So, I was playing around with the ship designer and suddenly realized that instead of armor on the Outpost's Outpost slot, I could fit quite a few other things, such as shields, three fighter squadrons, or science stations. Sure, it won't have any armor, but I'm yet to see the AI rush an outpost while there are combat capable ships on the board.

Anyway, so I made me a new outpost variant design, the science outpost, and proceeded to make a science outpost ship. Selecting New Design and Outpost Transport in the ship designer, I realized that there's no way to hook up an outpost transport variant to an outpost variant. I had to redesign the standard outpost right before deploying the regular ship, then change it back afterwards. While due to the lack of complexity of the outpost hull this is no great challenge, It's rather easy to forget about it during the turn...

So, could I have some way to match up "X Outpost" with "X Outpost Transport"? Either through matching names or through some kind of "deploy this" pointer would work.

NullVoid wrote:So, could I have some way to match up "X Outpost" with "X Outpost Transport"? Either through matching names or through some kind of "deploy this" pointer would work.

Arioch and I have talked about enabling a variety of special outpost and station module -- letting you create, say, dedicated mining, science, and trade outposts, along with, perhaps, a better defended variant.

That you can modify the specs of outposts at all in the current game is a good hint that we're interested in better supporting these kinds of designs -- but, as you've noted, there are some some UI and mechanics issues around outpost creation and design right now.

We have a ship designer update pass scheduled for before release, and there's a chance that we might get some more features along these lines done when that happens. But, it's not at the top of our priority list -- and a more fleshed out "station module" system is something that may need to wait for an expansion.