I was probably sounding a bit more melodramatic than I intended. You are right, there is an "All designs" filter, but I find I have to spend almost as much time tidying up old designs to avoid having to spend that time sorting through all obsoletes to find what I am looking for, even with the ability to sort by role/time etc. As people have pointed out, it is probably just easier to switch off autodesign.
In this case, as the commonly suggested solution involves switching off a feature like that, it does raise questions about whether it is working as it should and isn't causing more problems than it is giving in benefits. I think with a little work it could be a real boon instead of something that many people propose turning off almost immediately after starting a new game.
Emperor0Akim wrote: Mon Mar 21, 2022 5:03 pm
I can't quite follow you how you define a ship series.
But my guess would it is something I am activly promoting for DW2 as well.
Nameable Shiproles.
The current Role changes into Hull Type.
The Ship Name changes into Shipclass
And finally Ship Roles can be Named as well and are the variable the update and retrofit button gets to access
To elaborate on the first thing you mention there, if you make a new design called, for instance, "Firestarter 1", or "Firestarter I" it will recognise it as a version number at the end of the design and if you click update it will automatically call the next one "Firestarter 2"/"Firestarter II". This is also the case if autodesign updates from one of your designs.
It's kind of cool, and I find interesting because it does imply the bare bones of some kind of automatic versioning/series system within roles is already there. It already does this somewhat erratically on other design names when you use the upgrade button by adding "v2" to the end, but is pretty weird that if the game has already made a "Destroyer II" with the autodesigner then you update it, it seems to want to call it "Destroyer II v2".
The ship design system seems to have some kind of memory of its own series design history. This makes me think there might be more than just the bare bones there working in the background, but just not fully implemented or simply half finished.
I like your general "Shiproles" ideas, is what I would like to see too, and I think we are thinking along the same lines.
An example of how I am using the idea of "series" with the current state of the designer (and it is quite possibly not in keeping with convention) would be with most of my military ships where I have an armament heavy HV variant, a main all-rounder FL version that works well in most fleets without needing too much planning and a "special edition" for specific niche roles which can often change dramatically between versions. Right now, I have them set up to all be nebula safe and for ship capturing, though the latter means they aren't much use for monster hunting, so not a great multi-role mix in that scenario.
- Designs01.jpg (262.78 KiB) Viewed 1084 times
As you can see, I've been trying to keep the designer's Auto Design series going at the same time, but other than satisfying my curiosity over what the game would design is really just far more trouble than it is worth as if I don't go forward a day and then Copy those as new and delete the old ones it will overwrite one of my designs, it also leads to a huge amount of old designs to delete/sort through when I need to look through the obsolete list.
As the game already recognises my series/ship roles for the purposes up of auto-updating and increasing the version number, it is particularly frustrating I can't just designate them as separate designs to be treated individually. Even though, for now, the auto design is so likely to do something very silly with my designs that I would rarely use it for any of them. But I have hope for future updates to the game, especially if they implement ideas along the lines of what you have described and what I have been talking about.
BTW, if you have any questions or suggestions about my amateur and off the cuff attempt at using ship series or would like to share your own ideas, I'd be interested.
