While an infinite option may not be the best, I've just played the Alpha and I agree that it would be helpful to allow more designs. Especially if they're perma-saved (if you repeatedly use the same empire you may want different designs for different maps all saved together).



On a separate note- I'd also like more components for flavour, but that's another matter (though would also require an increase in design limits, hence the mention).

btw I hadn't noticed this before but if anyone was wondering the AI does not restrict itself to 10 active designs currently.

Cadoras wrote:
I don't quite understand your statement. If you mean if it matters if you can not rename individual planets or ships, than yes, a little bit. For the sake of immersion, renaming certain things would make it better. For a great group of gamers it would add something to the experience. For ships I would employ the Sins-approach: only Dreads could be renamed, as in the capships of Sins. It adds uniqueness to your own systems and ships, and it will make a game more personal.



I guarantee you this renaming will double the fun when multiplayer will be introduced. I can see it already:



In the RagingPants-system, a showdown between fleets of the UE and Horatio took place. In this battle the flagship of the Horatio, ThESnoOkI, was destroyed.

This was exactly the point i was going to bring up, I'm one for Immersion in strategy games, and each of my fleets has a flagship. I have to use up designs simply if I want to name these flagships to make them 'unique', meaning i can only realistically have 2 or 3 of them. The 10 ship design limit is definitely hurting the immersion, and to an extent the gameplay. ON a much smaller note, could the character limit on design names be increased just slightly? It's a bit limiting when building a Dreadnought that the word 'Dreadnought' only leaves 2 characters to work with :P

Daneic wrote:
To the people suggesting a cost for extra number of designs: Is this in any way logical? Is the information on each design so vast that we must suddenly buy "space" for new ones? There is no real reason to limit the number of designs to only 10, adding a scrollbar should be easy?

Nobody anywhere suggested this. Quit trying to distort the argument.



As it stands now, nobody wants the total number of design limited from a game design perspective.





Giving intensives, whatever that intensive is, to maintain a ship series rather than have every ship be a unique design - this would improve gameplay by giving more uniform fleet compositions to promote actually counterable strategies. It would also promote balanced designs, something that is generally not as useful in the game right now.



I recommend a small fee for each new or modified blueprint, others argue for reduces costs with longer prints runs of the ship.

To the people suggesting a cost for extra number of designs: Is this in any way logical? Is the information on each design so vast that we must suddenly buy "space" for new ones? There is no real reason to limit the number of designs to only 10, adding a scrollbar should be easy?

ThESnoOkI, was destroyed.

Should get a automatic bonus for that!

Chaotic wrote:
I have had no probs renameing planets or ships.....could you have been bugged when trying?

I don't quite understand your statement. If you mean if it matters if you can not rename individual planets or ships, than yes, a little bit. For the sake of immersion, renaming certain things would make it better. For a great group of gamers it would add something to the experience. For ships I would employ the Sins-approach: only Dreads could be renamed, as in the capships of Sins. It adds uniqueness to your own systems and ships, and it will make a game more personal.



I guarantee you this renaming will double the fun when multiplayer will be introduced. I can see it already:



In the RagingPants-system, a showdown between fleets of the UE and Horatio took place. In this battle the flagship of the Horatio, ThESnoOkI, was destroyed.

if I understand how it works correctly then specifically because of the way designs are stored, the save files are larger if you modify a single design fifty times than they would be if you made fifty separate designs.

No that's not exactly what I said or at least meant to convey. It's not about the number of designs per say, it's about the number of designs you currently have ships for. Example:



ex1: You have made 50 designs (or modifications) over time but only have ships that exist still that use 20 of them... those 20 designs are saved (and for that matter kept in memory), and at the moment only the last 10 have active status (ie you can build them still);



ex2: You have made 50 designs (or modifications) over time but you still have at least one ship made from each of those. All 50 are saved (and for that matter kept in memory), even though only the last 10 have active status (ie you can build them still).



