Just a quick question

[JDuff]

Hi, I have been playing the game for a few months and slowly mastering it but one thing confounds me. I want to have a few designs of each ship (military) but I don't want to have to manually do every other ship type.

However, even though I have the designs set to manual for both upgrade and retrofit it still keeps trying to upgrade them if I say yes to the upgrade prompt for new tech. If I say no then nothing gets upgraded.

Am I missing something here or does the game only support one design per class?

It is getting very frustrating indeed so any help appreciated.

[Fishers of Men]

Hi JDuff, and welcome to the forum!

There is another place, besides the ship design screen, that controls the refit controls and commands. Click on the Empire Policy Screen icon at the top of the main screen. Scroll down to the Research & Design section. Make sure the fields say Manual Control. Then, uncheck the box that says "Prompt for Refit When New Tech Becomes Available". This stop those messages from appearing for your response.

Let me know if this fixes your situation.

[Shark7]

Also keep in mind you can always manually command a ship or entire fleet to upgrade from the ship or fleet screens. Granted the automation is far, far nicer.

[JDuff]

Hi all, thanks for the info. The way I am playing is with automatic design turned on and then using the uncheck option to stop auto design update. I also set the ships to manual update. So when looking at the design screen it is manual and manual for the design and update columns.

Alas, this seems to get ignored when there are two designs of the same class (frigates and destroyers in my case) and it will pick the one that I last updated as the primary and send all of the other design off to retrofit to the design every time I accept the advisers advice to upgrade. For my Cruisers and Capital ships which have only one design for the class it works perfectly and they are never touched so it looks like a bug with having two or more designs in a single class which is a shame as what is the point of having all those weapons and not being able to create specialist fleets and units.

Is the whole upgrade process going to revamped at some stage to support what I am trying to do?

[Bingeling]

If you have two non-obsolete designs for a class, the retrofit order will prefer to use the newest one.

I will give an example to explain how to achieve what I think you want.

Say I want two explorer designs.

Searcher - The normal explorer
Scanner - A long range scanner ship used for surveillance

Where you need to test is to put both retrofit and upgrade off on these. It ought to make accepting the AI retrofit "safe". Life is also easier if they don't have the same maintenance cost, but that should probably not be a problem (I expect the scanner one to be more expensive).

Now, new tech, and I create "Seracher mk2" and "Scanner mk2". And obsolete the old designs.

Go to the ship list, filter for explorers. Sorting them on maintenance should split the searchers and the scanners.

Multi-select all the searches. Click retrofit in the ship list (button). A popup with designs. You should have two to select from "Searcher mk2" and "Scanner mk2". Choose the one you want. Then select the other explores and do the same.

I am quite sure it will also work just fine to have automated design turned on for explorers, the AI makes the normal ones. Just make sure to turn "automatic retrofit" (to left on the design) off on your special Scanner design. The only catch (I think) is that the AI will obsolete your Searcher design when it does design updates. But if you need another searcher, you can just change ship list filter, and unobsolete it. You can then choose what to build, at least on "right click" build, and probably construction yards build, but not the quick order options. The quick choice explorers will all be the newest, the AI one in this case.

[JDuff]

Thanks Bingeling but I already have the auto upgrade etc. turned off for the designs and it just ignores that and goes right ahead and does the refit. I have played with this a bit and it appears to happen when I have a military type tech change (weapon, shield, etc.) but not a passive one (sensor type upgrades).

So for designs Frigate A and Frigate B it applies my design for Frigate A to all my Frigate B's (so no changes to tech or fit out) and leaves all my Frigate A's alone (no upgrade for them). If I retrofit them back to Frigate B's it leaves them alone until the next upgrade event.

I am faced with having to upgrade all my ship designs manually which is just a drag or am I wrong about the adviser and I can ignore that and my other designs will happily upgrade in the background?

