Retrofit only when manually ordered - not working?

[jacozilla]

Maybe I'm just setting this up wrong. But the bottom line is right now, I've set all my military ship designs to the option 'only retrofit when manually ordered' in the design dropdown menu.

I have the overall adviser suggestion enabled so that it will ask if I want to apply the upgrades, which I thought I would let it do for my non-military ships like explorers, constructors. What I was trying to do was what I read here as advice if you want to have some automaton but not have every single ship at retrofit at same time, which would be a bad thing.

But what's happening right now is that the only ships that obey this design screen drop down setting, are non-fleet ships. Any ship in a fleet, whether I have it set to manual or auto fleet posture, will retrofit when the adviser prompts and I say yes - despite every ship in my fleets having a design that I've set to only retrofit manually.

So here's what I have setup:
1. All military ships have designs set to upgrade-manual, and retrofit-manual. so that my designs won't be overwrote by AI and the retrofit only happens manually. The design non-overwrite works just fine.

2. I also have on the design screen itself the little drop down set to retrofit only when manually ordered

3. In policy I have ship design automated so that it will take care of my private ships and the other non-military state ships I left design set to automatic and automatic retrofit. On the list of ships in the policy screen, I have unchecked every ship I want to design myself, and this works fine.

4. In construction I have policy set to 'suggest new ships and bases' because if I set this manual, then the adviser will never suggest (which I don't care about), but without the suggestion prompt, there is no way to have your designs implemented automatically short of doing it all manual.

So for awhile I thought my half and half setup was working fine. And I could swear I played like 10 years of this game where it seemed to do just that. Whenever I said yes to an auto retrofit, my fleets never moved - but I think it's because I didn't yet have a new design in place. So when I said yes there was no design for it that was newer. But I just had some techs unlock, I put those on my military ship designs but did not manually retrofit them- was just saving up a bunch to do at once.

But the very next tech, when the adviser asked to retrofit, it then moved every single fleet I had to go retrofit. But as I said, the weird part is all the non-fleet units did not and obeyed the design screen dropdown selection.

Anyone play around with this and get it to work 100%?

[Bingeling]

I may have the wrong understanding of this.

The adviser suggestion will tell everyone to retrofit if accepted. The worst thing about it for me is the automatic upgrade of spaceports. I may be happy with my medium spaceport on the giant colony, the AI will change it to large if it is above the population level set.

When told to retrofit, a ship can not retrofit if there is no new design.

Your fleet moves when the fleet leader moves, the fleet "flag" is attached to him. And the rest follow him around. Once the fleet leader could retrofit (had a new design), the fleet moved. When you tell the "fleet" to do stuff, though, I think every fleet member get that order, and don't just follow the leader around.

My understanding of the "manual retrofit" option is that it protects "special ships" from being accidentally retrofitted. In the old days we could find very powerful alien cruisers and capital ships. The problems started when we could build our own cruisers or capital ships. If we told the fleet with the powerful alien ship to retrofit, the alien guy would be retrofitted to our own sucky cruiser/capital design alongside the rest of the ships of his fleet.

To cure this problem, the auto upgrade and auto retrofit options were introduced. With auto retrofit, the ship will not be retrofitted unless specifically asked to. If the fleet it is a member of is told to retrofit, these ships will only take on a refuel order.

I believe this also works for multi selecting in the ship list and then retrofitting, but I am not quite sure this is true.

I would suggest you (who obviously have the game open way more than I do) try the following to advance your understanding and test if I am correct:

1: Have normal exploration ships. Then create a "special ship" with different design. Do nothing about the retrofit order.

2: Create a new exploration ship design so that there is a new "latest unobsolete" one.

3: Mark all the exploration ships in the ship list, and select retrofit.

4: Observe that all your exploration ships is changed to the new design, including the special one.

5: Repeat 1-4 but mark the special ship as "do not retrofit"

6: You will hopefully see that the "special ship" kept its design and ignored the retrofit order.

7: Retrofit your "Special ship" to the new design either by specifying it in the ship list, or by right clicking the spaceport. You should be allowed to do this if being specific about it.

I have used this to have special "long range scanner" explorers alongside the AI designed ones. And I have not had them accidentally retrofitted, and I believe I have done "retrofit all" stuff quite rudely. This is what you do to have multiple variant ships of the same ship class.

[jacozilla]

I'll try your suggestions, thanks.

Re: the spaceport refits, yea I don't like that either. If I leave both design and refit to manual, then am fine. but even if I set refit to automatic while using manual design, it will then follow the population settings used.

So I just stick to all manual for spaceports.