Bottom line is what matters most to the bloat I was mentioning is how many ships you still have of a given design, if you have zero - then the design finally goes away, if you have one or more it obviously has to stay around. Yes it could still be a problem if a person constantly modifies their ships and does not retrofit old ones at all so effectively the same thing. As I mentioned already I see no reason not to increase the number of allowed 'active' designs, only that _infinite_ may be a bad idea, trying to encourage retrofits to prevent a situation of someone having 300 ships each with a different design is not bad thing in my view, it's also not just player1 they have to worry about, as multiplayer and 6 or 7 other people as well on top adds up.



Who knows if it's even a real problem, performance both in enumerating the design screen and loading files was however the only reason I could come up with for why they may have wanted some type of limit in place even if it's much higher than the current limit of 10.

The_Doctor wrote:
I see no reason why there should simply not be no limit or a limit so high that it'd never really be reached to ship design amounts - people keep talking about 'maybe 12 or 20'.



Their reasoning would be valid if it produced a major problem - savegame clutter is unlikely to be large, but even if it was it wouldn't affect anyone except people who like to build more ship classes anyway!

I agree, there's no pressing reason for a limit on designs. Even with the way designs are saved the size of the save file wouldn't be prohibitively large unless someone was literally designing and modifying hundreds of designs at the same time. In fact, if I understand how it works correctly then specifically because of the way designs are stored, the save files are larger if you modify a single design fifty times than they would be if you made fifty separate designs.



But I'm not sure I agree with the retrofit function being beautiful. To be honest I'm pretty much unsure what to do with retrofitting at the moment.



It's too expensive for me to rely on for keeping my navy up to date. By the time the Dust starts rolling in so heavily that I can spare the dust to retrofit a fleet, I have so many fleets/ships that I'll go broke before I can update all of them. On the other hand, because retrofitting is instant, it is a potentially abusable way of massively changing the outfitting of a single (or a few) fleet(s).

I see no reason why there should simply not be no limit or a limit so high that it'd never really be reached to ship design amounts - people keep talking about 'maybe 12 or 20'.



Their reasoning would be valid if it produced a major problem - savegame clutter is unlikely to be large, but even if it was it wouldn't affect anyone except people who like to build more ship classes anyway!



There's no other good reason why there shouldn't be the simple freedom to choose - it wouldn't interfere with the beautiful retrofit function; the GUI already has the necessary scroll bars in both the design tab and the ship construction tab; and I very much doubt the current setting is anything but a game setting in the design that is 'set' to 10 at present, so I suspect it would take minimal to no time or effort to change or effectively remove the limit.

the names that can't exceed 10 characters

That is soooo annoying, because it gets truncated on the ship building selection screen anyway so you have to mouse over it at 10chars anyway.



Planets I've renamed without a problem, as well as fleets (as opposed to ships), if you mean renaming ship designs yeah that's annoying too once again sending me into the game file.

A larger design limit would be nice.

Reducing the cost(initial and upkeep) and possibly build/repair time for designs you have built a lot of makes sense, practice makes perfect after all.

Cadoras wrote:
the disability to rename planets and certain ships

I have had no probs renameing planets or ships.....could you have been bugged when trying?

I agree. Althoug normally 10 should suffice with the retrofit option, I like my freedom to satisfy my shipdesigning fetish...



But it is a bit of a recurring trait in this (very good) game: for example, the names that can't exceed 10 characters, the disability to rename planets and certain ships. It is completely irrelevant to gameplay, but very, very, very, important for the sake of immersion.

Was just playing a minute ago and I couldn´t create any more designs as I reached my limit. Already searched the forum a bit but didn´t find any posts that mentioned a design limit of 10 ships.



So I had designed ships with lots of missiles and ships with more beam and kinetic weapons. I had 2 designs of the following classes: Battleship, destroyer, cruiser, corvette.

Then one scout and one colonyship class. So that´s 10 ship designs.



I did more research and there it came Dreadnought class was available. Thats when I found the 10 ship design limit anyway. Had to delete one design, just a corvette. Now I got 2x battleship, 2x destroyer, 2x cruiser, 1x corvette, 1x scout, 1x colonyship, 1x dreadnought.



