Multiple different ships of the same class

[nzmx121]

So I recently purchased Distant Stars: Shadows, and while I love the game and am having a great time, one thing is kind of bothering me. I love the ship designer, however I am yet to discover a way to design multiple different ships in the same class: for example, two different types of destroyer that serve different purposes, IE a light carrier and heavy hitter. Every time I design a new class of ship it replaces the old design. This is somewhat limiting in my opinion. Is there any way to stop this, or is it an actually intended limitation?

Thanks for any help,
nzmx121

[joeyeti]

I believe you should use "Copy as new" and then use the same ship type (e.g. Escort).

[nzmx121]

Thanks for trying to help but that does the same thing - it replaces my previously designed ship of that class

[joeyeti]

Hmmm, maybe it marks the previous one as Obsolete? If you view all designs and unmark the previous one?

Just shooting hollow-point bullets here, but maybe...

[ReadeB]

I've done this before but it's a pain.

You have to make sure they don't auto-refit.

Then you manually pick which design each individual ship uses during retrofit.

Not efficient but it works.

[CyclopsSlayer]

It helps to clearly differentiate the ships names.
Naming something "Cruiser 1 MkXX" and "Cruiser 2 MkXX" could lead to confusion.
While something like "Cruiser MkXX" and "Advanced Cruiser MkXX" or even "Abel MkXX" and "Baker MkXX" makes it much more clear. If you don't mind breaking roleplay naming them by function also works. ie; "Ground Attack Cruiser", "Anti-shipp Cruiser", "Aegis Cruiser" etc...

Then when it comes to updating, choose from the Ship Tool to sorting by Name and then Role should group similar ships together. Select all the ones of a type and retrofit to the appropriate design.

[Shark7]

Basically, if you have two designs of the same ship class, the AI will always choose the one designed last (IE the newest) to build. The only way to have multiple esocrt designs (for example) would be to manually control designs and refits, which can get tedious in large games.

Personally, I'd prefer a player designated class system, where I make my designs and tell the game that this one is a 'gunboat' while this one is an 'esocrt' etc.

[nzmx121]

Thanks a lot for the help guys, I managed to get it working. Stupid me had set the filter on the ship design screen to 'latest designs', hiding all my other ships from view.
Thanks again,

[HTG]

For manual designs I would like to manually define which new design is an upgrade for which old design. This way, I could use the existing game features for my special design without accidentally updating my deep-Space-Explorer with the normal Explorer design. Good naming helps to keep them separated, but this is not enough. Support of the game would be appreciated.

[CyclopsSlayer]

I would very much like to build a class chain like that. Much as the modern navy does. So I can assign the role and class as I choose. If I wanted 5 Cruisers classes i could just build them, so a Torp, a Missile, a Beam, an Ion, even a Railgun based Cruiser that would stay as designed through any upgrades. Especially early game it can get bothersome to be constantly going back and redesigning, OK added Hyperdrive - done, Now I have to add Targeting - done, now I have to add Damage Control - done, NOW I have.... Like I said can get bothersome.

What I tend to do most games of DW is to devolve to a few simple ship classes.

Troop Transports - all set up to have identical designs and load outs
Escorts - cheap, small, fast, built in swarms, left in auto to patrol Shipping
Cruisers - max hull, split load out half for Anti-ship and half for Ground Attack Bombardment
Capital - max hull, optimized for Anti-Ship
Carrier - max hull, pure fighter load

All "C" class ships have the same performance specs, STL/FTL speeds and Fuel range.

[Antarian]

Note that you can also have different ship images for the same class. This is mentioned in other threads. Simply add new ship folders, ensuring they have all the types in them, with your extra images. The AI will not use them in their empires, but you can pick different images.

For the Klingons I play, for example, I have a folder of extra ship images, so I can build an entire series of cruisers, from the D-1 to the D-10, each with a different image. You can put the new images in any category you want, as it's just an image to choose in the drop down in design, so you can have a battlecruiser image in the 'bomber' or even the 'generic base' slot.

I wish you could default the designs screen to always show ALL non-obsolete designs and ALWAYS group by sub-role, would make things a lot easier when managing this.