Thanks for that explanation above Sithuk.ORIGINAL: Sithuk
ORIGINAL: onomastikon
Are we supposed to make "blueprints" for each and every possible ship design based on each and every tech advancement during the course of the game
Yes.
and then save each of these discretly
No. Set the filter to show all designs. Then select all the designs. Then click "save selected designs" to save all ship designs to a single ship design file.
so that we (and the AI) fall back on them when the time comes in future games? Is this to help the AI opponent races get better ships, save us time in future games at the sake of an enormous time investment now, or help the AI automatically upgrade our ships when automatic upgrading is set to "on"?
Yes to each of the questions in the preceding quote.
the exact steps I need to do in order to implement its functionality.
Create a complete set of ships for a race of your choice with zero tech researched. Pursue research as you normal would with the game on fast forward and then update the designs to create new ship versions for each of the techs as they are researched. Save the entire set of ships and bases into a single ship design set as noted above.
I'll also add that in the current version (.12) the optimized designs are given absolute preference - i.e. if an optimized design exists for a subrole (e.g. destroyer) and you have the tech and construction size to build it, then that optimized design will be used - even if your tech has progressed further, and a new AI-generated design would now actually be more effective (i.e. with new tech). The assumption is that the optimized designs will be better than AI-generated ones. When there are multiple buildable optimized designs for a subrole, then the most advanced one will be selected.
Thus you currently (1.7.0.12) need a reasonable number of optimized designs for each subrole at various tech levels so that you keep pace with your tech. At the very least you would always need to have a super-advanced optimized design that uses the highest-level techs. Note that the components in the optimized designs also guide AI research project choices - i.e. the AI gives preference to research projects that will unlock the components in the optimized designs.
HOWEVER in the next version (1.7.0.13) this is changed: while optimized designs are still given preference, this is no longer absolute. So when your tech advances sufficiently, the AI will begin to once again design new ships/bases that may replace the optimized designs (if there are no buildable optimized designs at your tech level). In other words, when your tech is significantly more advanced than the the tech in the best buildable optimized design, then the AI will revert to generating a new design using the new tech, replacing the now-outdated optimized design.
This should make generating optimized design sets less of a chore, because the AI will now fill the gaps between designs better. Optimized designs are still preferred, but will eventually be discarded in favor of new AI designs (as new tech becomes available), if no better optimized designs are currently buildable.