I'll feel really foolish if this already exists, but I can't find it:
Suggestion: it would be nice, when choosing "Refit ship" at a planet, to be able select a ship, then simply select a current design, rather than having to manually "redesign" the ship each time.
Yes, I can refit/mass refit ships instantly, but I'm cheap, and trying to avoid the "coin" cost of that ... I'm trying to use idle production, having second-line planets refitting ships.
It would still be nice if it had a shortcut button, like how you can "instant refit" by clicking on a little round icon on the upper right corner of a ships box in the refit menu.
harpy eagle wrote:It would still be nice if it had a shortcut button, like how you can "instant refit" by clicking on a little round icon on the upper right corner of a ships box in the refit menu.
So you mean like a button that wouldn't even take you into the ship designer screens? -- just queue up the design for refit using a target design from your current ship design specs? That's pretty doable -- particularly if we were to use the same logic as 'instant refit' (so we don't show the full dropdown menu of possible refit targets, just any valid target that happens to have the same design name).
Precisely because we wouldn't show a full dropdown menu, it would have kinda limited utility though... Though maybe if I wrote some smart logic for deciding what the 'default' upgrade for a given design ought to be, it would be more useful. Hrm...
Oh wow, I've never used that pulldown after the first game, seeing it was a sort of "auto-design", and turning my nose up at it. Thank you, Arioch!
I do like harpy eagle's suggestion... yes, as an automatic "refit to current design" like the insta-refit method. I'd suggest it could even replace the existing buttons, since the insta-refit is available with one button (and so is mass refit) when looking at the ship. When in the planet view, one is managing the production queue, and the quick buttons should relate to that. Of course, others play differently, and probably like the current buttons.
sven wrote:Precisely because we wouldn't show a full dropdown menu, it would have kinda limited utility though... Though maybe if I wrote some smart logic for deciding what the 'default' upgrade for a given design ought to be, it would be more useful. Hrm...
I thought it would just be whatever design it was that we used to build the ship, or the design of the latest refit.
Edit: Just checked and the names of designs are not unique like I thought. So I guess if designs are not modified in place when edited you'd have to associate the new HullSpec with the one it superceded somehow to do that.
e.g. associate each of an empires designs with a unique key. When the player edits a design, replace the old one but keep the key. Then ships can reference the key to get the latest up-to-date version of their design.
But I haven't looked at the relevant code so I probably shouldn't be making suggestions about it.
harpy eagle wrote:
e.g. associate each of an empires designs with a unique key. When the player edits a design, replace the old one but keep the key. Then ships can reference the key to get the latest up-to-date version of their design.
This is more or less how things work under the hood -- so your suggestion is a reasonable one
It is possible to get into cases where there are multiple different designs that a ship could plausibly be refit to, and none of them share the design key used when originally creating the ship. But, such cases should be rare, so just using the design key to lookup the matching design and otherwise not offering the feature is probably a reasonable implementation.
harpy eagle wrote:
e.g. associate each of an empires designs with a unique key. When the player edits a design, replace the old one but keep the key. Then ships can reference the key to get the latest up-to-date version of their design.
This is more or less how things work under the hood -- so your suggestion is a reasonable one
It is possible to get into cases where there are multiple different designs that a ship could plausibly be refit to, and none of them share the design key used when originally creating the ship. But, such cases should be rare, so just using the design key to lookup the matching design and otherwise not offering the feature is probably a reasonable implementation.
I would love to see something like that. Now (when Im out for gold) I have to refit every ship individually and it takes unnecessary time since they all have the latest optimized design. I would also love to see at least 2 graphical designs for each size, since I often do two designs of each ship (for example Beam Cruiser and Missile Cruiser), especially the large ships.
... I'm trying to use idle production, having second-line planets refitting ships.
