The shipbuilder

Well, I almost won my first game, surviving until there were just two of us. It was at beginner level but considering I was at zero ship production for half the game, I did ok!

Now, the confusing point in my second game is the shipbuilder.

1)At the top of the shipbuilder screen is a bar that fills as you select items you want to install. It must be the cost, but there is a faint fill and a solid fill that I don't get.

2) it seems that you can't go back to a design you've created and add on more goodies. Instead you have to come up with a new design that has the additional goodies and then upgrade a ship made with the older design to it - is that right?

3) Someone said you could avoid all the placing of objects on the hardpoints with some shortcut that would pop them on for you. I can't find that post. What was that shortcut?

4) built-in designs can't be modified, I understand. So that means the only way to get to more powerful core ships is to follow the tech tree to obtain them? I'm finding the tech tree hard to get around...wish there was a way to bring up a future ship design and see what's needed to get to it.

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1. Total space and space used. As you gain more ability in Miniaturisation, a given ship will have more space for you to add components.

2. When you upgrade an existing ship design (there's an upgrade button!) you can remove old functional components to make way for new ones. There is in fact an option that will remove them all for you automatically when upgrading a design. I tend to just hit the 'functional' component view and remove them manually. Delete works as a shortcut for this.

3. There's a 'Place' button under the list of components. Very useful when you want to spam lots of components onto a design to see how high you can go.

4. Ignore the core ship designs. They're there to confuse you. The important things to consider are Planetary Invasion tech - which unlocks troops modules and allows you to, funnily enough, invade planets - and the increasingly larger hull sizes available with Medium Scale Building, Large Scale Building, and Massive Scale Building. Weapons and defence techs give you better weapons and protection against weapons. These give you the essentials you need to build your fleet up. Hull sizes are usually selected right after you click 'New' in the shipyard.

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So it's the components - for weapons, capacity and speed - that I want to go after and larger sized hulls to get on everything I want.

Planetary Invasion takes quite a bit of research, I notice.

In this game, I've gone with Starbase enhancement and the resulting defense and attack capabilities have made my SB's indestructible, but pirates took a planet of mine and without invasion ability, I guess influence is all that can get it back.

As you mention - the prebuilt ships, Defender and Phoenix, don't seem worth much, except for suicide missions.

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