Ship Designing? How the he.......

[Ardent Haste]

So, after alot of trail, error and hunting endless scraps of info I've finally got the basics of map editing. Turned to Ship Designing....and came to a complete stop. It just makes zero sense to me and can't locate much of anything in the way of 'how to'. Can you actually design a ship in this game -- reducing weapons for more engine, less engine for a weapon, etc. Where can information be found on how to do it?

[grognardgary]

Until you've got medium hulls there is really not a lot to design and even then until you've got upgraded weapons and some miniaturization. Its fairly simple really. Tiny and small hulls are basically one engine, one weapon, and one defensive system, Note scouts become essential and simultaneously expendable on the defense, simply because the can be used to tell you whats heading your way so that you can use your cash reserves to refit your fleet in being to blunt your enemies strengths and take advantage of his weaknesses for instance your scouts detect an in bound hostiles primarily equipped with guns and armor so you counter with a fleet of missiles. beams and armor. Note defensive fleets of small ships can specialize and should but a offensive fleets need to contain a balance of weapons and defenses

[Airmaster]

Ship design is very similar to building a model kit without instructions or glue. Use your imagination.

[Ardent Haste]

Thanks for taking the time to respond, but not what I was after. I understood all of that, what I was after is some explanation of 'how' to use the editor - the mechanics of it are not very Intuitive.
What I eventually stumble across was a walk through guide by Brad Wardell. While not quite perfect it was not only basic enough, but also advanced enough to get what I needed.

It's an external link to Brad Wardell's Dev Journals for GC III
https://littletinyfrogs.com/article/464004/Galactic-Civilizations-III-A-walkthrough

[Knofbath]

The trick about ship designing, is that all the Design stuff, really doesn't matter. You can send a blank hull out there, and it will have the same stats as any of the workshop ships. All that matters is the Equip side of the design menu, and you can just double-click to add modules to that.

Tiny - +2 Move, 0 Upkeep, not enough space for anything but a weapon or two
Small - +1 Move, 1 Upkeep, you can fit a weapon and couple of defense modules
Medium - 2 Upkeep, you actually have room to add some support modules, and adding an engine and some Life Support is a good idea
Large - 5 Upkeep, these larger hulls have less Tactical Speed than the smaller ones, which means the small ones rush out front and die before this joins combat, add Thrusters to increase Tactical Speed
Huge - 7 Upkeep, biggest and slowest, can just stack support modules on them, best used as Capital ships, with smaller ships set as Escorts

Also look into Ship Roles, since choice of Ship Role affects combat results by a lot:
https://galciv3.fandom.com/wiki/Ship_role

[Airmaster]

Originally posted by Knofbath:

The trick about ship designing, is that all the Design stuff, really doesn't matter. You can send a blank hull out there, and it will have the same stats as any of the workshop ships. All that matters is the Equip side of the design menu, and you can just double-click to add modules to that.

I beg to differ, designs shouldn't look like like it was built from lego blocks. If OP plans to upload and share them on the GC3 workshop, the design should have a good appearance to appeal to other players who would like to subscribe and add to their game.

Here are some tutorial videos for GC3 ship design I hope OP finds useful.

https://youtu.be/YXWbHFdpfos

https://youtu.be/sAizrUfBr6Y

https://youtu.be/aj-_GCGzaPU

[Knofbath]

Originally posted by Airmaster:

Originally posted by Knofbath:

The trick about ship designing, is that all the Design stuff, really doesn't matter. You can send a blank hull out there, and it will have the same stats as any of the workshop ships. All that matters is the Equip side of the design menu, and you can just double-click to add modules to that.

I beg to differ, designs shouldn't look like like it was built from lego blocks. If OP plans to upload and share them on the GC3 workshop, the design should have a good appearance to appeal to other players who would like to subscribe and add to their game.

I don't think he was trying to upload ship designs, he was asking about stuff like weapons and engines for performance. In which case, you just pick a random ship design and add equipment to it.

You can even pick the "Empty Hull", which is meant to be a blank canvas for "Design Mode", and just add weapons and modules to it. The engine may be facing the wrong way, and all the modules are clipped together, but the game doesn't care.

https://i.imgur.com/BSVMD8d.png

Does mean that there isn't much to look at in the battle viewer though, since the scale is going to be completely off.

The default "Ship Designs" for each faction are perfectly fine, but can't trust the equip templates. Just add your own Equip loadout to them and try to make things look ok.

https://i.imgur.com/11o0EWT.png

[Airmaster]

In any case I hope the OP finds the information we've given useful.