nweismuller wrote:It's not immediately obvious, but even in live, you should be able to refit ships that aren't of your racial design using planetary production (although not with instant refit).
The interface for refit-through-production is confusing so after a few aborted attempts I just discarded it as something that doesn't work. With your post I took another look and figured it out.
The problem:
- I've got a fleet of spaceship I want to update to the new standard design; but I don't have enough money and metal to do it all at once -- I can at most update one spaceship every two or three turns
- I want to set a planet to do it gradually to free me from having to micromanage that turn after turn
- So I go to refit, it asks me to select a hull, and then I'm sent to the ship design screen but -- and that was the source of my initial confusion -- I don't want to redesign the ship, I just want it to use the new standard design. Turns out the screen simply shows up the ship's current design and you have to recreate your standard design in here manually, which is tedious. As long as you haven't changed anything, the validation checkmark remains grayed out. Originally I hadn't paid much attention to the left window showing that the onboard systems are outdated, I just saw that I wanted to refit the ship and that after selecting it I couldn't go further.
Suggestion:
- Separate the "refit" option into two: "upgrade refit" and "custom refit"
- Custom refit would be the current behavior of modifying the spaceship as it exists, except it wouldn't get the little icons for buying instant refit and instant mass refit. That would make it clearer that you're looking at the ships as they are and go from there.
- Upgrade refit would just apply current design to ships without having to recreate your standard design. No redesign screen.
- One of the options in "upgrade refit" hull selection screen would be "auto", in which it just takes one of the existing ships currently in the system and automatically update it to current design. This, combined with the "repeat build" queue item would let a system serve as a general upgrade and maintenance hub for your fleet during peacetime.
- This would be shown in strings where needed as "Upgrade (ship type)" and "Auto-upgrade (ship type)". E.g., a notification could look like this:
Construction of Auto-Upgrade (Carrier) was completed at Cheleb 1. Our next project will be Auto-Upgrade (Cruiser). Followed by Repeat.
Alternatively, on the redesign screen when refitting, provide a way to load up an existing design. This would make the separation between custom and upgrade unnecessary; though I'd still lobby for auto-upgrade to reduce micromanagement. Here's a mockup of how it could look like:
I've added a ⚒️⌄ on the opposite side to the ✓.
- if you have several designs for this hull type (e.g. by default transport hulls can be configured for troops and cargo), clicking on ⚒️⌄ would make a drop-down list of said designs appear, and then you can click on the one you want to instantly configure the ship to this design
- if you have only one design for this hull type, then perhaps it could only show the crossed tools symbol, not the down arrow, and clicking on it would instantly load it
In any case, the auto-upgrade would use the existing design for the current type.