The current shipyard and tech really removes options for customizing your shipbuilding.
1). Is there a tech that lets us minimize the technology? So that we can get more items on a specific size of ship, e.g., get 4 items on a small ship (instead of just 3). So that you can add an interstellar drive to that little tiny or medium ship once you get some miniaturization tech.
2) Restricting each ship size to a set number of components instead of space, with each component taking up space, makes it impossible to customize good ships. Similarly, limiting ships to having only one type of component, e.g., only one titanium armor, prevents you from being creative and designing ships for specific situations. I used to love to add extra engines to a ship class to make my Quick Reaction Force. Also like to make specialized ships from the large Cargo hulls, filled with engines and sensors. Or faster colonizers so you can reach a good world before the AI does.
Might be too late to change this back, but i really preferred shipbuilding in previous versions of GC.
The problem with mass is that some hard-core players love it, but it's really confusing for more casual players or needlessly futzy even for the hard core.
The problems we are trying to solve is this:
When playing a game with some mass upgrades I design a ship. Let's say a small hulled ship with great engines.
1. The next time I play a game I can't use that ship (because I don't have the mass upgrade tech yet).
2. When I get my next mass upgrade I'm incented to design another ship to make use of that additional mass.
3. Ships that autofill their mass becomes difficult/impossible to determine their stats. Is a player better to upgrade his lasers or increase the mass (that might allow another laser to fit on the ship)?
To address this we want to lock mass so its not as futzy. But we are totally fine with providing lots of components to allow you to customize as you want. The question is:
What ship design components would you like to see in the game? (or conversely, what sort of ship are you trying to build?)
I've already gone through and increased the number of slots on ships to help with this. But if there is a type of ship you are trying to build that you can't currently let me know (for example a ship engine that increases movement but halves hit points).
