Confused about Ship Design Policies

[Nikratio]

Hello,

I do no quite understand how the settings for automatically updating and retrofitting individual ship designs interact with the empire-wide policies.

If I set my empire policy to "Control Ship Design Manually", are the settings for individual ship designs ignored, or are designs set to "Automatic" still automatically upgraded?

If I set my empire policy to "Fully Automate Ship Design", are the settings for individual ship designs ignored, or are designs set to "Manual" excluded from automatic upgrades?

Does the retrofitting also fall under the "Control Ship Design Manually"/"Fully Automate Ship Design" empire policy, or is there a separate setting that I can't find?

Can somebody help?

[Aeson]

If you want the computer to have control over the designs of some, but not all, of your ships, then you need to have an Empire policy of "fully automate ship designs," and you need to set the roles that you want to design for yourself to manual. It is possible that the other way around will work, but it did not appear to the last time I tried it and the in-game help in the ship design screen says it will not work.

I do not believe that retrofits are affected by the manual vs automatic design settings, though I may be mistaken on this, and no, there is not a separate setting for this to the best of my knowledge.

[Nikratio]

Thanks Aeson! I did some experiments based on your answer, and it seems to me that if Automatic Ship Design is disabled, none of the per-design settings matter (neither Update nor Retrofit). If Automatic Design is Enabled, the per design settings make it possible to exclude some designs from upgrading and retrofitting. For retrofitting, this needs to be enabled for the current design of a ship in order for a retrofit to happen (as opposed to it being enabled for the design that the ship is upgraded to).

[Aeson]

Yes, I should probably have mentioned that retrofit settings are per-design rather than per-role, while upgrade settings are per-role. Sorry about that; I just don't usually think about it since I rarely play with retrofit settings. Be advised that fleet retrofit orders and possibly automatic retrofits will only consider the latest design in a given role, not the latest iteration of a specific design within the role, so if you're using an Ion Cannon-armed destroyer design and a torpedo-armed destroyer design, and you order a fleet containing destroyers to 'retrofit to latest designs,' your destroyers will all retrofit to whichever design was more recently updated (it considers the real-world time when you created the design, not the in-game date when you created the design), and that can mean your 15 Ion Destroyers just became 15 Torpedo Destroyers despite being in the Pirate Squadron rather than in Fighting Fleet Five. If you want to get around that, you can either issue retrofit orders ship by ship, or you can go to the Ships and Bases list and select the ships that you want to retrofit and what you want them to retrofit into to give mass retrofit orders.

[catweasel]

Aeson, just to make sure that I fully understood:

- If I set "manual control" in the empire policies, then I need to upgrade every design myself, both private and state. The "automatically upgrade design" serves no purpose.
- If I I give control over vessel designs in the empire policies, all designs are fully automated by default.
- If I want to have control over a specifc type, then I disable "automatically upgrade design", which renders me responsible of keeping it up to date.
- E.g. I disable automatical upgrade for Destroyers, the AI will not create any other destoryer class nor upgrade the existing designs

Questions:
- If press the "auto upgrade design" of a type I control manually, will all components be replaced with recent ones, but no new will be added? Or will the AI refresh the whole design as it assumes to be valid, i.e. add components which were not there initially?

- What does the "auto retrofit" in the design settings do? As far as I understand it only enables me to quickly retrofit to the latest design by clicking the small botton on the unit window. Any other function?

[AKicebear]

I have one more question to add - assuming ship design is automatic, if I jump in and modify a design (e.g. add a component to all medium space ports) and then allow continued automation/upgrading - will the AI use that as a baseline, or will it remove the component I added in future updates to get closer to its optimum design?

[Aeson]

- If I set "manual control" in the empire policies, then I need to upgrade every design myself, both private and state. The "automatically upgrade design" serves no purpose.

Yes.

- If I I give control over vessel designs in the empire policies, all designs are fully automated by default.

More or less, though it remembers the settings from your last game or your current settings in this game. So if you set destroyers and cruisers to manual design last game, and then started this game with ship design on 'control manually' but later switch it over to 'fully automate,' destroyers and cruisers will start out on the manual design setting unless you switched them to automatic designs at some point during the current game.

- If I want to have control over a specifc type, then I disable "automatically upgrade design", which renders me responsible of keeping it up to date.

Yes, though remember that this affects all designs within a given ship role. You cannot have two destroyer designs, one of which is kept up to date automatically by the computer and the other which is kept up to date by your intervention. You can have two destroyer designs where both are kept up to date automatically by the computer, and you can have two destroyer designs which are both updated by you.

