The Ship upgrade system should allow for the forking of designs. An example:



I embark on a campaign of craver extermination (they started it...) and build a line of capital ships I dub the BUGSMASH, specifically suited to attack and defend against current craver designs. As the cravers change it up, I can edit and make BUGSMASH 2/3/4/etc. But half way through my genocide, those slimy birdmen double cross me, and now I am in two wars. I cannot create a design for fighting the Hisso, BIRDSMASH, and retrofit BUGSMASH's on the front lines to BIRDSMASHes. I have to create a whole new line and build them somewhere, or repurpose the BUGSMASH late models to fight birds... rendering the name I can never change false entirely.



One should be able to retrofit any class of ship into another profile of the same class.

Already offered here. Good idea, anyway)

I concur. The thing is, you already CAN have two forks on the tree. You just design one "fork", upgrade some ships to it, design the new "fork," upgrade the other ships to that. Then re-design as necessary to queue things up in the production queue. It's tedious, and the variant numbers get very high, but it can be done. As a general rule, any game limitation that can be worked around through tedious micromanagement is a bad game limitation that should be reworked.

I believe you missed the part where he said he wanted to rename the fork, as well as forking it.

I've run into this problem as well. One race changes their behavior, and I have to modify the ships. So far so good. Then I meet another race with different loadout, and I cannot just change my blueprint. I need the plan for the first race.



But there's a ten blueprint limit.

There's a ten blueprint limit? Seriously? That's dumb.

I'm not sure how you can run into the ten blueprint limit. I need one space for the colonizer, one space for something with sight radius and engines. Then I've got 8 left and I basically use the biggest ship design available. You can always erase old ones, which I quickly do once they are out of use.

Then I've got up to 8 variants of my dreadnaughts. If I specialized in one defense and one offense per variant, I'd have a total of 9 ship variants, but I never need all of those, since the AI doesn't come up with all combinations anyways.

Nosferatiel wrote:
If I specialized in one defense and one offense per variant, I'd have a total of 9 ship variants...[pluscolonizerandscoutforatotalofeleven]

And that's if you only use one size, dreadnaught, which means that you won't be able to max out your fleets.