How to control ships designs and retrofitting

[Hasefrexx]

Some help out there would be much needed. I tried to create alternate ship designs for a single function (say 2 active destroyer designs, updated separately as I tech up). I failed to find an easy way to actually keep up like this (either I have to disable AI from doing anything and then need to micromanage everything; if I let some room for AI overall it bypasses my work by creating new designs, ie the ones I've created are retrofitted into those automatically).

Alternatively, I ended up working with only one active design per ship role (twisting them away from their expected role), but even then, I had trouble in keeping the AI away from designig for those ship roles while still managing the others.
What I would really want is to create a design, and let AI automatically retrofit it as I tech up; even then it seems to involve trouble, ie "manual" automatic updating (going in design and forcing auto update) not adding hyperspace thingy when unlocked; I don't think it also updates if replacing the old component would increase ship size above the actual limit.

So, any tip on how to manage designs while still automating as much as possible would be more than welcome; this is the single part of the game where automation is quite troublesome overall, I would say.

[icedude94]

When you create a new design for a unique role, click the columns under upgrade and retrofit to manual.

Any ship design you toggle upgrade to manual will stop the AI from messing with your designs and overriding it. If you get new components, you need only select your design in the list and click the auto-upgrade button. The game will upgrade to the latest components without adding or subtracing any.

Now when it comes to construction, you'll have to use the construction yard tab in the ships and bases window(I prefer to build my fleets at 1 spaceport) or the ship construction screen and you can select your different designs in the drop-down list.

Also if you don't want issues with designs mixing up, don't click the button in the selected item window for "retrofit to latest design."

Use control + right click and select the design to retrofit to from there. You can also select multiple ships of the same class in the ships and bases window and tell them to retrofit to a specific design.

As for it not adding new components, you still have to go into the design and add it, like hyperdrives. Then for size, just check the column for ship size after you high-light everything and click auto-upgrade.

[Hasefrexx]

Thanks a lot, it got me swearing quite a few of times :)

[EddyVegas]

Thanks for writing that clear explanation! Now my railgun ships will keep their railguns! That just made the game a lot better for me.