost again, though, of course, idle colony ship upkeep is something to keep in mind.

OrnluWolfjarl wrote: Thu Feb 29, 2024 2:43 pm Exploration - More fuel cells

Construction - Easier to escape monsters/enemies + more fuel cells for extra range

Colony ship - "a few million colonists" can actually save you a bunch of money. Every extra colonist exponentially decreases the amount of time you have to wait for a colony to turn profitable, which is a far bigger cost than building the ship for a few more days

Another thing I forgot to mention is that Hull Size is essentially the ship's HP. Bigger hulls can more easily escape trouble intact and are way more resistant to shield-penetrating weapons.

If you'd rather play more conservatively, you can still do it by designing ships with smaller hulls, and making obsolete any new designs that appear.

Larger Construction ships could also be made to have more resource capacity and hence be able to build the larger stations, this could be another method of regulating an empire's advancement. There are fewer stations/orbital-ships' roles that can be built by Construction ships than in Distant Worlds Universe though. This may be a feature in the distant dev path .

Larger Exploration ships, eventually, can also be designed with an extra larger sensor.