I’d like to get more ways to organise ship designs.
Currently you just get a list with all your ship designs sorted alphabetically when pressing load on the design screen or when in the deployment screen (filtered by race on the deployment screen). When you’ve got a lot of designs scrolling the list to find the one you want can get tedious. I think the idea is that players should be encouraged to make lots of different setups for all the different scenarios/challenges but as it is now I tend to stick to a small number of designs for each race to avoid getting a huge cluttered list of ship designs. It would be nice if we could get some way to filter what designs to show based on the scenario/challenge it was intended for, ship types, shields, engines, etc. Perhaps we could add tags to our designs and filter based on those or something like that?
Something I’d also like to able to do is rename a ship design.
Yeah, I’m very keen for something like this. Even just showing the names would help. Showing some minimal stats would work, too. Ultimately, it’d be awesome if we could apply filters to the list, as ninJan suggests.
Renaming designs is something I really want. Even better though, would be to have saved orders persist across a save to a new name. Sometimes I’ll make a small variant on an existing design that I use (most common being removing shields for those maps where shields are disabled), but I often forget that the ‘new’ design will not have the orders I’d saved on the original.
As a result dedicated anti-fighter frigates end up chasing cruisers etc and I chalk up another loss to someone’s challenge xD
Yes, these are good points, I’m sure I’ll get around to them, it’s on the insanely long todo list. UI stuff always seems to take ages, but that’s because its filtered in alongside actual bugfixes, and non-code stuff like businessy stuff, and website stuff, database management stuff, replying to emails, and a whole host of other things.
Hopefully each new version fixes and improves things that people have asked for in the past. For example, version 1.17 has a much nicer race selection screen and much better challenge browser screen too. Plus you can finally rename ships by typing in a name.
Yes, UI improvements for better finding the appropriate ship design would be welcome. For now, I’ve restorted to a very detailed naming system. My design names start with F or C to distinguish frigates and cruisers (fighters start with their speed), then number and type of primary weapon, any special purpose, whether I loaded up on Shields or Armor, the hull name, and I end with the price. This lets me find the ship I want easily.
I do something similar, but also use a suffix to indicate the race the design was for, as you can’t give two ships of different races the same name, unfortunately. It would make more sense to me if each race got its own folder, and designs for that race went in the folder for that race, and only had to be uniquely named within that race’s scope.
The ships design sorting should go like the folders in Windows Explore.
First there would be 4 folders which say each races’ name. Click. Then you get three subfolders which names are Fighters, Frigates, Cruisers. Let’s click on Cruiser. Now we get all the cruiser designs for, let’s say rebels, and cruisers could have a same name with another race’s cruiser because even the names are same, the races are different so it can’t be the same ship.
This already would make finding a certain ship designs easier.
Then if we want a bit more complex system we could include sorting by name, cost, amount of weapons, speed and so on for each ship class folder.
The ship design list is badly in need of much greater granularity of sorting. I try to cope by using verbose design names and have had to resort to an absurd amount of abbreviations & acronyms in order to differentiate each from the others while still being descriptive of any given ship’s intended use & key stats. It’s becoming tiresome.
There are many good suggestions here. Mr. Weedy and tater, in particular, have aired ideas most closely mirroring my own.