Ship Design

Still not perfect

from GalCiv2 Forums
I gotta say that I'm still not a big fan of ship design in GalCiv2. And this is after designing tons of ships in other games...personally, I still think the "design by plopping bits onto the frame" idea is not a great one. It's not terrible or even bad, it's just not great. I can live with it though, especially with the option of just double clicking on the part to have it automatically added. The "extras" thing still doesn't do much for me, but that just might be a personal preference. I don't really feel like I have time to fiddle with all those bits, and it doesn't add much to the game. Aside from that, the number of red dots on the ship models is almost too much to even keep track of if you do try to design it from scratch.

I would prefer a ship design screen that had more obvious "performance" and size information instead of just the way the ship looks. Hell, I'd almost go so far as to say that the "tinker" screen be entirely separate, accessed by a button on the main shipyard. In other words, the normal design system doesn't require you to stick stuff on the red dots, but just automatically adds it. Then you can have a button that lets you go more in depth and add extras and move around stuff. Also, the slider for changing size doesn't always let you change something enough. That is something I just recently noticed.

Overall, the ship design wouldn't keep me from playing the game, but to me, it feels like more of a bother than a feature. Sorry for being a downer on the ship design!
7,204 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
To those of us whom aren't sweeping through the game to larger hulls, its a rather useful feature. By adding wings/pylons/etc its possible to create visually different vessels. Means I'm not having to rely just on the ship class name to figure its capabilities.

If you don't like it, ignore it. I doubt its possible to remove to a seperate window at this late date, but it may be possible to add an 'autogenerate' button for the extras selecting from two dozen presets for each hull types.
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
Maybe we can have 2 options a ploping feature for a hands-on Aprroach like i do and i think is good but may get irriating after a while and a autogenerate which automaticly fiddles with extra parts in a common sense and u can keep doing that until u get want you want! you know what if you customized a capital ship hull with a colony module and some weapons? it can make a great self-desense weapon for getting into deep enemy territory or even freighters... or somting Civ units that really needed protection from more powerfull ships in galciv1 The Ranger ship and skyhawk ships were the only ships in galciv1 that had the ablity to fight and do somting else...this is all just some stuff not really to be taken in but as a ref...
Galactic Civilizations III