I just wish there wasn´t a limit on the designs or at least a limit of 30 ish designs.. so you can have some fun with custom designs. And maybe when the mods start rolling out the limit won´t ruin your pleasure when a design mod comes around the corner.

davea wrote:
have you been using retrofitting?

There are times when the retrofit system is a great help, saving time and giving some organization, like when leveling up a class with better equipment.



But there are other times when retrofitting one kind of ship to another kind of ship is a convoluted workaround, forcing redesign just to construct a ship of either type.



If you maintain two different types of destroyer, it is not a good idea to have to constantly upgrade a single design spec every time you want to construct one of the two types, or upgrade an already constructed ship.



There's also the issue of who is playing the game.



Master Of Orion 3 has this same problem when designing a fleet. Someone on the dev team decided to organize fleets into rings, and then went on to place restrictions on what kind of ship goes in what ring. So players just build ships that were labelled the appropriate kind, and put whatever they needed and wanted into them.



Space Empires IV also had a similar issue with designating roles for a ship. Players were required to fill in a role for each ship class, as an organizational tool. But the dev cheated, as the AI was configured to behave according to what role was selected for the ship. So players just picked roles such that the AI would behave how they wanted them to behave.



History is a good teacher.

I think the design limit needs an increase not too much but at least to 12 or 16 or 20. Due to the way they are persisted (saved) an infinite option I could potentially see leading to lots of clutter in the save file. Note as long as you still have a ship of any design (even if you deleted said design) the design is still saved.



By the way if you really want more then 10 right now you can do it, you just have to edit the game file manually to add the class.



Basically just copy an existing making sure to give it a unique LocalizedName, and then update the "name" property to a unique number ie (0x0000023C00000001) to 0x0000099C00000001, as well as the matching "Name" element inside the . Then add a element or that name under and increment the "Count" property. Reload game and you will now have that design available\modifiable.



I've only tested this and felt the need for up to 12 at the moment. It's also come in handy when I just want to RENAME an existing design without rebuilding it.

davea wrote:
So far one other player has mentioned this as a problem. Most players have not noticed this limit so have not complained. To make sure, have you been using retrofitting? For me, one destroyer frame is enough: I "modify" this design and then retrofit all the ships to it. If you "add" a design, you cannot retrofit, which makes sense. For me, this places a natural limit on the number of schematics I would use.



Still, adding a scrollbar should not be hard.

Yeah I use the retrofit often enough, I used all the old designs.. cause I already had many ships.

I made modified designs and used modify on the old designs cause if you delete a design then you can not retrofit so you would have outdated ships at some point. I used a similar strategy in SOTS so I also had 2 destroyer designs etc etc. The retrofit option works great as it is anyway.



It would just be cool to be able to make two of each design for different purposes like I did in SOTS.

I have mentiont this also and hope for a change.

It was I who created the other thread; referenced before.



Many people's strategies include having one optimal all-round design and just constantly upgrading every ship to one of its hull class, but I wanted to play more variety and be able to design however I like without having to keep deleting or retrofitting specific ships to different models...



There's already a scroll bar on both the ship designs and the ship construction bar, and nobody would be forced to build loads of designs; the retrofit function is brilliant and can co-exist exactly as it is now... But I'm really disappointed at the lack of freedom to design, mix, specialise and archive different classes and roles of the same hull because I get to 10 and it's deletion time



(also, I wonder why my achievements don't show on my post-profile anymore? who knows)

I find the current system annoying, I want to be able to make specialists ships like a corvette outfitted with repair module a large engine and tons of armor. Without the 10 ship limit I think most people would use the retrofit option for ships. It is easier to modify a design and retrofit then it is to make a bunch of unique ship designs.

Gargomaxthalus wrote:
The way the game is set up this all feels a bit pointless to me. Once the setup is optimized we'll likely just all end up with homogeneously balanced ship designs.

Maybe we have different definitions of "balanced". In my opinion, if there is one all-around best ship design, then the game is not balanced. Or at least, it would be boring for me. Granted, most players feel the current alpha is not balanced due to destroyer spam; but that is a different problem.