- E.g. I disable automatical upgrade for Destroyers, the AI will not create any other destoryer class nor upgrade the existing designs

Correct.

- If press the "auto upgrade design" of a type I control manually, will all components be replaced with recent ones, but no new will be added? Or will the AI refresh the whole design as it assumes to be valid, i.e. add components which were not there initially?

My understanding is that this is how the button which asks the computer to automatically upgrade a design works. However, I've never played with that button, so I cannot say with any real certainty that this is what that button does.

- What does the "auto retrofit" in the design settings do? As far as I understand it only enables me to quickly retrofit to the latest design by clicking the small botton on the unit window. Any other function?

Auto retrofit tells the computer that it can assign your ships retrofit missions (if they or their fleet is automated) when you come up with a new design for your ships, without you having to go through your fleet and manually issue retrofit orders to all the automated vessels in your navy. I don't know whether or not auto retrofit acts like the fleet order 'retrofit to latest designs' or if it acts like the ship order 'retrofit to design X,' where X is the most recent mark level of whichever specific design that the ship currently uses. If it's the former, then it would make it a little more difficult to maintain two or more current designs in a given role when using automated vessels or automated fleets, as the computer would eventually order all your automated vessels to retrofit to the most recently created design within the appropriate role, whether or not it's the most recently created iteration of the specific class within that role.

I have one more question to add - assuming ship design is automatic, if I jump in and modify a design (e.g. add a component to all medium space ports) and then allow continued automation/upgrading - will the AI use that as a baseline, or will it remove the component I added in future updates to get closer to its optimum design?

If you take an automatically created design and modify it, and allow the computer to continue to have control over that particular design, then the computer will 'upgrade' the design back to whatever it had been doing, often shortly after you create your modified design, though it may preserve elements of your modifications which are not too far off from the design template. If you want automated designs to go to designs that you think are good, then you need to work out how to modify the design templates for the species you're playing, and if you want to do that I'd suggest looking around in the modding forum.

Basically, if your faction's default destroyer design uses railguns and missiles, and you modify the destroyer to use blasters, you can expect the computer to redesign your destroyers to use railguns and missiles soon after you complete your redesign. If you modify the destroyer to slightly change the balance of railguns to missiles and be a little bit faster, then there's a fair chance that the computer will let the design be for a while, since your redesign still approximates the 'ideal' design set by the design template.

[Nikratio]

ORIGINAL: catweasel
- What does the "auto retrofit" in the design settings do? As far as I understand it only enables me to quickly retrofit to the latest design by clicking the small botton on the unit window.

No, you can always use that button. If you enable auto retrofit for at least one design, any time you research a new technology you will get an advisor message asking if you want to retrofit your ships and bases. That message pretends to be related to the technology you just researched, but it really is not. If you say yes, the game will automatically retrofit all ships and bases whose model has retrofit set to automatic.

[Mortimer14]

ORIGINAL: Nikratio

ORIGINAL: catweasel
- What does the "auto retrofit" in the design settings do? As far as I understand it only enables me to quickly retrofit to the latest design by clicking the small botton on the unit window.

No, you can always use that button. If you enable auto retrofit for at least one design, any time you research a new technology you will get an advisor message asking if you want to retrofit your ships and bases. That message pretends to be related to the technology you just researched, but it really is not. If you say yes, the game will automatically retrofit all ships and bases whose model has retrofit set to automatic.

This is not entirely (or at least not always) accurate.

If you have "control designs manually" in your empire policies, then auto retrofit doesn't do anything for your ships. You will need to go into either fleets or individual ships and click on the retrofit buttons.

You will also need to ensure that new tech is included in your designs manually. As an example of this, I have auto refit set on for my Escorts and Manual design set in empire policy. After about 20 years gametime, I have 20 different escort designs in play. The game didn't retrofit any of them to the latest design.

With Automatic Upgrade to designs turned on, upgrades to current tech (i.e. from warp bubble to gerax hyperdrive) are handled automatically with the appropriate settings. But new tech such as torpedo launchers replacing missile weapons will not. I get better missile launchers but don't get the new torpedo launchers if I don't manually adjust the design.


I tend to go into ship design, highlight the chosen designs and click on the auto upgrade button. Once this is done, I manually re-adjust all those designs to my specs. This seems to be a quick way to get the upgrades for existing tech but it tends to wipe out the things that I want included such as long range sensors. Manually adjusting the designs allows me to add those back in. I now set Manual Control on everything except private ships/bases.