[Bingeling]

I find manual design somewhat of a drag, so I am not very experienced in this

Some enjoy design a lot and have many fancy designs. I can design military, but prefer the AI designs, partly because I suspect all races would be the same if I design myself...

I don't find the gui friendly for updating designs. Like checking that they got every little gadget. If I ask the AI to update, I typically have to replace shields and weapons...

On the other hand, how many designs do you actually need? Fighting ships should be the main target, and I tend to run very boring fleets.

Destroyers - 4 ship fleets (becomes 6). Area defense, mining base hunts.

Cruisers - Bread and butter battle fleet ships.

Carriers - In battle fleets.

I rarely play until capitals, but they are beefed up cruisers with fleet stuff. And once they are in, why bother with cruisers?

I am a weirdo, though, and rarely run military ships outside fleets.

In legends you can pick what to do yourself. Set the AI to do design. Scroll down empire options and locate the design part, with the long list of ship classes. Uncheck those you want to do yourself.

It is possible to save and load designs. I have never tried that, but those doing designs typically have their stuff. I think it works to save design with all gadgets, they load just fine without (missing the gadgets).

[Shark7]

ORIGINAL: Bingeling

I find manual design somewhat of a drag, so I am not very experienced in this

Some enjoy design a lot and have many fancy designs. I can design military, but prefer the AI designs, partly because I suspect all races would be the same if I design myself...

I don't find the gui friendly for updating designs. Like checking that they got every little gadget. If I ask the AI to update, I typically have to replace shields and weapons...

On the other hand, how many designs do you actually need? Fighting ships should be the main target, and I tend to run very boring fleets.

Destroyers - 4 ship fleets (becomes 6). Area defense, mining base hunts.

Cruisers - Bread and butter battle fleet ships.

Carriers - In battle fleets.

I rarely play until capitals, but they are beefed up cruisers with fleet stuff. And once they are in, why bother with cruisers?

I am a weirdo, though, and rarely run military ships outside fleets.

In legends you can pick what to do yourself. Set the AI to do design. Scroll down empire options and locate the design part, with the long list of ship classes. Uncheck those you want to do yourself.

It is possible to save and load designs. I have never tried that, but those doing designs typically have their stuff. I think it works to save design with all gadgets, they load just fine without (missing the gadgets).

And I am just the opposite in that I want full control over every design that is built in my empire. And its cool, because DW allows the hands off you like with the full control I like.

[Plant]

ORIGINAL: JDuff

Hi all, thanks for the info. The way I am playing is with automatic design turned on and then using the uncheck option to stop auto design update. I also set the ships to manual update. So when looking at the design screen it is manual and manual for the design and update columns.

Alas, this seems to get ignored when there are two designs of the same class (frigates and destroyers in my case) and it will pick the one that I last updated as the primary and send all of the other design off to retrofit to the design every time I accept the advisers advice to upgrade. For my Cruisers and Capital ships which have only one design for the class it works perfectly and they are never touched so it looks like a bug with having two or more designs in a single class which is a shame as what is the point of having all those weapons and not being able to create specialist fleets and units.

Is the whole upgrade process going to revamped at some stage to support what I am trying to do?

Yeah I have the same problem with 2 ship designs for the same ship type though in my case, with destroyers. I designed 4 different ship types (carrier, laser, torpedo, missile if you are interested), under Destroyers ship type.

Like you, I had auto design switched on, so that I don't have to manually redesign/upgrade each and every civilian ship with a check option for autorefit for fine control.

What I had to do, was to alternate the primary designs, then select the appropriate ships for refit. So to upgrade ship design A, select ships with design A to refit to primary design A, then select ships with design B to refit to primary design B. This will solve your problem nicely.

Later on, I hit upon the idea of using different ship types for different ship designs, which made things easier. Escort ship types for Carriers, Frigates for Lasers, Destroyers for Missiles/Torpedoes.

Of course, the only reason I could do the new idea, was because, I turned off the silly ship production automaton.