Reliant wrote:
You could also use a scale to the cost. The first of any new particular ship would be the most expensive to build & maintain since it is the prototype, but as more ships are produced and production ramps up, the construction cost can start to scale down along with the maintenance cost. Realistically the decrease in cost would be specific to individual shipyards. perhaps implemented by a repeat-build cost reduction (repeat the same build and it decreases by 1% each repeat until it caps at 10% for example with the value being reset if production changes), but it can also be done empire wide for simplicity with the cost reduction being based solely on how many of that ship have already been build.



Lots of unique designs gives the added benefit of flexibility and always being state-of-the-art, but come with the downside of being more costly to manufacture & maintain the fleet. Imagine the nightmare that the chief engineer of the USS Unique has in trying to find a replacement intake manifold for their engine if they're the only ship in the fleet with that specific design for that part. This would also give players a viable option in sticking with an existing design that's only slightly out of date. Master of Orion 2 implemented this through miniaturization where equipment became cheaper and smaller through new research.



Think of it like having a fleet of cars. It's a lot easier to maintain 10 cars of identical models than trying to maintain a fleet of 8 cars from 8 manufacturers located in 8 different countries.



Disclaimer: I'm still downloading the alpha and haven't yet played Endless Space yet.

Not bad, not bad at all for a blind mans post. ROFL

The way the game is set up this all feels a bit pointless to me. Once the setup is optimized we'll likely just all end up with homogeneously balanced ship designs. With the lack of balance, specialization can really work but, the game doesn't seem to be designed for specialist ships. I really haven't seen enough to make ships special, I mean, you just load them up with the best defenses and weapons and send them to play. There's nothing like the tanker/refinery, C&C, and ECM/ECCM ships in SotS, or those sort of modules like in say GalCiv. As things stand you really don't even need the 10 slots that are available, especially with the refit system.

So far one other player has mentioned this as a problem. Most players have not noticed this limit so have not complained. To make sure, have you been using retrofitting? For me, one destroyer frame is enough: I "modify" this design and then retrofit all the ships to it. If you "add" a design, you cannot retrofit, which makes sense. For me, this places a natural limit on the number of schematics I would use.



Still, adding a scrollbar should not be hard.

Ketobor wrote:
Realistically the system needs a revamp. There is no reason for any ship not to be a unique variant on a previous design, with every ship being uniquely refit for problems. This makes the separate design system rather pointless.



I would recommend infinite designs, but a small (10% of production cost in dust) cost to making new designs or modifying old ones. Cheap enough that you will do it whenever you need to, expensive enough that not every ship will be arbitrarily unique.

You could also use a scale to the cost. The first of any new particular ship would be the most expensive to build & maintain since it is the prototype, but as more ships are produced and production ramps up, the construction cost can start to scale down along with the maintenance cost. Realistically the decrease in cost would be specific to individual shipyards. perhaps implemented by a repeat-build cost reduction (repeat the same build and it decreases by 1% each repeat until it caps at 10% for example with the value being reset if production changes), but it can also be done empire wide for simplicity with the cost reduction being based solely on how many of that ship have already been build.



Lots of unique designs gives the added benefit of flexibility and always being state-of-the-art, but come with the downside of being more costly to manufacture & maintain the fleet. Imagine the nightmare that the chief engineer of the USS Unique has in trying to find a replacement intake manifold for their engine if they're the only ship in the fleet with that specific design for that part. This would also give players a viable option in sticking with an existing design that's only slightly out of date. Master of Orion 2 implemented this through miniaturization where equipment became cheaper and smaller through new research.



Think of it like having a fleet of cars. It's a lot easier to maintain 10 cars of identical models than trying to maintain a fleet of 8 cars from 8 manufacturers located in 8 different countries.



Disclaimer: I'm still downloading the alpha and haven't yet played Endless Space yet.

Realistically the system needs a revamp. There is no reason for any ship not to be a unique variant on a previous design, with every ship being uniquely refit for problems. This makes the separate design system rather pointless.



I would recommend infinite designs, but a small (10% of production cost in dust) cost to making new designs or modifying old ones. Cheap enough that you will do it whenever you need to, expensive enough that not every ship will be arbitrarily unique.