Ship designing questions

[Remigius]

As I have picked up Universe only recently and played just a limited number of games before that, I still lack quite a few informations and hope that you guys will share your wisdom with me.
1) If I leave ship design on automatic, and change some designs later on, will the ai override my design with the next retrofittig session?
2) If I design my own ships, what options do I have to select to ensure, that the ship is keept up to date without me redesigning each design after every corresponding research?
3) The handbook of the original states that different planet types have different max population values, is that still correct?
4) While trying out my first prewarp game I noticed, that some private ships got updated to hyperdrive while others of the same type did not, how long should it take until the privat sector has checked for new designs and ordered all its ships to update?
5) Are the automatic research sequences in line with each races requirements for ships?
6) Is it therefore a bad idea to have research and ship design on both automatic and manuel at the same time?
7) I heard, that while spaceports should not be build on every colonie, a simple base with medical and recreation facilities is beneficial to each colonie, is that correct?
8) Is there still an option in DW:Universe to create what was called a quick game in RotS?
9) When I am asked to retrofit due to a new technologie, do the concerned ships only upgrade the new tech, or do they check for all components and upgrade accordingly?
10) At game start, I cant build most ship types. How do I know which techs are neccessary for each kind to unlock it?

Thank you for your patience and fly safe

[Bingeling]

1: The AI will make new designs until you turn that off. The default build and retrofit solution will always default to "latest design", and in that way your design is overridden. If you turn off automatic retrofit for the design, and take care while retrofitting, you can have your special ships use your designs just fine.

2: You can ask for an automatic upgrade. The AI will pick the latest components. To have all new gadgets included I believe most players would have stored designs that include everything. Without that you have to add the new stuff, I believe.

3: Maybe The most important things are planet quality and size. I am not sure if planet type matters in itself. But there are few if any very low quality continentals, for instance, while lots of low quality desert worlds.

4: It is hard to say. The AI updates designs whenever it feels like. Maybe they have too little to do, and too little available cash?

5: In the default game, the priorities for research match the ship designs. If a race has blasters as the main weapons, they should not spend much time researching railguns due to this setting.

6: If you have only one of them, it is a good idea to be aware on what the AI uses in the other task. You should be able to see the "selected tech" by the research focuses in the Empire Policy screen. The AI will only research according to that, and by default the AI designer only uses those components.

7: Yes that is true. I suggest to use the Star Base for the "general purpose" base. The reason why you do not want a lot of spaceports is that a spaceport wants a certain set/amounts of resources stored, and the freighters will have to shuffle more resources around to satisfy the demands of many spaceports.

8: The old quick games are gone. There are quick starts for different era games, where I think you can set a few options like galaxy size and shape.

9: A new technology prompts the AI to make a new design. The ships retrofit to this new design. You can see what they will retrofit to in the design list, they will shift to the latest design of their class.

10: Resupply ships and carriers have special requirements. See one construction tech for the resupply ship and one fighter tech for the carriers. For the rest it is about build size, you can't build a 230 size cruiser or capital ship, for instance.

[Aeson]

For the rest it is about build size, you can't build a 230 size cruiser or capital ship, for instance.

You can in fact build cruisers or capital ships at 230 size, it's just that the computer will not usually strip enough out of the design templates in order for an automatically-generated cruiser or capital ship design to work at such a small size. As far as manually-created designs go, you can certainly create such a small cruiser or capital ship if you want, but there's not really that much point to doing so, especially if the reason you're doing it is because your size limit is 230 rather than because you just want a small ship. It's quite difficult to meaningfully differentiate more than two or maybe three ship classes when they're that small.