Ship design question

[Charlemagne]

As I understand, in order to make one of my designs to be updated by the game (that is to offer new version in the builder M1 M2 M25 etc.) I need to save it as a template, right? However I have been doing that and the game is not presenting more versions of my design. Note: These were ships that are already saved in one of my custom races as ship designs. As my designs show up because of tech progress, I have entered the designer and saved them as templates, but new versions never come up, only the basic one that has become very obsolete. What am I doing wrong?

[RealMutter]

Hi there, to make sure that i'm understanding correctly, are you saying that the custom ship templates from your custom civ are not showing even when their necessary components are unlocked? Or rather, are you saying that when you save a ship template you updated, it isn't displaying in the shipyard build list?

[Charlemagne]

My designs always show, even in new games. But it is only the one design. The game doesn't present new versions as tech advances, i.e. M1, M2, M3 etc. as it does with the default ships. This means I have to make new versions regularly which is tedious and too much work.

Suppose I have the Star Eagle fighter which is default. As the game advances, I get the Star Eagle M1, the Star Eagle M2, etc. The game takes advantage of new techs to present newer versions without me needing to do anything. This is great. However, say I design a nifty fighter, the Viper. The game will never change the version to something better. By midgame the Star Eagle might be M29 with 5 combat strength, my Viper will still be the original with strength 3.

In another thread when I spoke of this, it was said that what I needed for the game to automatically upgrade my custom design is to save it as template instead of as design. But I have been doing that and no dice. I still have the original Viper. So, did I misunderstand and the game does not have the ability to upgrade custom design as it does with default designs, or I'm doing something wrong.

[graphitepaddle]

Hi Charlemagne,

Have seen that same behavior, and it makes sense. How would the game exactly what to upgrade on our custom designs?

And as an example, so you design a Cruiser, that doesn't use Elerium because it's in short supply. Because of technological advances, new game-designed Cruiser use lots of Elerium ... do you want your custom Cruiser to also be an Elerium pig?

Nice-to-have enhancement is the ship designer: Allow the player to specify which components, if any, can be upgraded.

[Charlemagne]

Originally posted by graphitepaddle:

Hi Charlemagne,

Have seen that same behavior, and it makes sense. How would the game exactly what to upgrade on our custom designs?

And as an example, so you design a Cruiser, that doesn't use Elerium because it's in short supply. Because of technological advances, new game-designed Cruiser use lots of Elerium ... do you want your custom Cruiser to also be an Elerium pig?

Nice-to-have enhancement is the ship designer: Allow the player to specify which components, if any, can be upgraded.

But the game does automatically present more advanced designs for its default ships, sometimes with increased resources costs. Anyway, all I want to know if there is a way to make the game automatically present newer versions of custom ships. If not, fine, and I will scrap all my designs because keeping them up to date is too much work. In the example I gave, from my current game, the game currently has a M29 version of a default fighter. That meas 28 previous models. To keep up, I would need to create a new version of my custom 28 times as well.